Quartz/Mike Hutchings
AWS’s story is incomplete without acknowledging the legendary role of an independent team of engineers and developers in Cape Town.
February 7, 2021
Amazon’s next chief executive made his name by launching one of the retail behemoth’s most profitable businesses from South Africa. Andy Jassy, who joined Amazon in 1997 as a technical assistant to Jeff Bezos, started Amazon Web Services (AWS), of which he later became CEO. The web service business ushered in the era of cloud computing and now accounts for more than half of Amazon’s operating profit.
AWS’s story is incomplete without acknowledging the legendary role of an independent team of engineers and developers in Cape Town. This South African team was assembled and led by Chris Pinkham, a South African who had proposed a novel web infrastructure service for Amazon as the engineer in charge of its global infrastructure. Pinkham had gone on to found Amazon’s software development center in Cape