2003年刚刚被升职负责网站工程团队的本杰明·布莱克（Benjamin Black）写了一篇简短的论文，讨论重建亚马逊网络基础设施的可能性。在文章结尾，他提到了将出售虚拟服务器作为一项服务的可能。
布莱克的顶头上司，公司负责 IT 基础设施的副总裁 Chris Pinkham 带着布莱克将这份论文交给了 CEO 贝佐斯，他们向贝佐斯描绘了一幅未来图景：大学生凭借亚马逊的服务在寝室里就可以创办起一家公司。
贝佐斯非常欣赏这个想法，很快让 Pinkham 带领团队打造 EC2（弹性计算云）。三年之后，EC2 作为初版产品之一在 AWS 的发布会上亮相。
「当时我们觉得这是一件非常有趣的事情，」布莱克回忆说，「很久之后，我么你才意识到，这实际上掀起了一场变革。在最开始的时候，这并不明显。」

转载来源：http://www.anyv.net/index.php/article-2238332

http://www.businessinsider.com/aws-creator-benjamin-black-joins-pivotal-2015-3

Pivotal has just hired engineer Benjamin Black — the regular Amazon employee who co-wrote the paper that would become cloud titan Amazon Web Services all the way back in 2003.

Black most recently worked at Microsoft, where he helped build Office 365, its answer to Google Apps, and prior to that founded a startup called Boundary, which monitored computer networks. Wired first reported the news last week.

Black becomes the third such cloud pioneer to join Pivotal recently, joining OpenStack co-founder Joshua McKenty and Puppet Labs co-founder Andrew Shafer.

These are important people in the world of cloud computing — a major movement that is reshaping how companies spend money on technology.

OpenStack is the four-and-a-half year old open source cloud project that took the basic concept behind Amazon’s cloud computing technology and made it available to anybody. It was started by Rackspace and NASA, and includes huge enterprise companies like HP and Cisco among its contributors.

Puppet is one of two companies (along with Chef) at the forefront of a movement called “DevOps,” which makes it easier for the people who develop software to run the operations necessary to support that software, rather than relying on the IT department to do it.

So what’s so exciting about Pivotal that it’s attracting this kind of talent?