For Amazon to survive, they needed the cloud. But they had to invent it — and creating the cloud meant overcoming obstacles fundamental to the nature of software development at the time.

The main obstacle was what developers lovingly referred to as “The Monolith.” In Monolith architecture, it was like all elements of a software system were plugged into the same outlet, and if you wanted to replace or update one, you had to unplug the whole thing — not a sustainable structure for the kind of global-scale business Amazon wanted to create.

In other words, to create the cloud, Amazon had to first reinvent the wheel — redefining standards for building and running software.

Including contributions from:

• Allan Vermeulen, who led the team that built the world's first web-based storage product, Amazon S3
• Michael Skok, founding partner of Underscore VC, and a major cloud investor
• Joe Kinsella, founder of CloudHealth Technologies
• Erik Peterson, co-founder and CTO of CloudZero, Inc.