An easy way to understand what the early cloud did is to think of it like a public utility. The same way buildings depend on a common set of utilities — gas, electricity, and water — software projects depend on a common set of services: compute, storage, and database.

“Compute” refers to the power it takes to run the software.

“Storage” refers to the part of cloud computing most of us know about — web-based storage, as opposed to local storage options, like personal hard drives.

“Database” refers to information about the items in storage, and mechanisms for retrieving and delivering stored data to users.

To create the cloud, and to offer it as a public utility to other software companies, Amazon needed solutions for all three. And in the mid-late-2000s, that’s exactly what they built — unleashing an economic event of epic proportions: the software-as-a-service (SaaS) revolution.

• Allan Vermeulen, who led the team that built the world's first web-based storage product, Amazon S3
• Matt Round, who led Amazon's personalization team — and made it such that the online store rearranges itself for every unique user
• 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.