Amazon Web Services Launches Amazon S3 Storage

• Amazon Web Services launched Amazon S3, the Simple Storage Service, on March 14, 2006, with a short announcement on its What's New page^[1]
• A dated press release the same day was titled for S3 as a simple storage service for software developers, pitching it as storage for the Internet^[3]
• Storage cost 15 cents per gigabyte per month and data transfer 20 cents per gigabyte, with no minimum fee^[2]
• AWS says the same storage now costs slightly over 2 cents per gigabyte, roughly 85% less than at launch^[1]
• S3 came five months before EC2 and was the first service to make AWS a platform developers paid for by usage rather than an internal Amazon tool^[1]

Notable features

• Developers paid only for what they stored and moved, with no upfront commitment, which made the service usable by small teams^[2]
• It was aimed at software developers building applications, not at consumers, and it was sold through web-service interfaces^[4]