How the cloud became essential in just 20 years

Name something invisible you use every day. If you answered "the cloud,” you’re spot on.

Sure, “air” and “gravity” work, too, but the fact that the cloud only debuted two decades ago makes its dominance pretty amazing. In fact, it’s the cloud’s 20th anniversary this month, forever changing the way we live, work and play.

To be more specific, it was AWS – or Amazon Web Services – that launched S3 in March 2006, a product offering that is widely considered the beginning of the modern cloud computing era.

What is the cloud?

Quite simply, the cloud refers to storing and accessing your information and programs over the internet instead of on a local device. For consumers, you can stream a movie via Netflix just as easily as if the content were on a disc in your home.

Do you access Gmail on several different devices, like a phone, tablet or laptop? This is possible as your messages are stored in the cloud. The same goes for uploading and viewing your photos on services such as Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Photos and iCloud.

“Cloud computing relieves us from much of the drudge work associated with keeping our own computing resources up and running,” confirms Carmi Levy, a veteran technology analyst with more than two decades of industry experience. “We no longer need to worry about which software is installed on which device, and whether it’s been updated to the latest version. Nor do we have to manage large stores of data on our drives or sync them between different devices.”

For businesses, it could be costly and complicated to set up and run their own physical in-office servers.

“Cloud services allow them to manage investments in technology far more efficiently, because they can be scaled up or down to accommodate fast-changing market conditions,” adds Levy, based in London, Ontario.

Having your data stored elsewhere protects your files from any local threats – like a cybersecurity attack, power outage, fire or flood – plus you don’t need to spend money on buying, maintaining and fixing expensive hardware or paying for excessive electricity. Instead, the cloud works by a subscription or “pay-as-you-go” fee.

The cloud turns 20

Like all new technology, some tech analysts, journalists and executives questioned – or even pushed back against – cloud adoption. In an interview with The Guardian in 2008, Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, believed moving data to the web was “stupidity.”

“It's worse than stupidity: It's a marketing hype campaign. Cloud computing is simply a trap aimed at forcing more people to buy into locked, proprietary systems,” Stallman said.

Granted, there are always naysayers when new technology is introduced. With the cloud, many were legitimately curious or concerned about security, scalability and costs. But it didn’t take long for the cloud to prove itself.

“Most of the excitement for me is witnessing a new level of growth each year,” says James Hamilton, senior vice president and distinguished engineer at Amazon, who is widely regarded as one of the primary architects behind the massive physical and software infrastructure that powers AWS. “Even though I’ve been doing this for 20 years, it’s super exciting and rewarding.”

AWS is the largest cloud provider in the world with an estimated 28%-29% global market share, according to Synergy Research Group. Many consumer-facing brands – like Airbnb, Netflix, Lyft, Disney+, Twitch and Spotify – all run on AWS, in some capacity, behind the scenes.

Reducing downtime

After working at Microsoft and IBM, Hamilton joined AWS in 2009 and is credited for pioneering the data center cost models that proved how cloud computing is less expensive than traditional on-premises hardware. Hamilton was also a major proponent of AWS building its own custom networking hardware, power distribution systems, and even silicon (like the Graviton processors).

Simplifying his modus operandi, Hamilton says his job is to iron out even the odd “blip” (or temporary outages). “I’d say it’s just about impossible to lead a modern life today and not be using literally tens of services on AWS and probably never know it – in some ways, that's the beauty of it – and I spend so much of my time and attention to make sure it’s all invisible and seamless.”

“Over time, even early cloud-doubters had to admit that online services could be every bit as secure as traditional on-premises ones,” Levy says. “In fact, they turned out to be far more resilient, and most of us eventually learned to trust these once-questioned platforms, particularly as cloud providers continued to raise the bar on performance, affordability, security and ease of use.”

While outages happen, they’re rare. In 2025, across all major providers, uptime stayed above 99.99%, according to IncidentHub.

To mitigate risks, Levy notes cloud providers offer robust cyber protection and “redundancy,” which refers to having backups – think of it like a spare tire – in the event something goes awry. For example, a cloud server often has two or three mirrored hard drives, and so if one burns out, the others keep running without the computer ever turning off. That, and your files aren’t stored in just one spot; the cloud provider makes copies of your data across multiple different hard drives.

AI and the cloud go hand in hand

What’s next for the cloud? Supporting the rapid growth of AI, of course.

Massive computational power is needed to run these AI systems, which are primarily in the cloud, as opposed to “on-device” processing of artificial intelligence prompts, which is also growing in popularity.

For example, a basic ChatGPT prompt consumes as much as 10 times the energy as a simple Google search.

By automating complex resource management and enabling real-time data processing at scale, AI makes the cloud more efficient, predictive, and indispensable for virtually all industries.

Marc Saltzman is the host of the Tech It Out podcast and is the author of the book Apple Watch For Dummies (Wiley).