South African Engineer Key to Launch of Amazon’s $1.9 Trillion AWS Cloud Business
Cape Town, South Africa – A South African engineer, Chris Pinkham, played a pivotal role in the genesis of Amazon Web Services (AWS), now a $1.9 trillion (approximately R36.5 trillion) business, according to a report by MyBroadband. Pinkham’s work addressed a critical bottleneck for Amazon’s developers and ultimately led to the creation of the cloud computing giant.
In the early 2000s, amazon’s software developers were hampered by the time-consuming tasks of managing underlying IT infrastructure. As Andy Jassy, then Amazon’s chief of staff, observed, developers spent a disproportionate amount of time deploying storage systems, databases, and computing equipment, limiting their focus on customer-facing applications.
Pinkham, alongside colleague Benjamin Black, proposed a solution: a shared, pre-deployed IT platform. They outlined a plan in an internal paper to offer virtual servers as a service through a standardized and automated platform. Black described Pinkham as “the best manager he has ever had,” praising his drive for “better abstraction and uniformity, essential for efficiently scaling.”
Recognizing the potential, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos tasked Pinkham with developing the concept into a functioning computing service. Remarkably, Bezos then granted Pinkham the unusual freedom to build the team and develop the service from South Africa, believing the distance would be beneficial. “I spent most of my time hiding from bezos,” Pinkham later recounted, acknowledging Bezos’s intense interest while preferring to avoid being a “pet project.”
Pinkham assembled a small team in Cape Town, initially working from a house in Llandudno before relocating to an office in Constantia. The team included lead developer christopher Brown, local engineers, and Willem van Biljon, the founder of payment system Postilion.
This team ultimately launched EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) publicly in August 2006. Today, EC2 boasts nearly 400 instance types across 24 regions and 77 availability zones, forming the core of AWS.
Pinkham left Amazon in 2006 as Vice President of Engineering and, after a brief hiatus, co-founded infrastructure software startup Nimbula with Van Biljon in 2008. Nimbula’s success continued,culminating in its acquisition by Oracle for $110 million (approximately R1.06 billion at the time) five years later. Pinkham then served as Oracle’s senior vice president for cloud product advancement until 2014, followed by a role as vice president of engineering at Twitter until 2017.
Pinkham’s early work with AWS also laid the groundwork for Amazon’s significant investment in South Africa. amazon now employs over 7,000 people in Cape Town and Johannesburg, encompassing AWS and Amazon Marketplace, making it one of the country’s largest tech employers.
