#ec2

You can be forgiven if you think the most important thing AWS ever sold developers was EC2. It’s not. No, AWS’s big gift to developers was permission to stop fretting about servers. That sounds obvious now, but it was close to magical at the time. Before the cloud, getting infrastructure meant waiting on procurement, hardware, and the somewhat arcane process that stood between a developer and a running machine. AWS turned that into a credit card and an API. It was awesome. AWS still (over)uses a great phrase for what it removed: “undifferentiated heavy lifting.” That is, all the mess associated with racking servers, patching operating systems, managing storage, planning capacity, etc. Important work, sure, but not the work that makes your application special. Let AWS do that, the company intoned, and developers could focus on the thing their customers actually cared about. It was a brilliant abstraction. It helped build one of the most important technology companies of the past two dec