Tomorrow is Pi Day.
My wife and I got married on Pi Day six years ago, so I was already never going to forget the date. This year it also lines up with 20 years of modern AWS, which feels fitting.
If you want to be pedantic (and I do), AWS started before 2006. The platform dates back to 2002, some of the early public services showed up in 2004, and March 14, 2006 is when the AWS most of us know today really showed up.
One of the clearest moments in my career happened in 2009 at NASA. I noticed EC2's API was "RunInstances," plural. Not "RunInstance."
That sounds like a tiny detail, but it completely changed how I thought about infrastructure. Up until then it was still easy to think in terms of individual machines. Care and feeding. Hand-built environments. Pets with hostnames. "RunInstances" made the real idea obvious: infrastructure had become software. Infrastructure was a commodity. Not singular. Not precious. Programmable, repeatable, and elastic by default. I still remember how hard that hit me. One plural API name opened up a whole new mental model.
I feel deeply and personally lucky that I've basically spent my whole career working with AWS. My time at AWS itself was some of the best time of my life. I got to travel all over the world and meet thousands of customers, users, and developers who were building the systems underneath modern life. Airlines. Electricity. Media. Logistics. Rockets. The infrastructure under the infrastructure.
When you spend enough time around those builders, AWS stops feeling abstract. You realize a huge amount of the modern world runs on it.
That has always felt a little like a superpower to me. Not because AWS was perfect, and not because it was always simple, but because it consistently gave builders real primitives, took away undifferentiated heavy lifting, and let technologists build at a scale that used to be out of reach.
It is also a big part of why we built Caylent on AWS. We believe these building blocks really do change what companies can do in the world, and we wanted to spend our time helping customers turn that leverage into something real.
That is also why the genAI moment feels familiar. Yes, the models matter. But the deeper thing is the same pattern again: give smart people better building blocks, remove more of the heavy lifting, and they will build things that surprise you. That was true when cloud infrastructure became programmable. It is true again now.
That lesson hit me in 2009 because of one plural API name. It still feels true today. I think about AgentCore and how that can be the platform of the future. I think about Neal Stephenson novels and scifi. The future feels clear directionally even if it is a little murky on the specifics.
A huge thank you to
Jeff Barr and then literally thousands of other people at AWS for building this opportunity and objectively changing the world.
Happy 20 years to modern AWS. And happy Pi Day to my wife. 🫶