Remember when Amazon.com Inc. was only a bookstore? It seems an eon ago, back in the Dark Ages before instant connectivity. In reality, it was 2006. But when the company people knew for e-commerce began to offer cloud computing services, education was the first barrier to overcome.

“Doesn’t Amazon sell books? What is this cloud thing? What is EC2? What does EC2 stand for? … What the heck is an instance?” were some of the questions asked by those early customers, recalled Sandy Carter (pictured), vice president of worldwide public sector partners and programs at Amazon Web Services Inc.

Carter spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the Amazon EC2 15th Birthday Event. They discussed the history of AWS Public Sector and how it grew alongside EC2. (* Disclosure below.)

From a two pizza team to global operations

EC2 hadn’t even hit its 5th birthday when a six-person team set out to build the AWS Public Sector. The two came of age together as the Public Sector team set out to convince government, education, non-profit and healthcare customers to migrate test workloads over to the cloud.

“We had to spend a lot of time on training and education to win the hearts and souls of our customers,” Carter recalled. “We led with pilots to show the potential of the possible, and we led with security standards and compliance certifications — always listening to the customer; always listening to the partner.”

Early public sector adopters of EC2 included the United States Navy and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Then came Amazon’s GovCloud, and momentum picked up. When it came to cloud adoption, the public sector led the private sector with the United States Central Intelligence Agency’s decision to jump onto the GovCloud, marking the acceptance of cloud as secure enough for sensitive data storage.

From that very first, unnamed EC2 instance in 2006, AWS now offers over 400 EC2 instance types, each marked with its unique name. Over 24,000 not-for-profit agencies, 4,000 government agencies, 9,000 education agencies and 2,000 public sector partners now use the AWS cloud, and they are a force for driving global innovation.

A robot linked via the internet of things and powered by EC2 that can take temperatures for incoming hospital patients in Latin America, COVID clearance passes for university students in Illinois, traffic optimization and accident prevention measures in New York City, and creating ROL (return on lives) through 3D imaging for kidney transplant patients are some of the use cases Carter lists. But the one that “blew the socks off” both Carter and Werner Vogels, AWS VP and chief technology officer, is the space startup Lunar Outpost Inc.

“They are synthesizing oxygen on Mars now that’s driven by EC2. That’s crazy right?” Carter said.

Fifteen years is only the beginning

It’s been quite a ride for the public sector, according to Carter.

“Now we’ve got customers moving so fast with modernization using [artificial intelligence] and [machine learning], containers, serverless and all of these things that are changing the game and leveling it up as we increase that business connection,” she said.

August 2021 may mark a milestone for cloud computing and EC2, but the AWS rollercoaster is still climbing the first slope of the first corkscrew on its wild ride into the future.

“We’ve only just begun with EC2, and we’ve only just begun with Public Sector,” Carter stated. “You know our next great moments are still left to come.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Amazon EC2 15th Birthday Event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Amazon EC2 15th Birthday Event. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE