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Amazon is quite a bit more than 'an internet shop'.

Nowadays. How would you describe Amazon before the rise of AWS? The fact that i didn't say Amazon and you recognized it says a lot, too :P

They had a pretty neat fulfillment network before AWS.

Amazon is pretty unique in that they make a lot of their internals available as products, but even before that, the infrastructure was still impressive. What other online store do you use? :)

Yeah, but did they have their own server hardware, data centers, programming languages, CDNs, web frameworks, kernel developers, operating systems, invented new protocols and hosted all kinds of stuff on the internet for billions of users? ;)

But of course, i probably use Amazon for 80% of my online shopping needs, they rock!

Amusing. Your description fits very well for Google, Microsoft and Apple, if we leave server hardware aside, because I don't know exactly what hardware does Microsoft (or Apple) use in their own Datacenters. Does anybody know this?

Sure, and i would expect them to offer a lot as well :P

MS seems to use Dell (only link i could find): http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/10/28/dell-...

Thanks for that. So it seem that they use a "highly-customized server platform". I hope they show eventually what those customizations are.

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