Amazon Web Services (AWS) is Amazon’s global on-demand cloud service, which at the time of writing offered more than 70 different services to digital business customers.

Amazon has had particular appeal for start-up digital businesses, unlike larger and older organisations, because they don’t have the same legacy systems. In a way, this creates an uneven playing field, in which smaller newer upstarts have the relative might and scale of the AWS that larger organisations might not have access to (Donnelly, 2015).

Slack, the group messaging platform, is an interesting company to examine with its use of AWS. Originally, Slack was designed as a tool for its parent company to use, but Slack itself became the dominant product. To grow rapidly and provide a freemium product, it would have been financially and possibly technically/technologically impossible to do this using owned data centres and proprietary platforms. Like all cloud-based applications, the ability to grow fast and scale up at incredible rates is really what focuses the attention.

AWS global reach has allowed this organisation to grow in ways that would not have been possible ten years earlier. The simple resources would have curtailed growth. In effect, AWS has become a significant facilities manager for many start-ups - the faculty being a platform to face the world (Amazon, 2017).