Selipsky says that Amazon's first major move into expanding its platform beyond books and basic retail came in 2000, when the company opened its platform to third-party merchants, who were able to sell their products on Amazon.

In 2002, the third wave began, he says, when Amazon launched the Amazon Ecommerce Service, which allows developers to create applications which hook into Amazon's database, retrieve and display product information and build customer shopping carts.

Out of that grew Amazon's Web Services initiatives, including S3, SQS, and EC2.

"The Web Service initiatives let us pass on the engineering expertise we've acquired through the years, and the sometimes painful lessons we've learned building a Web-scale business," Selipsky explains. He adds that Amazon will continue to add other service for developers and businesses, although would not be specific about what future services might be launched.

What Amazon Cloud means for grid computing