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How AWS re:Invented the cloud

From the floor at AWS re:Invent, Ryan is joined by AWS Senior Principal Engineer David Yanacek to chat about all things AWS, from the truth behind AWS’s Black Friday origin mythos to the development of essential cloud tools like SQS and DynamoDB. Plus, how David envisions autonomous agents will ease developers' operational burdens.

January 16, 2026

How AWS re:Invented the cloud

This episode was recorded live at AWS re:Invent. Listen to our other episodes from the floor with the Stack Overflow team and Corey Quinn.

Keep up with the latest AWS updates, including what they’re doing with AI, at their site.

Connect with David on Linkedin and Twitter.

TRANSCRIPT

[Intro Music]

Ryan Donovan: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Stack Overflow podcast, a place to talk all things software and technology. I am your humble host, Ryan Donovan, and today we are recording from AWS Re;Invent. My guess is no stranger to AWS – longtime builder of the Cloud Platform, David Yanacek, Senior Principal Engineer at AWS. So, welcome to the show, David.

David Yanacek: Thanks for having me.

Ryan Donovan: Of course. So, before we get started, we'd like to get to know our guests. How did you get involved in software and technology?

David Yanacek: We got involved just thinking that it was pretty cool that you could write a program to quickly get something to happen that was actually useful. And so, I was always chasing things that were making people's lives easier. Just wherever, I was thinking, 'oh, how could I help somebody do that thing more simply?' In high school, I worked at a bank as a teller, you know, doing transactions for those who maybe haven't visited a bank in a while. I used to do deposits, and withdrawals, and everything like that.

Ryan Donovan: Right. The real person teller.

David Yanacek: Yes, that's right. And in doing so, I saw a lot of things that were people working around me who– I could actually make your job easier. I could help you with that tedious task that you don't like working on, like sending out schedules for everyone. And I just found, you know, I could make a quick little application, something that would be easier for you to maintain over time, not a program that you're not gonna understand, but I could wire up Excel with a ton of V lookups to make schedules that will just save you all the time from having to fax schedules around to people. And so, I just became very excited by the amounts of happiness and relief I could bring other people by making their lives easier, removing the tedious stuff.

Ryan Donovan: Nice. And then, obviously about 20 years ago, you got started at a little startup called Amazon.

David Yanacek: That's right. I thought it was a really fascinating place with a ton of scale and data problems to solve. I found it was really interesting, 'cause before I started Amazon SQS, the Simple Q Service, was already out there in a beta, and I thought that was very interesting of, okay, I've been writing these applications to help people, but they're always needing to operate something. I can give them a solution, but then that also comes with the tax of always having to operate that thing, keep it running. It has an underlying database or server that it's running on that needs to be upgraded and everything. I saw, immediately, the kind of toil that would come from something like that. Oh, it helps you, but at what cost? So, I saw this SQS idea, this Simple Queue Service in beta out there. And I was just fascinated that we could provide some kind of a building block, a low-level building block as a queue. Why do I need that as a building block? It's like, 'well, actually, I would've to otherwise do a bunch of operations, have a server running all the time. That's hard to deal with.' And so, if instead I can just call an API from something easy shortcut, I found that really interesting. And so, then I joined Amazon to just be a part of that and make everybody's lives as easy as possible.

Ryan Donovan: Sure. So,

Ryan Donovan: I want to fact-check a story I heard about the origin of AWS, possibly apocryphal. I heard it project from some other engineers. Amazon Web Services – did it get started because there was a huge Black Friday capacity ramp-up, and then the rest of the year there was no use for that capacity, and then they decided, 'let's productize this.' Is that true?

David Yanacek: I think there's a ton of factors to what led to AWS being formed. We had a lot of experience in automating server operations. We had built a bunch of tools and realized like, hey, this is actually something that when you have teams structured to own all of the development and operations like we do at DevOps at AWS, there are so many things that they're responsible for; and we realized we were building a bunch of tools for ourselves, and that expertise of having built tools for ourselves, we said, 'well, we could actually build those tools for everybody, too.'

Ryan Donovan: Right.

David Yanacek: I mean, it is also true that scaling for Peak was an interesting thing. I actually started on Amazon.com when I joined Amazon for a couple years, and I was actually responsible for figuring out how many web servers we would actually need physically to land and become all wired up and everything. That peak prediction calculation is extremely stressful with nearly no reward, 'cause if you just choose too many, and buy too many, then why did you waste our money buying too many? And if you buy too few, well, that's a huge problem.

Ryan Donovan: Right, right.

David Yanacek: So, I scrambled to figure out how to get everything more efficient in time. So, that peak provisioning thing is a real problem dear to my heart, because I was having to do a bunch of automation around that forecasting for so many different sites. The good news is there was so much growth at the time—and remains—that if you do overbuy, then there's always some other use for those things, so.

Ryan Donovan: Right. That was the better place to miss. Right. Did you come up with a better sort of heuristics or algorithms to manage that peak estimation?

Ryan Donovan: There

David Yanacek: were a bunch of smart people who know a lot of math compared to me. When I showed up, I was handed a book on how to do a forecasting 101. So no, I didn't do anything particularly smart, but I figured out how to bring in those different tools, and to run a bunch of experiments on the data, and it was a pretty interesting project to be able to learn a lot more about forecasting, and to build systems to automate it.

Ryan Donovan: Yeah. You mentioned things like SQS server, and building tools for yourselves for automating servers. What were the other pieces that you all built that were fundamental to AWS as an eventual product?

David Yanacek: Well, I mean, AWS is an ongoing project, so really, there's no point in time where we thought, 'oh, this is actually what we need.' Right?

Ryan Donovan: Well, I mean, there was an MVP, right? There was the first time where you're like, 'we're gonna get a customer, we're gonna turn the lights on. Here's all the things that make it.'

David Yanacek: Compute and storage, storing things, durably, securely – it's really hard. So, that's why S3, the Simple Storage Service was one of the first ones because it solves a discreet problem of like, 'how do I store all of my objects, my files, or whatever?' And to be able to access them whenever I need them.

Ryan Donovan: And reliably and consistently.

[...]

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