API Economist: There’s been a lot said on Jeff Bezos’ big mandate issued back in 2002. If I understand it correctly, it basically stated that all your teams internally would be required to expose their data and their functionality through APIs. How has this mandate impacted the growth and innovation you've seen in AWS?

Jeff Barr: The effort is very, very real. It has been for quite a while. From where I stand, it seems like a really strong, positive impact. I think back to before I joined Amazon and I was a guest at a little developer conference that we were holding. It was just me and three or four outside developers that were brought in to get a sneak preview of what Amazon was thinking in the web services world. This was around the spring of 2002.