The Story Behind the Building

Source: Day 1 Blog Published: March 2018

Source: Day 1 Blog
Published: March 2018

The Story Behind the Building

Circulated: November 12, 2019

Each building at Amazon has a peculiar name. Here are some of the buildings and the inspiration for the name:

• Bigfoot: the tool used to map products on Amazon to titles on IMDb.

• Day 1: “This is Day 1 for the Internet, and if we execute well, for Amazon.com” — Jeff Bezos in the 1997 Letter to shareholders. (Rumored to also be named after a daily email read by curious minds across the company, Fact of the Day 1).

• Doppler: the code name for the Amazon Echo.

• Houdini: the code name for Prime Now.

• Lowflyinghawk: an AWS customer’s username on the AWS forums that was considered the voice of the customer.

• Obidos: the original page-rendering engine.

• re:Invent: yearly learning conference hosted by AWS.

• Rufus: Amazon’s first dog, a corgi.