Most of EC2 and S3 product development happened in South Africa. The original technical lead for AWS was South African, and was about to move back from Seattle after the original AWS pitch meeting. Bezos liked the idea so much that he let him develop the product in South Africa.
> Since then, most of AWS transitioned back to Seattle and the CT team focuses on some of the tooling around AWS.
This is not true.
Most of AWS was never in Cape Town, only most of EC2.
And lots of EC2 development still occurs in Cape Town. EC2 has just grown immensely, so even though EC2 developers in Cape Town are now at least 25 times more than at launch, there are teams working on EC2-specific stuff in a number of locations (but yes, many in Seattle).
However, all customer EC2 API calls (e.g. the AWS cli's 'aws ec2 run-instances' etc.) are handled by software that is currently developed and maintained by the Cape Town office, and I believe the EC2 parts of the AWS console are also mostly developed in Cape Town.
There are however teams besides EC2 that have developers in Cape Town (e.g. I think the Personal Health Dashboard, which is not EC2-specific, is also developed in Cape Town).
Cape Town also has a large team of support engineers in Premium Support, and handles all Premium Support calls for about 6 hours a day (IIRC).
This video talks a little bit about the EC2 team in Cape Town (a team that I’ve always enjoyed working with). It was made at the 10 yr anniversary of EC2.
