Amazon EC2 Public Beta Launch

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) was publicly launched in beta, providing on-demand compute capacity. Security Groups were an intrinsic feature, allowing users to define network access rules for their instances.

Significance

This was the foundational moment for Security Groups, introducing the concept of a programmable, instance-level virtual firewall as a core primitive of cloud infrastructure. It democratized network security by putting control directly into developers' hands.