The genesis of AWS was when in the early 2000s, experience with building Merchant.com, Amazon's e-commerce-as-a-service platform for third-party retailers to build their own web-stores, made them pursue service-oriented architecture as a means to scale their engineering operations[17][18][19][20][21][22][23] led by the then CTO, Allan Vermeulen.[24] Around the same timeframe, Amazon sought out to create "a shared IT platform" so its engineering organizations which were spending 70% of their time on "undifferentiated heavy-lifting" such as IT and infrastructure problems could focus on customer-facing innovation instead.[25] Besides, in dealing with unusual peak traffic patterns especially during the holiday season, migrating services to commodity Linux hardware, and reliance on open source software already had Amazon's Infrastructure team, led by Tom Killalea,[26] Amazon's first CISO,[27] run their data centers and associated services in a "fast, reliable, cheap" way