AWS
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is Amazon's cloud computing platform, offering more than 200 on-demand services spanning compute, storage, databases, networking, and artificial intelligence.
Definition
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is Amazon's cloud computing platform, offering more than 200 on-demand services spanning compute, storage, databases, networking, and artificial intelligence.
Overview
Launched in 2006 with early services like Amazon S3 for storage and Amazon EC2 for virtual compute, AWS pioneered the modern pay-as-you-go public cloud model and remains the largest cloud provider by market share, competing primarily with Azure. Beyond compute and storage, AWS offers managed databases, container orchestration through Amazon EKS, serverless computing via Lambda, and AI/ML tooling such as Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Bedrock. AWS Amplify simplifies building full-stack apps on top of these underlying services. Infrastructure is typically provisioned through the console, CLI, SDKs, or infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform. AWS is covered in depth in courses such as AWS Core Services and AWS Solutions Architect, and introduced for newcomers in the blog post AWS for Beginners: Cloud Computing Fundamentals.
Key Features
- 200+ services spanning compute, storage, networking, databases, and AI/ML
- Pay-as-you-go pricing with no upfront infrastructure investment
- Global infrastructure across dozens of regions and availability zones
- Managed container and Kubernetes services
- Serverless computing via AWS Lambda
- Deep AI/ML tooling including SageMaker and Bedrock
- Infrastructure-as-code support via CloudFormation and tools like Terraform