AWS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is Amazon's cloud computing platform, comprising more than two hundred services for compute, storage, networking, databases, machine learning, and other capabilities, billed by usage.

How it works

Resources are organized by region (a geographic area with multiple isolated availability zones) and by account. Identity and access are governed by IAM, which mediates every API call. Services are consumed through APIs (CLI, SDK, or console) and billed by usage at fine-grained per-second or per-request granularity.

Common services

• Compute: EC2, Lambda, ECS, EKS, Fargate
• Storage: S3, EBS, EFS, Glacier
• Databases: RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, Redshift, ElastiCache
• Networking: VPC, Route 53, CloudFront, API Gateway, ELB
• Messaging: SQS, SNS, EventBridge, Kinesis, MSK
• AI/ML: SageMaker, Bedrock, Rekognition, Comprehend
• Identity and security: IAM, Cognito, KMS, Secrets Manager

Origin

Launched publicly in 2006 with S3 and EC2, AWS evolved out of Amazon's internal infrastructure platform built to support its retail business.