AWS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments. Launched in 2006 with services such as Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), AWS has grown into a broad platform offering compute, storage, databases, analytics, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, security, and application development tools. The service model is typically described as infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS), with many higher-level services for data processing, machine learning, and management.

Key services include EC2 for scalable virtual servers, S3 for object storage, RDS and DynamoDB for databases, Lambda for serverless computing, VPC for isolated networks, CloudFront for content delivery, and IAM for access control. Additional offerings cover container management (ECS, EKS), data warehousing (Redshift), data analytics (Athena, Glue), migration tools (DMS), and a broad set of security and governance features. AWS also provides developer tools, monitoring and logging services, and machine learning platforms such as SageMaker.

AWS operates a global infrastructure of regions and availability zones to provide low-latency access and data residency options. Pricing is typically usage-based, including options like on-demand, reserved, and spot instances.

Security and compliance are central to AWS, with a shared responsibility model and a wide range of certifications and controls. Common use cases span web hosting, backup and disaster recovery, data analytics, mobile and web applications, and scalable enterprise workloads. Competition primarily comes from Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.