AWS (Amazon Web Services) is Amazon's cloud computing platform, offering a broad range of on-demand compute, storage, database, networking, and AI/ML services that businesses use instead of running their own infrastructure.

What was the first AWS service?

AWS launched with foundational services including Amazon S3 for storage and Amazon EC2 for compute, which remain among its most widely used offerings.

How does AWS pricing work?

AWS generally uses pay-as-you-go pricing, charging based on actual resource usage, though many services also offer discounted reserved or committed-use pricing for predictable workloads.

How does AWS compare to Azure or Google Cloud?

AWS, [Azure](/glossary/azure), and Google Cloud all offer broadly similar categories of services; AWS is generally recognized as the largest by market share and service breadth, with the others differentiating on integration with their own ecosystems and specific service strengths.

What are AWS regions and availability zones?

A region is a geographic area containing multiple, physically separate availability zones, letting applications be deployed close to users while maintaining redundancy if one zone experiences an outage.

Cloud

Amazon Web Services

By Amazon

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) is Amazon's cloud computing platform, offering a broad catalog of on-demand services spanning compute, storage, databases, networking, and AI/ML that businesses use instead of running their own physical…

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Definition

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is Amazon's cloud computing platform, offering a broad catalog of on-demand services spanning compute, storage, databases, networking, and AI/ML that businesses use instead of running their own physical infrastructure.

Overview

AWS launched with foundational services like Amazon S3 for storage and Amazon EC2 for compute, establishing the pay-as-you-go, on-demand cloud model that most of the industry has since adopted. From those two services, AWS expanded into a catalog spanning hundreds of offerings — managed databases, container orchestration, analytics services, and AI/ML platforms like Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Bedrock — while remaining the largest cloud provider by market share. AWS organizes infrastructure into geographic regions, each containing multiple availability zones, letting customers deploy applications close to their users while maintaining redundancy against localized failures. Infrastructure is commonly provisioned through infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform rather than manual console configuration, and AWS competes most directly with Azure and Google Cloud, as well as regional providers such as Alibaba Cloud. The breadth of AWS's catalog is a defining characteristic of the platform — most workloads can be built entirely within AWS's own services — which is covered from the ground up in the AWS Core Services course and the blog post AWS for Beginners: Cloud Computing Fundamentals.

Key Features

Hundreds of on-demand services spanning compute, storage, networking, and AI/ML
Global infrastructure organized into regions and availability zones
Pay-as-you-go pricing with no upfront hardware investment
Deep service integration, letting most architectures stay within AWS
Extensive identity and access management (IAM) for fine-grained security
Support for infrastructure-as-code and DevOps tooling
Broad compliance certifications for regulated industries

Use Cases

Hosting web applications, APIs, and backend services

Building data warehouses and analytics pipelines

Running machine learning and generative AI workloads

Migrating on-premises infrastructure to the cloud

Building globally distributed, highly available applications

Powering startups' entire infrastructure without owning hardware

Frequently Asked Questions

From the Blog

Cloud & Cybersecurity

AWS for Beginners: Cloud Computing Fundamentals

Amazon Web Services is the world's most widely used cloud platform. This guide covers the core services every developer needs — EC2 (virtual servers), S3 (storage), IAM (access control), VPC (networking), and RDS (databases) — with practical setup instructions and free tier guidance.