AWS (Amazon Web Services)

AWS (Amazon Web Services) is the world’s largest and most comprehensive cloud computing platform, offering over 200 services including compute, storage, databases, networking, AI/ML, and more. It is a subsidiary of Amazon.com.

Overview

AWS was launched in 2006 and has since become the dominant cloud provider by market share. It operates in multiple geographic regions with availability zones (data centers) for high availability. AWS uses a pay-as-you-go pricing model.

Key Services

  • Compute: EC2 (virtual servers), Lambda (serverless), ECS/EKS (containers)
  • Storage: S3 (object storage), EBS (block storage), EFS (file storage)
  • Databases: RDS (relational), DynamoDB (NoSQL), Redshift (data warehouse)
  • Networking: VPC, CloudFront (CDN), Route 53 (DNS), Direct Connect
  • AI/ML: SageMaker, Rekognition, Comprehend
  • Management: CloudWatch, CloudFormation, IAM

Licensing

AWS is a commercial, proprietary cloud platform. Services are offered on a pay-as-you-go or subscription basis. There is no open-source component to the platform itself, though many AWS services support open-source technologies (Linux, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, etc.).

See AWS Pricing for details.

Official Resources