What Is Amazon Web Services (AWS)?

Summary: Amazon Web Services (AWS) is Amazon’s cloud computing division, providing on-demand infrastructure and software services like computing, storage, networking, analytics and security. It is the world’s largest cloud provider, serving millions of customers across industries.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is an Amazon cloud computing platform that provides a wide range of computing, storage, and application services, enabling businesses and developers to build, deploy and scale digital solutions without managing physical infrastructure.

Amazon Web Services can refer to both Amazon’s cloud computing division and the ecosystem of cloud services it offers. AWS is currently the largest provider of cloud computing solutions in the world by market share.

Amazon Web Services: What Does AWS Do?

Cloud computing infrastructure
Non-relational data storage services
Relational data storage services
Networking and content delivery
Data analytics and machine learning
Security, identity management and compliance

What Is AWS? | Video: Amazon Web Services

Uses of Amazon Web Services

At its core, AWS provides cloud computing infrastructure, which means that computing resources (computers, servers, data centers) are made accessible to anyone with an internet connection and the ability to log in to the AWS portal.

These hardware services are coupled with software services that AWS users can access on AWS’s website.

The list of services, or cloud products, is as long and vast as the variety of uses one can make of them, but we can identify a set of primary use cases for the platform. A customer might use these services individually or combine them depending on workload requirements.

Computing

Customers use AWS’ computing and processing powers by accessing a network of computing clusters stored in various data centers all across the globe. This means customers pay to run their applications on virtual compute instances or serverless environments hosted in Amazon-managed data centers, rather than renting specific physical machines.

Unstructured Data Storage

Storing file data is on the list of services AWS provides. This use case is primarily used for data that’s not structured, such as images or videos.

Structured Data Storage

Database customers also store data that comes directly from their websites or applications. AWS provides a number of options for storing structured data (such as customer transactions, stock trades, sensor data and more).

Networking and Content Delivery

Customers rely on AWS’ network infrastructure to optimize the transmission of information to and from their website or application. In practice, this means the goal is that the user experience is optimized for low latency and rapid content delivery (such as the quick retrieval of information from a website).

Analytics and Machine Learning

AWS provides a set of solutions for organizations to run analytical workloads in the cloud (i.e. data processing, manipulation and modeling) so customers can derive insights from their operations. Additionally, customers rely on machine learning solutions to leverage the power of predictive analytics. These capabilities allow organizations to not only derive insights from past and present data but to also make predictions about the future based on that data.

Security, Identity Management and Compliance

AWS provides a number of solutions to help companies and applications remain compliant with data regulations in specific countries (the GDPR, for example). These tools allow organizations to secure their applications that contain sensitive information and manage users’ permissions in order to facilitate secure identity management.

Advantages of Amazon Web Services

There are several advantages to using AWS as a solution to build, manage and deploy cloud applications.

Pay-as-You-Go Model

Resource consumption is tied to usage with no up-front commitments. In other words, cloud resources are billed in a pay-as-you-go model that lets customers pay only for resources that are running and not idle.

Offload Infrastructure Management

Launching (not to mention managing) software and hardware infrastructure is difficult and complex. Since AWS specializes in these areas, e-commerce companies can focus on feature development rather than managing server provisioning or patching.

Can Save Money and Time for Users

By relying on AWS and moving applications to the cloud, customers no longer need to buy, own, manage and maintain proprietary data centers or their computing, storage and networking solutions. This ultimately frees up both money and time that are best invested elsewhere. The shift from on-premise resources to cloud resources is one of AWS’ biggest selling points.

Access Proprietary Software Services

Within AWS’ suite of services, clients can access Amazon’s numerous proprietary software solutions related to machine learning, artificial intelligence and automation.

Optimize Security Compliance

By offloading resources to the cloud, customers can optimize for data compliance and security by making use of AWS’s distributed network of global data centers. If a company needs certain market data to be held within a given region, it can use the cloud platform to store that data close to that geography in order to achieve legal and security compliance.

Who Uses Amazon Web Services?

In short, everyone — whether directly as customers or indirectly as users of a specific platform. From individual developers looking to grow their business all the way to multinational enterprise companies in the most regulated industries, AWS counts customers in the millions across all industry sectors and company sizes.

Here’s a list of some of AWS’ most recognizable customers:

AWS Customers

Netflix
Airbnb
Twitch
McDonald’s
Epic Games
Pfizer
Kellogg’s
The Guardian

Amazon Web Services Pricing

AWS pricing is a complex topic as fees are based on each specific service within the ecosystem of AWS and many other factors such as product tier, usage frequency and more. AWS itself provides products to better handle the combination of different AWS service prices to facilitate the management and billing of AWS resources.

For a complete deep dive on price tiers for each different service, the AWS Pricing Catalog provides detailed information.

Key AWS Developments

AWS provided a critical shift in how companies approach IT infrastructure, moving from rigid, on-premise data centers to flexible, scalable cloud-native architectures. These are some of its most significant developments since its release in 2006:

US-EAST-1 Region Outage (October 2025)

AWS experienced another major outage at itsUS-EAST-1 region, which led to widespread disruptions for thousands of popular websites and applications globally, including Delta, Verizon, Reddit and major banking services. The root cause was traced to a Domain Name System (DNS) resolution issue affecting its core database service, DynamoDB, causing cascading failures as dependent applications could not locate their necessary servers.

US-EAST-1 Region Outage (December 2021)

On December 7, 2021, AWS experienced a significant outage at its US-EAST-1 region in northern Virginia — its oldest and largest data center. The disruption lasted about eight hours and was caused by an impairment of several network devices, which led to widespread errors across several AWS services. A subsequent service disruption occurred a couple weeks later, lasting approximately one hour. These two back-to-back incidents highlighted just how vulnerable the cloud infrastructure is.

AWS Launches Bedrock (September 2023)

AWS announced the availability of Amazon Bedrock, a managed service designed to help customers build and scale generative AI applications using foundation models from Amazon and other leading AI startups. This development significantly expanded the inclusion of AI services by providing a serverless experience for running AI models, allowing organizations to securely customize and integrate them into applications without having to manage any underlying infrastructure.

Netflix Completes Full Cloud Migration (January 2016)

After a seven-year effort that began in 2008, Netflix officially completed its migration to AWS, shutting down the last of its remaining data center infrastructure used for its streaming service. This landmark achievement demonstrated the extreme scalability and high availability that is possible with a fully cloud-native architecture, providing a crucial blueprint for other large enterprises seeking digital transformation.

Launch of Relational Database Service (RDS) (October 2009)

AWS introduced the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), initially supporting MySQL databases. This fully managed service simplified the setup, operation and scaling of a relational database in the cloud, automating common administrative tasks like patching, backups and scaling. RDS allowed developers to focus on application development rather than database administration, rapidly accelerating the adoption of cloud-based transactional applications.

Amazon Releases AWS (March 2006)

After years of developing an internal infrastructure, Amazon released the service to external organizations through the launch of Amazon Web Services. As the first generally available service, S3 was designed to provide developers with a simple web service interface to store and retrieve any amount of data, offering industry-leading durability and availability at the time.

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