What is AWS?
AWS stands for Amazon Web Services.
Formally, AWS is a cloud provider that offers cloud services.
In plain terms: The AWS cloud is a huge collection of cloud computing services that let people and companies run websites, apps, and systems over the internet instead of on their own physical servers.
Why does AWS exist?
The original problem
In the early 2000s, Amazon was facing huge internal problems:
- Their teams needed servers constantly;
- Buying hardware took weeks or months;
- Most servers sat idle most of the time;
- Every team was reinventing the same infrastructure (storage, auth, scaling).
Amazon realized:
The hard part of building products isn’t the business logic, it’s the infrastructure.
The solution
They decided to:
- Standardize their internal infrastructure;
- Automate it;
- Expose it as APIs;
- Let other companies rent it.
That became Amazon Web Services (2006).
Problems that AWS solves
Before AWS was a thing, running a website or app, required:
- Buying physical servers;
- Renting data center space;
- Handling power, cooling, networking;
- Planning capacity months in advance;
- Overpaying “just in case”;
- Manually recovering from failures.
AWS flips this completely. Now:
- Upfront cost is replaced by “pay per second” cost;
- Clients pay only for the resources that they use;
- Resources are automatically scaled to meet demands;
- Resources are spread globally for fault tolerance;
- The underlying hardware is managed by AWS, clients focus only on the code/product.
Related
- 01. Cloud Computing Fundamentals
- 02. Global Infrastructure
- 03. Shared Responsibility Model
- 04. IAM
- 05. EC2
- 06. S3
- 07. Databases
- 08. Other Compute Services
- 09. Integration Services
- 10. VPCs & Networking
- 11. Security & Compliance
- 12. Cloud Monitoring
- 13. Infrastructure Management
- 14. Machine Learning
- 15. Other Services
- 16. Well-Architected Framework