Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a comprehensive, evolving cloud computing platform provided by Amazon. It provides a mix of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and packaged software as a service (SaaS) offerings.

AWS launched in 2006 from the internal infrastructure that Amazon.com built to handle its online retail operations. AWS was one of the first companies to introduce a pay-as-you-go cloud computing model that scales to provide users with compute, storage or throughput as needed.

Amazon Web Services provides services from dozens of data centers spread across availability zones (AZs) in regions across the world. An AZ represents a location that typically contains multiple physical data centers, while a region is a collection of AZs in geographic proximity connected by low-latency network links.

An AWS customer can spin up virtual machines (VMs) and replicate data in different AZs to achieve a highly reliable infrastructure that is resistant to failures of individual servers or an entire data center.

More than 100 services comprise the Amazon Web Services portfolio, including those for compute, databases, infrastructure management, application development and security. These services, by category, include:

Compute Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides virtual servers -- called instances -- for compute capacity. The EC2 service offers dozens of instance types with varying capacities and sizes, tailored to specific workload types and applications, such as memory-intensive and accelerated-computing jobs. AWS also provides an Auto Scaling tool to dynamically scale capacity to maintain instance health and performance.

The Amazon EC2 Container Service and EC2 Container Registry enable customers to work with Docker containers and images on the AWS platform. A developer can also use AWS Lambda for serverless functions that automatically run code for applications and services, as well as AWS Elastic Beanstalk for PaaS. AWS also includes Amazon Lightsail, which provides virtual private servers, and AWS Batch, which processes a series of jobs.

Storage Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) provides scalable object storage for data backup, archival and analytics. An IT professional stores data and files as S3 objects -- which can range up to 5 GB -- inside S3 buckets to keep them organized. A business can save money with S3 through its Infrequent Access storage tier or use Amazon Glacier for long-term cold storage.