AWS is a comprehensive cloud platform that provides Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service. E-commerce giant Amazon founder Jeff Bezos likened it to the evolution of electricity supply: Once factories were able to buy power from a central utility company, they no longer needed their own private power plants and could enjoy lower costs thanks to economies of scale.
AWS includes dozens of fully featured services, providing the tools and infrastructure to build, test and deploy applications at any scale. These services range from compute storage options to big data solutions. It’s a comprehensive offering that is used by the largest enterprises, the fastest-growing startups and countless small and midsize businesses.
For example, AWS’ EC2 service is a virtual computer that lets you create and run application instances at a large scale. You can access each instance through a web console, REST APIs or a command line interface. Each instance provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud, so you can add or remove resources as you need them.
It’s an easy way to spin up and down capacity on demand as your applications need it. In addition, AWS has a pricing model that allows customers to pay for their computing capacity on an hourly basis. That makes it a cost-effective solution for start-ups and small companies. It also helps ease cloud migration and gives businesses the flexibility to choose the programming languages, architectures and operating systems they are familiar with. amazon aws