Launched in 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s leading cloud service provider, offering comprehensive on-demand cloud computing solutions (including compute power, content delivery and database storage) to clients worldwide. The AWS platform combines Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and packaged Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions.
According to Amazon, there are well over a million active users of AWS worldwide. Around 10% of these are enterprise-scale clients (household names like Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Adobe and the BBC use the AWS platform), while the rest are small-to-medium-sized companies. Cloudways has partnered with AWS (among other leading IaaS providers) to allow users to host their websites or apps on AWS servers.
AWS currently controls around a third of the cloud infrastructure market (almost twice as much as its closest competitor). A comprehensive and flexible cloud solution, AWS is suited to startups and small businesses as well as major enterprises, offering near-unlimited server capacity, a diverse array of tools and features, and the ability to scale operations quickly and flexibly.
AWS is made up of over 200 products and services covering areas such as computing, networking, storage, application services, deployment, analytics, machine learning, development, RobOps, and the Internet of Things (IoT). The most popular include Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a virtual server that allows user to run applications on AWS, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which provides storage through a web interface, and AWS Lambda, a serverless compute service which lets you run code without provisioning.
