What Is Amazon Web Services? Definition, How It Works, Products, Benefits, and Disadvantages

An AWS account is a virtual space to host your AWS resources. You can create an AWS account by providing an email address and a password, which form the root credentials to what is known as the root account. The account provides an isolated AWS environment in which to manage your resources.

The idea for AWS emerged in 2003. Amazon was running its e-commerce service and had infrastructure that provided developers with APIs to integrate with its e-commerce platform. As Amazon ran its e-commerce architecture, the company realized it had established a highly effective and efficient infrastructure that it could offer to the public.

In March 2006, AWS launched its first public service, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS). Shortly after followed the launch of EC2 and Amazon S3 in August of the same year. Over the years, AWS has continued to innovate with architecture development, making it the infrastructure giant it is today.

What is AWS? History of Amazon’s Cash Cow [2000 to 2024]

Amazon is a technology company founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994. It began as an online bookstore and has since become the largest e-commerce platform in the United States. AWS, on the other hand, is a subsidiary of Amazon and exists as a separate legal entity. It is a branch of Amazon that provides infrastructure solutions to clients all over the world.

In 2002, AWS launched as a company offering APIs for software developers to integrate with the Amazon.com e-commerce website. Today, AWS is Amazon’s most profitable subsidiary and the leading cloud infrastructure provider in the world.

Clients of AWS can take advantage of numerous services that span multiple domains, such as compute, networking, databases, storage and security, among others. Users launch the services from within their AWS accounts and pay for them on a pay-as-you-go basis. This means users are only charged for the services they use.

An AWS region is a geographical area that contains AWS data centers holding AWS resources. Regions are made up of at least three availability zones. Each region operates independently and is completely isolated from all other AWS regions.

How Many Regions Does AWS Have?

As at April 2024, AWS had 33 active regions, including Northern Virginia (us-east-1), Oregon (us-west-2), Mumbai (ap-south-1), Tokyo (ap-northeast-1), Cape Town (af-south-1), Ireland (eu-west-1) and Bahrain (me-south-1), among others. The regions span across North America, South America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific, Australia and New Zealand. 

You can take a look at the current AWS regions on the AWS Global Infrastructure map, which illustrates the AWS global network.

Availability zones are a collection of data centers in close geographic proximity. These data centers have an independent and redundant infrastructure setup to improve availability. All availability zones within a region are interconnected through high-bandwidth and low-latency connections via dedicated metro fiber. 

How Many Availability Zones Does AWS Have?

As at April 2024, AWS had 105 availability zones, including us-east-1a, us-west-2a, ap-northeast-1a, sa-east-1a and us-east-2a. Availability zones are denoted by the letters a, b, c and d after the region identifier.

The term “compute” entails the use of concepts related to software computation, such as processing power and memory. Compute forms one of the core parts of cloud computing technology.

On the AWS platform, you can specify the computing power and memory for your application, which are determined by the number of CPUs and bytes, respectively. You can then get a virtual AWS server that meets your specifications.

The compute category includes resources such as EC2, ECS and AWS Lambda. The compute service you use will be based on factors such as the application’s requirements, the compute power demand and code size, the operating system and your software development needs.

Storage products and services allow AWS clients to store their data for high durability and availability. The main storage services include Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) for block storage, EFS for network file systems, and S3 for object storage and as a foundation for data lakes.

The storage service you use will be based on factors such as the type of data being stored, how frequently you will access it, what the data is used for and network accessibility. AWS storage services are highly reliable and are designed with 99.999999999% durability.

AWS database storage services allow customers to host database applications such as a provision to host game data. AWS offers solutions for relational databases and NoSQL databases. 

Relational database services store data in a table format and include Amazon Aurora, Redshift and Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service). RDS offers six database options, namely Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, SQL Server and Aurora.

NoSQL databases are more suitable for high performance and dynamic scalability. They store data in a key value format. Examples of NoSQL databases include DynamoDB, DocumentDB, Amazon Neptune and Amazon Elasticache.

Networking and content delivery services connect the data to its users, create a virtualized environment to run applications and aid with interconnectivity features such as route table configuration. 

Examples of networking services include Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Amazon Route 53 and AWS Direct Connect. Content delivery services enhance users’ data accessibility in the cloud. Examples of content delivery services include Amazon CloudFront and S3 Transfer Accelerator. 

Analytics services help businesses with big data management derive insights from their data efficiently and at scale. They help organizations collect, store, process, analyze, visualize and stream data from various sources to aid with decision-making. Examples of analytics services include Amazon Kinesis, Amazon QuickSight and AWS Glue. 

Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) services give developers and data scientists the ability to build, train and deploy machine learning models and AI applications quickly and at scale. The main services under machine learning and AI are Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Polly, Amazon BedRock and Amazon PartyRock.

Security, identity and compliance resources consist of data security tools and cloud security tools that help users protect their data, control access management using Amazon Cloud Directory and ensure compliance with various regulatory standards.

Examples of AWS security tools include AWS IAM, AWS KMS, Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Config, Amazon Macie, AWS Shield and AWS WAF.

IoT resources help users connect devices to the cloud, collect data from those devices, analyze the data and build scalable IoT solutions. Example services include AWS IoT Core, AWS IoT Greengrass, AWS IoT Core, AWS IoT Events, AWS IoT Device Management and AWS IoT Analytics.

Management and governance services facilitate visibility, control and automation across AWS infrastructure. Examples of AWS management tools include AWS CloudWatch, AWS Systems Manager, AWS Organizations (comprising multiple AWS accounts), AWS Trusted Advisor, AWS Config and AWS CloudTrail.

Migration and transfer services help facilitate a seamless migration from on-premises architecture to the AWS cloud, and help move data in hybrid cloud AWS environments to enhance data backup.

Examples AWS migration services include AWS Database Migration Service, AWS Datasync, AWS Storage Gateway, AWS Outposts and AWS Snow Family, including AWS Snowball.

Microsoft Azure is Microsoft’s cloud-based service. It is the second most popular cloud computing platform after AWS, and its market share has been increasing over the years. Azure offers a variety of services comparable to those of AWS, with competitive pricing models. Azure sets itself apart with its integration with Microsoft products like Office 365 and Windows Server.

Google provides infrastructure services to its clients through Google Cloud. Google Cloud offers a variety of cloud computing services at very competitive prices compared to AWS. It has the third largest market share after AWS and Azure.

DigitalOcean provides simple cloud services and mostly targets startups and small firms. It offers far fewer services than AWS but focuses on crucial ones such as virtual servers and databases. Cost-conscious clients appreciate DigitalOcean’s well-defined and well-structured pricing model, which is less complex than AWS’.

IBM cloud offers a wide variety of cloud computing services with competitive pricing models, such as pay-as-you-go, reserved instances and discounts for long-term commitments. However, AWS offers more services, has a more extensive ecosystem and commands a far larger market share than IBM Cloud. 

Alibaba Cloud offers a wide array of AWS services at competitive prices to AWS via its pay-as-you-go and subscription pricing models. Alibaba Cloud provides services for diverse clients. Though AWS commands a far larger market share than Alibaba Cloud, Alibaba has been expanding its reach, especially in the Asian market.

Oracle Cloud offers a wide range of cloud computing services targeting businesses of all sizes. It uses a pay-as-you-go pricing model and discount models for reserved instances. Oracle focuses on providing end-to-end solutions, particularly for businesses in finance and telecommunications. Learn more about how it compares to Amazon in our AWS vs Oracle Cloud comparison.

OVH Cloud is a leading European cloud provider, with its headquarters in France. It provides a comprehensive set of cloud computing services such as compute, storage and databases with pay-as-you-go pricing models. 

Though AWS commands a far larger market share, OVH continues to expand — especially within Europe, where it differentiates itself by offering GDPR-compliant solutions and an emphasis on data privacy and security.