Amazon Web Services launched in 2006 and remains the largest cloud provider by market share. AWS offers over 200 services across compute, storage, databases, machine learning, and more.
Core Services
Compute: EC2 (virtual machines), Lambda (serverless), ECS/EKS (containers), Fargate (serverless containers).
Storage: S3 (object storage), EBS (block storage), EFS (file storage), Glacier (archive).
Database: RDS (managed relational), DynamoDB (NoSQL), ElastiCache (in-memory), Redshift (data warehouse).
Networking: VPC, CloudFront (CDN), Route 53 (DNS), Direct Connect (dedicated links).
Pricing Model
AWS uses pay-as-you-go pricing with options for commitment-based discounts:
- On-Demand — pay per second/hour with no commitment
- Reserved Instances — 1-3 year commitments for up to 72% savings
- Spot Instances — bid on unused capacity for up to 90% savings (can be interrupted)
- Savings Plans — flexible commitment-based discounts across instance families
Strengths
- Broadest service catalog of any provider
- Largest global infrastructure (30+ regions)
- Most mature ecosystem of third-party integrations
- Strongest position in serverless and managed services
Considerations
- Complex pricing can lead to unexpected costs without active management
- Console UX is functional but dense
- Some services have overlapping functionality