- Founded
- 2006-01-01 in Seattle, Washington, USA
- Headquarters
- 410 Terry Ave N, Seattle, WA 98109, USA
Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, operated as a subsidiary of Amazon.com. Launched internally in 2002 as a set of web services and publicly as a cloud computing platform in March 2006, AWS offers over 200 on‑demand services including compute, storage, databases, machine learning, analytics, and networking. Customers pay only for what they use with no upfront commitments, a model that has enabled millions of organisations—from startups to governments—to scale globally without maintaining physical infrastructure. AWS operates from data centres across 33 geographic regions (as of early 2025) and serves more than a million active customers. Its revenue reached $128.7 billion in fiscal year 2025, driven by a 31% share of the cloud infrastructure market. AWS’s commitment to operational excellence, customer obsession, and rapid innovation has made it the backbone of modern digital transformation.
Detailed Review
AWS pioneered the public cloud industry and remains its dominant force. Its foundational service, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), launched in 2006, gave users virtual servers on demand, while Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) provided scalable object storage. The platform has since expanded to include managed databases (Amazon RDS, DynamoDB), serverless computing (AWS Lambda), container orchestration (Amazon ECS, EKS), AI/ML services (Amazon SageMaker, Bedrock), and edge computing (AWS Outposts, Wavelength). AWS also offers hybrid capabilities via AWS Snow Family for offline data transfer and AWS Local Zones for low‑latency workloads. Security is built into every layer, with over 300 security, compliance, and governance services. AWS’s partner network includes more than 130,000 partners, and its marketplace hosts thousands of third‑party solutions. The company invests heavily in custom chip design (Graviton processors, Trainium and Inferentia for AI) and offers the broadest portfolio of GPU‑based instances. AWS’s recent $38 billion partnership with OpenAI (2026) underscores its role in powering frontier AI workloads. Despite intense competition from Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, AWS continues to lead in feature breadth, global infrastructure, and enterprise adoption. Its main criticisms revolve around complex pricing and vendor lock‑in, but its relentless pace of innovation keeps customers loyal.
Key Products
Amazon EC2
Virtual servers in the cloud, offering resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload.
Amazon S3
Scalable object storage designed for any type of data, with 99.999999999% durability.
AWS Lambda
Serverless compute that runs code in response to events without provisioning or managing servers.
Amazon RDS
Managed relational database service supporting MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server, and MariaDB.
Amazon DynamoDB
Fully managed NoSQL key‑value and document database for single‑digit millisecond performance.
Amazon SageMaker
Fully managed machine learning service for building, training, and deploying models at scale.
Amazon Bedrock
Managed service for building generative AI applications using foundation models from leading providers.
Amazon EKS / ECS
Managed Kubernetes and container orchestration services.
AWS Outposts
Hybrid solution that brings AWS infrastructure and services to on‑premises data centres.
AWS Snow Family
Physical devices for edge computing and offline data transfer in harsh environments.
Recent News
SOFTSWISS CTO Outlines Five Engineering-Business Alignment Pitfalls Ahead of Tech Race Summit 2026
SOFTSWISS CTO Sergey Kastsukevich identifies five critical missteps operators and providers make when aligning business speed with engineering scalability, including fast launches that degrade platform quality, late scalability planning, unrecognized technical debt, legacy technology risks, and the need for dedicated research time. He previews these insights ahead of the Tech Race Summit 2026.
2026-07-16