Amazon aws is a cloud computing platform by e-commerce giant amazon. It provides Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings for its customers. Amazon Web Services is based on the same logic as electricity supplies in the early 1900s where factories that needed power used to build their own private power plants, but once there was an option for them to purchase electricity from a central power company they stopped building their own. Using the same approach, amazon aws aims to move companies away from purchasing and managing their own hardware technology by offering them access to their servers over the internet on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Some of the largest and most well known companies in the world use amazon aws for their IT operations. Netflix is a notable example of a company that went all-in with AWS, closing its own data centers and moving their entire IT estate to the service. This level of commitment and trust from long-established enterprises speaks to the capabilities of amazon aws.
AWS offers over 100 featured services that allow users to build and scale their applications. These include compute instances which allow users to rent computing power in the cloud, storage services like Amazon Glacier and S3 and networking features such as Amazon Elastic Load Balancing. It also has tools and services to help users migrate their existing IT infrastructure to the cloud such as Route 53 and Migration Hub. Amazon aws has data centres in ten regions across the globe with two special zones for government users called AWS GovCloud.