Amazon’s cloud computing service is called Amazon Web Services, commonly abbreviated AWS.
AWS provides on-demand computing, storage, databases, networking, analytics, and other information-technology services over the internet. Instead of buying and maintaining physical servers, customers can rent capacity from Amazon’s data centers and pay according to usage. This model lets organizations scale resources up or down as demand changes.
Amazon began offering web services in the early 2000s and launched its major infrastructure services in 2006. Two foundational products are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, which supplies virtual servers, and Amazon Simple Storage Service, or S3, which stores data as objects. AWS Lambda later popularized serverless computing, allowing code to run without customers managing servers directly.
AWS is often confused with Amazon’s retail website because both belong to Amazon, but they are different businesses. It also competes directly with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. The abbreviation AWS refers to the broader platform, not to a single cloud product.