Amazon founded Amazon Web Services in 2006, helping make cloud computing a major business.
AWS began with services that let developers rent computing infrastructure and storage over the internet instead of buying and maintaining their own servers. Its early offerings included Amazon Simple Storage Service and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, commonly known as S3 and EC2.
Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994 and began as an online bookstore. The company expanded into many retail categories, logistics, digital media, devices, and subscription services. AWS added a second major engine to Amazon’s business and became one of the best-known examples of infrastructure sold as an on-demand service.
Cloud services are often confused with ordinary web hosting. Cloud platforms generally provide scalable computing resources, storage, databases, networking, and software tools that customers can provision as needed. AWS is a division of Amazon, not a separate parent company.