Amazon founded Amazon Web Services, whose first public services launched in 2006.
Amazon Web Services began as an effort to turn the reusable infrastructure developed for Amazon's retail operations into services that other organizations could rent. The first major public offerings included Simple Storage Service, known as S3, and Elastic Compute Cloud, known as EC2.
S3 launched in March 2006 and provided scalable internet storage. EC2 followed later in 2006 and allowed customers to rent virtual computing capacity. Together, these services helped popularize infrastructure as an on-demand utility rather than something every company had to purchase and operate itself.
AWS is often confused with Amazon's consumer marketplace because both belong to Amazon.com, Inc. AWS is a separate cloud-computing business serving startups, governments, universities, and large enterprises. Its services now cover storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning, and many other technical categories.