Amazon founded AWS, the cloud-computing business launched in 2006.
Amazon Web Services began offering commercial infrastructure services in 2006, initially with services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. These products allowed organizations to rent computing capacity and storage over the internet instead of building all infrastructure themselves.
AWS grew into one of the world’s largest cloud platforms, serving startups, governments, universities, and major enterprises. Its revenue and operating results became an important part of how investors assessed Amazon’s overall business and market value.
Amazon is best known to consumers for online retail, but it also operates advertising, digital-content, logistics, and cloud businesses. A frequent mistake is treating AWS as a separate publicly traded company. AWS is a business segment of Amazon, and Amazon’s stock-market capitalization represents the parent company as a whole.