Amazon founded AWS, the cloud service that launched in 2006. Amazon Web Services began by offering infrastructure that businesses could rent over the internet instead of purchasing and maintaining all their own servers. Its early public services included Amazon Simple Storage Service, known as S3, and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, known as EC2.
Amazon started in 1994 as an online bookstore founded by Jeff Bezos. It expanded into many retail categories and then developed major businesses in logistics, digital media, devices, advertising, and cloud computing. AWS became a particularly important part of Amazon’s corporate story and helped the company rank among the world's most valuable businesses by market capitalization.
AWS is not the same as Amazon’s online retail marketplace. Amazon owns and operates both, but AWS sells computing and technology services to organizations, while the marketplace connects shoppers with products sold by Amazon and third-party merchants.