Amazon launched Amazon Web Services in 2006, helping pioneer large-scale public cloud computing.
Amazon Web Services began with foundational infrastructure services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service, or S3, and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2. These services let customers rent storage and computing capacity over the internet instead of buying and maintaining all their own servers.
Amazon.com had started in 1994 as an online bookstore founded by Jeff Bezos. It expanded into a broad technology and commerce company, and AWS became a major business serving startups, governments, media organizations, and large enterprises. Its usage-based model helped popularize infrastructure as a service.
AWS is often confused with Amazon’s retail marketplace because both belong to the same parent company, but they serve different functions. Amazon’s market capitalization reflects the combined company, including e-commerce, cloud computing, advertising, logistics, and other operations.