Amazon Web Services is the cloud-computing division of Amazon. By its own account on the “About AWS” page, the company states that “since launching in 2006, Amazon Web Services has been providing industry-leading cloud capabilities,” positioning itself as a provider of on-demand cloud infrastructure to customers ranging from startups and enterprises to non-profits and governments.
AWS made its name with two foundational services launched in 2006. Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) arrived in March, offering pay-per-use object storage, and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) followed in August, offering rentable virtual servers billed by the hour. Both were announced on the AWS blog by Jeff Barr, and both turned what had been capital purchases of hardware into metered operating costs.
The significance of AWS is that it created the public-cloud market as a practical reality rather than a concept. By renting storage and compute over the internet at published per-unit prices, AWS let developers provision infrastructure in minutes and pay only for what they used, which made on-demand, rentable infrastructure the default expectation for new software companies.
AWS has since grown into a broad catalog of services spanning storage, compute, databases, and higher-level platforms, but its identity remains rooted in the 2006 launches that defined the category.