AWS

Amazon Web Services is a cloud computing platform offering comprehensive infrastructure and services for virtually any workload. AWS provides scalable compute through EC2, object storage via S3, managed databases including RDS and DynamoDB, serverless computing with Lambda, and hundreds of additional services spanning machine learning, analytics, IoT, and media processing.

AWS operates a global infrastructure of data centers organized into regions and availability zones, allowing applications to be deployed close to users and replicated across geographically isolated facilities for redundancy. The pay-as-you-go pricing model means teams only pay for resources consumed, though cost management itself becomes a skill as usage scales and bill complexity increases.

For web development, AWS is relevant because it hosts a significant portion of the internet. Services like S3 for static asset hosting, CloudFront for CDN delivery, Lambda for serverless API endpoints, and Amplify for full-stack deployment cover the entire spectrum of web hosting needs. The platform breadth is both its strength and its challenge, as the sheer number of services requires significant learning investment. Most web teams use a small subset of AWS services effectively.