What is AWS and what is cloud computing?

Question

Accepted Answer

**AWS** (Amazon Web Services) is the leading **cloud computing** platform — providing on-demand computing resources (servers, storage, databases, networking, and hundreds of services) over the internet, paid for as you use them. Cloud computing means renting IT resources instead of owning physical hardware.

## Cloud computing: renting resources on demand

```text
TRADITIONAL: buy/maintain your own physical servers (data center, upfront cost,
  capacity planning, maintenance, slow to scale)
CLOUD: rent computing resources from a provider ON DEMAND, over the internet:
  → provision servers/storage/databases in MINUTES (no buying hardware)
  → PAY ONLY for what you use (pay-as-you-go)
  → SCALE up/down instantly as needs change
  → the provider handles the physical infrastructure
```

## What AWS provides (hundreds of services)

```text
✓ COMPUTE — EC2 (virtual servers), Lambda (serverless functions), ECS/EKS (containers)
✓ STORAGE — S3 (object storage), EBS (disks), EFS (file storage)
✓ DATABASES — RDS (SQL), DynamoDB (NoSQL), ElastiCache (Redis), etc.
✓ NETWORKING — VPC (private networks), Route 53 (DNS), CloudFront (CDN)
✓ Plus: security (IAM), monitoring (CloudWatch), messaging, AI/ML, analytics, and more
```

## Key benefits

```text
✓ NO upfront hardware cost; pay-as-you-go (operational vs capital expense)
✓ SCALABILITY — scale instantly to meet demand (up and down)
✓ GLOBAL reach — deploy across regions worldwide quickly
✓ RELIABILITY — redundant, managed infrastructure
✓ SPEED — provision resources in minutes; focus on your app, not hardware
```

## Why it matters

Understanding AWS and cloud computing is valuable, broadly-relevant knowledge because cloud computing has transformed how software is built and deployed, and AWS is the leading cloud platform, used pervasively across the industry.

The fundamental concept — **cloud computing means renting computing resources on demand** (rather than owning physical hardware), provisioning servers, storage, and databases in minutes, paying only for what you use, and scaling instantly — represents a major shift from the traditional model of buying and maintaining your own data centers, eliminating upfront costs, capacity-planning guesswork, and slow scaling.

Understanding **what AWS provides** (hundreds of services spanning compute like EC2 and Lambda, storage like S3, databases like RDS and DynamoDB, networking like VPC and CloudFront, plus security, monitoring, and more) conveys the breadth of capabilities available on demand.

Understanding the **key benefits** (no upfront cost with pay-as-you-go pricing, instant scalability, global reach, managed reliability, and speed of provisioning) explains why organizations adopt cloud computing — it lets teams focus on their applications rather than infrastructure, scale efficiently, and move fast.

Since cloud computing is now central to how most software is deployed and AWS is the dominant platform (with cloud skills being widely sought across the industry), and since understanding what AWS is, the cloud computing model, and its benefits is foundational for modern software and operations work, understanding AWS and cloud computing is valuable, broadly-applicable knowledge — a fundamental concept underpinning modern infrastructure, increasingly essential for developers and operations professionals, and the starting point for working with cloud platforms that power a large portion of today's software.