Amazon Web Services (AWS)

World's Leading Cloud Platform

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 200 fully featured services from data centers globally. Launched in 2006, AWS has become the backbone of the internet, powering millions of businesses from startups to Fortune 500 companies including Netflix, Airbnb, Pinterest, Slack, and NASA.

Global Infrastructure

AWS operates the most extensive global cloud infrastructure with 38 Geographic Regions and 120 Availability Zones worldwide, with plans for 10 more Availability Zones and 3 more Regions. Each Region consists of multiple isolated Availability Zones connected by high-bandwidth, low-latency networking, providing 99.99% availability SLA. This global reach enables businesses to deploy applications closer to end users for lower latency and better performance.

Core Services for Web Development

Compute Services

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) provides resizable compute capacity with 600+ instance types optimized for different workloads. EC2 offers pay-as-you-go pricing starting from $0.0116/hour, with Savings Plans offering up to 72% discount and Spot Instances providing up to 90% savings for fault-tolerant workloads. The latest Graviton5 processors deliver 25% better price-performance than previous generation.

AWS Lambda lets you run code without provisioning servers, charging only for compute time used (measured in milliseconds). Perfect for microservices, APIs, and event-driven architectures. Includes 1 million free requests per month in the Free Tier.

AWS Lightsail offers simplified VPS hosting with predictable pricing starting at $5/month for 1GB RAM, 1 vCPU, 40GB SSD, and 2TB transfer. Ideal for developers who want AWS power without the complexity.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk provides Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) deployment for web applications supporting Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, PHP, .NET, and Java. Automatically handles capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and health monitoring.

Storage Services

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is the industry-leading object storage with 99.999999999% (11 nines) durability. Starting at $0.023/GB for standard storage, S3 powers millions of websites, offering unlimited scalability, versioning, lifecycle policies, and seamless integration with CloudFront CDN. New S3 Vectors feature enables AI-ready vector storage at 90% lower cost.

Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) provides persistent block storage for EC2 instances with SSD and HDD options, automatic backups, and encryption at rest.

Database Services

Amazon RDS offers managed relational databases supporting MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SQL Server, and Amazon Aurora. Aurora provides MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility with 5x and 3x performance improvements respectively, automatic backups, Multi-AZ deployments, and read replicas.

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database delivering single-digit millisecond performance at any scale, with on-demand pricing starting at $1.25 per million write requests and $0.25 per million read requests.

Networking & Content Delivery

Amazon CloudFront is a global CDN with 600+ Points of Presence across 90+ cities, delivering content with ultra-low latency. Free tier includes 1TB data transfer out per month for 12 months. Pricing starts at $0.085/GB for first 10TB.

Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable DNS service with 100% uptime SLA, supporting domain registration, DNS routing, health checks, and traffic management. Hosted zone costs $0.50/month plus $0.40 per million queries.

Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming traffic across multiple targets (EC2, containers, IP addresses) in multiple Availability Zones, with Application Load Balancer (ALB), Network Load Balancer (NLB), and Gateway Load Balancer options.

Developer Tools & DevOps

AWS CodePipeline, CodeBuild, and CodeDeploy provide complete CI/CD automation. AWS recently introduced Frontier Agents - autonomous AI agents that revolutionize the software development lifecycle, including Kiro for development automation, AWS Security Agent for proactive security, and AWS DevOps Agent for operational excellence.

AWS Transform uses agentic AI to modernize legacy code 5x faster, supporting Windows, mainframe, VMware, Java, Node.js, Python migrations automatically.

AI & Machine Learning

Amazon Bedrock provides access to foundation models from AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Mistral AI, Stability AI, and Amazon's own Nova models. Amazon Nova includes Nova 2 Lite (cost-effective reasoning), Nova 2 Pro (complex workloads), Nova 2 Omni (multimodal), and Nova 2 Sonic (speech-to-speech).

Amazon SageMaker offers complete ML workflow tools for building, training, and deploying models at scale with serverless reinforcement learning.

Security & Compliance

AWS provides security as the highest priority with 300+ security, compliance, and governance services. Features include:

• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) - Fine-grained access control
• AWS Shield - DDoS protection (Standard free, Advanced $3,000/month)
• AWS WAF - Web application firewall ($5/month per rule)
• AWS Certificate Manager - Free SSL/TLS certificates
• AWS Secrets Manager - Secure credentials rotation
• AWS GuardDuty - Intelligent threat detection

AWS complies with 143 security standards and certifications including SOC 1/2/3, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS, GDPR, and FedRAMP. Data encryption at rest and in transit is available across all services.

AWS Free Tier

AWS offers one of the most generous free tiers in the industry with three types of offers:

• Always Free - Services like Lambda (1M requests/month), DynamoDB (25GB storage), CloudWatch (10 custom metrics), SNS (1M publishes)
• 12 Months Free - EC2 t2.micro/t3.micro (750 hours/month), S3 (5GB standard storage), RDS (750 hours db.t2.micro/month), CloudFront (1TB transfer)
• Free Trials - Short-term offers for services like Inspector, GuardDuty, SageMaker

Support Plans

AWS offers four support tiers:

• Basic Support - Free for all customers, includes 24/7 customer service, documentation, forums
• Developer Support - $29/month or 3% of monthly usage, business hours email access, <12-hour response time
• Business Support - $100/month or 10%/7%/5%/3% based on usage tiers, 24/7 phone/chat/email, <1-hour response for urgent issues, AWS Trusted Advisor full checks
• Enterprise Support - $15,000/month or 10%/7%/5%/3% based on usage, <15-minute response for critical issues, Technical Account Manager (TAM), Infrastructure Event Management, Well-Architected reviews

Pricing Model

AWS pioneered the pay-as-you-go cloud pricing model with no upfront costs, no termination fees, and pay only for what you use. Key pricing advantages:

• Per-Second Billing - Most services billed in 1-second increments (60-second minimum)
• Savings Plans - Commit to consistent usage for 1 or 3 years and save up to 72%
• Reserved Instances - Save up to 75% on EC2 by reserving capacity
• Spot Instances - Save up to 90% using spare AWS capacity
• Volume Discounts - Tiered pricing means cost decreases as usage increases
• Free Data Transfer - Data transfer IN is always free, between services in same Region is free

Customer Base & Industry Leadership

AWS serves millions of active customers across 245 countries and territories, including:

• Startups - Airbnb, Stripe, Slack, Lyft, DoorDash, Coinbase
• Enterprises - Netflix, Expedia, Samsung, McDonald's, Volkswagen, BMW
• Government - NASA, FDA, CDC, US Navy, UK Ministry of Justice
• Healthcare - Philips, Johnson & Johnson, GE Healthcare
• Financial Services - Nasdaq, Capital One, AXA, FINRA

AWS holds 32% market share (Q3 2024) and generated $105 billion in annual revenue (2024), more than the next three cloud providers combined. Gartner has named AWS a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure & Platform Services for 14 consecutive years.

Learning & Certification

AWS offers extensive training through AWS Training and Certification with 500+ free digital courses, hands-on labs, and 13 certification paths including Cloud Practitioner, Solutions Architect, Developer, SysOps Administrator, DevOps Engineer, and specialty certifications in Security, Machine Learning, Database, and Networking.

Who Should Use AWS

AWS is ideal for:

• Startups needing to scale rapidly without infrastructure investment - AWS Activate provides up to $100,000 in credits
• Enterprises requiring global reach, enterprise-grade security, and comprehensive compliance
• Developers building modern applications with microservices, containers, and serverless architecture
• Data-intensive businesses needing big data analytics, machine learning, and AI capabilities
• SaaS companies requiring multi-tenant architecture, auto-scaling, and global distribution
• E-commerce sites needing high availability, security, and traffic handling during peak seasons
• Media companies requiring video processing, transcoding, and content delivery at scale

Community & Ecosystem

AWS has the largest cloud ecosystem with 130,000+ AWS Partner Network (APN) partners, including Accenture, Deloitte, Capgemini, and Cognizant. The AWS Marketplace offers 15,000+ software listings. AWS hosts the flagship re:Invent conference annually with 50,000+ attendees, announcing hundreds of new features and services.

Innovation & Future

AWS releases an average of 4-5 new features or significant updates daily, totaling over 3,500 new features in 2024. Recent innovations include Frontier Agents for autonomous software development, Nova Forge for custom AI model training, Graviton5 processors, and S3 Vectors for AI-ready storage. AWS continues to lead in sustainability with commitment to 100% renewable energy by 2025 and plans for AWS to be water positive by 2030.