Amazon Web Services

AWS launched in 2006 as Amazon's internal infrastructure project, originally built to handle the company's own massive retail traffic. Andy Jassy led the early team that spun it into a commercial service, and he remains CEO today. The first public offering was Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which let anyone rent virtual servers by the hour, a radical idea at a time when businesses had to buy and maintain their own hardware.

From those beginnings, AWS grew into a sprawling ecosystem of over 200 services, covering compute, storage, databases, machine learning, and more. Its data centers span 30+ geographic regions worldwide, with nine in North America alone. The pay-as-you-go pricing model became the industry standard, letting startups access the same infrastructure as giants like Netflix and NASA.

AWS holds the largest slice of the cloud market, 31% as of early 2023, per Synergy Research Group, ahead of Microsoft Azure's 25% and Google Cloud's 11%. It was also the first major provider to build government-specific infrastructure, launching AWS GovCloud in 2011 for U.S. agencies and later earning accreditation for classified workloads up to Top Secret level.[edit]