Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive cloud platform, offering over 200 fully featured services from data centers globally. Instead of owning and maintaining physical servers, businesses “rent” these resources on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Think of AWS like a utility company (such as electricity or water). In the past, if a company needed a server, they had to buy the hardware, find a room for it, set up cooling, and pay for electricity. With AWS, Amazon has already built massive “server farms” all over the world. You simply log in to a website, “turn on” the amount of computing power you need, and pay only for the minutes or hours you use it.
How AWS Works
AWS is not just one giant computer; it is a global network organized into three layers:
- Regions: Physical locations around the world (e.g., US East, Europe, Asia Pacific).
- Availability Zones (AZs): Each Region contains multiple, isolated data centers called AZs. If one data center has a power outage, your application can instantly failover to another AZ in the same region.
- Edge Locations: Smaller data centers used to cache content (like videos or images) closer to users to reduce lag (latency).
Most applications on AWS are built using a few core services that mimic the parts of a traditional computer:
| Service | Category | What it does |
| Amazon EC2 | Compute | Virtual servers where you run your code. |
| Amazon S3 | Storage | For storing files, images, and backups. |
| Amazon RDS | Database | Managed databases like MySQL or PostgreSQL. |
| Amazon VPC | Networking | A private, isolated section of the cloud where you control your network. |
| AWS Lambda | Serverless | Runs code only when triggered (no need to manage servers at all). |
How can thousands of different companies all use the same Amazon hardware without seeing each other’s data? The answer is Virtualization.
AWS uses software to shift a massive physical server into many smaller virtual machines. Each virtual machine acts like its own independent computer. This allows AWS to maximize its hardware efficiency while keeping every customer’s data strictly separated and secure.
When you use AWS, security is a divided as,
- AWS is responsible for security the Cloud: Protecting the actual buildings, the physical servers, and the software that runs the cloud.
- You are responsible for security IN the Cloud: Encrypting your data, setting strong passwords, and deciding who has access to your files.