Amazon Web Services

Overview

Amazon's cloud platform that rents out computing power, storage, databases, and hundreds of other building blocks over the internet.

General use

Companies use it to run their servers and apps without buying hardware, storing data and scaling up or down as demand changes.

Insight

It has every building block you could want, which is also the problem: the console is overwhelming and the pricing is famously hard to predict. Small teams often pay for complexity they do not need and would move faster on a simpler host. Once your setup is deep in AWS, moving off is a large project on its own. Best for teams with real scale or specific needs, and someone on staff who knows it well.