Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the internet with pay-as-you-go pricing, replacing the traditional approach of buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centers and servers. This model lets organizations provision compute, storage, and networking capacity in minutes, paying only for what they actually use rather than for infrastructure that may sit idle most of the time. Amazon Web Services, commonly known as AWS, is Amazon's comprehensive cloud computing platform, offering more than two hundred fully featured services from data centers located all around the world.
AWS delivers a wide range of benefits that explain its popularity with businesses of every size. These benefits include agility in deploying new workloads, the ability to scale capacity up or down on demand, elasticity that matches resources to real-time usage, and a global reach that places infrastructure close to users everywhere. Customers also benefit from pay-as-you-go pricing, strong security features, and high reliability backed by redundant infrastructure. Because AWS takes on the heavy lifting of running hardware and facilities, teams can focus their time and budget on building applications rather than operating data centers.
The cloud industry generally groups services into three main service models that define who manages what. Infrastructure as a Service, or IaaS, provides virtualized computing resources such as servers and storage that customers configure themselves. Platform as a Service, or PaaS, offers a managed development platform where developers deploy code without worrying about the underlying operating system or runtime. Software as a Service, or SaaS, delivers ready-to-use applications over the internet. AWS supports all three models, with examples ranging from EC2 for IaaS-style virtual servers to fully managed databases and end-user applications that resemble SaaS offerings.