AWS
ExplainedCloud service
Also known as: Amazon Web Services
The world’s largest cloud platform, with hundreds of services for compute, storage, databases and more.
AWS, explained
Written by EduVerseWhat it is
AWS (Amazon Web Services) is Amazon’s cloud platform: you rent computing power, storage, databases and many other building blocks by the hour or by usage instead of buying hardware. Well-known services include EC2 for virtual servers, S3 for file storage and RDS for managed databases.
Why teams use it
Running your own servers means buying hardware up front, guessing how much you’ll need and handling repairs yourself. With AWS you start small, add capacity when traffic grows and pay for what you use. The trade-off is a long list of services with their own names, and a bill that needs watching, because forgotten resources keep costing money.
An example from work
Your team stores user uploads in S3. The first time your new upload code runs in the test environment, the logs show an AccessDenied error from S3: the IAM role your app runs under hasn’t been given permission to write to that bucket. Once someone adds the right policy to the role, the upload works.
Our own explanation, not a quote from the book.
Where it fits
Cloud infrastructure, hosting, managed services
Coverage in the book
Explained and compared with alternatives, so you know where and why it’s used.
