Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered, pay-as-you-go basis. Clients will often use this in combination with autoscaling (a process that allows a client to use more computing in times of high application usage, and then scale down to reduce costs when there is less traffic). These cloud computing web services provide various services related to networking, compute, storage, middleware, IoT and other processing capacity, as well as software tools via AWS server farms. This frees clients from managing, scaling, and patching hardware and operating systems. One of the foundational services is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which allows users to have at their disposal a virtual cluster of computers, with extremely high availability, which can be interacted with over the internet via REST APIs, a CLI or the AWS console. AWS's virtual computers emulate most of the attributes of a real computer, including hardware central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs) for processing; local/RAM memory; Hard-disk(HDD)/SSD storage; a choice of operating systems; networking; and pre-loaded application software such as web servers, databases, and customer relationship management (CRM).
"AWS" redirects here. For other uses, see AWS (disambiguation).Company type
- July 2002[a] (Web services)
- March 2006[b] (Cloud computing)
US$80 billion (2022)[5]
US$22.8 billion (2022)[5]
- Annapurna Labs
- AWS Elemental
- NICE Software[6]
- Wickr
AWS services are delivered to customers via a network of AWS server farms located throughout the world. Fees are based on a combination of usage (known as a "Pay-as-you-go" model), hardware, operating system, software, or networking features chosen by the subscriber require availability, redundancy, security, and service options. Subscribers can pay for a single virtual AWS computer, a dedicated physical computer, or clusters of either.[7] Amazon provides select portions of security for subscribers (e.g. physical security of the data centers) while other aspects of security are the responsibility of the subscriber (e.g. account management, vulnerability scanning, patching). AWS operates from many global geographical regions including seven in North America.[8]
Amazon markets AWS to subscribers as a way of obtaining large-scale computing capacity more quickly and cheaply than building an actual physical server farm.[9] All services are billed based on usage, but each service measures usage in varying ways. As of 2021 Q4, AWS has 33% market share for cloud infrastructure while the next two competitors Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud have 21%, and 10% respectively, according to Synergy Group.[10][11]
Availability and topology[edit]
As of March 2024, AWS has distinct operations in 33 geographical "regions":[8] eight in North America, one in South America, eight in Europe, three in the Middle East, one in Africa, and twelve in Asia Pacific.
Most AWS regions are enabled by default for AWS accounts. Regions introduced after 20 March 2019 are considered to be opt-in regions, requiring a user to explicitly enable them in order for the region to be usable in the account. For opt-in regions, Identity and Access Management (IAM) resources such as users and roles are only propagated to the regions that are enabled.[109]
Each region is wholly contained within a single country and all of its data and services stay within the designated region.[7] Each region has multiple "Availability Zones",[110] which consist of one or more discrete data centers, each with redundant power, networking, and connectivity, housed in separate facilities. Availability Zones do not automatically provide additional scalability or redundancy within a region, since they are intentionally isolated from each other to prevent outages from spreading between zones. Several services can operate across Availability Zones (e.g., S3, DynamoDB) while others can be configured to replicate across zones to spread demand and avoid downtime from failures.
As of December 2014, Amazon Web Services operated an estimated 1.4 million servers across 11 regions and 28 availability zones.[111] The global network of AWS Edge locations consists of over 300 points of presence worldwide, including locations in North America, Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa, and South America.[112]
As of March 2024, AWS has announced the planned launch of six additional regions in Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Thailand, Saudia Arabia, and the European Union.[8] In mid March 2023, Amazon Web Services signed a cooperation agreement with the New Zealand Government to build large data centers in New Zealand.[113]
In 2014, AWS claimed its aim was to achieve 100% renewable energy usage in the future.[114] In the United States, AWS's partnerships with renewable energy providers include Community Energy of Virginia, to support the US East region;[115] Pattern Development, in January 2015, to construct and operate Amazon Wind Farm Fowler Ridge;[116] Iberdrola Renewables, LLC, in July 2015, to construct and operate Amazon Wind Farm US East; EDP Renewables North America, in November 2015, to construct and operate Amazon Wind Farm US Central;[117] and Tesla Motors, to apply battery storage technology to address power needs in the US West (Northern California) region.[115]
Charitable work[edit]
In 2017, AWS launched AWS re/Start in the United Kingdom to help young adults and military veterans retrain in technology-related skills. In partnership with the Prince's Trust and the Ministry of Defence (MoD), AWS will help to provide re-training opportunities for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds and former military personnel. AWS is working alongside a number of partner companies including Cloudreach, Sage Group, EDF Energy, and Tesco Bank.[128]
In April 2022, AWS announced the organization has committed more than $30 million over three years to early-stage start-ups led by Black, Latino, LGBTQIA+, and Women founders as part of its AWS impact Accelerator. The Initiative offers qualifying start-ups up to $225,000 in cash, credits, extensive training, mentoring, technical guidance and includes up to $100,000 in AWS service credits.[129]
Environmental impact[edit]
In 2016, Greenpeace assessed major tech companies—including cloud services providers like AWS, Microsoft, Oracle, Google, IBM, Salesforce and Rackspace—based on their level of "clean energy" usage. Greenpeace evaluated companies on their mix of renewable-energy sources; transparency; renewable-energy commitment and policies; energy efficiency and greenhouse-gas mitigation; renewable-energy procurement; and advocacy. The group gave AWS an overall "C" grade. Greenpeace credited AWS for its advances toward greener computing in recent years and its plans to launch multiple wind and solar farms across the United States. The organization stated that Amazon is opaque about its carbon footprint.[130]
In January 2021, AWS joined an industry pledge to achieve climate neutrality of data centers by 2030, the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact.[131] As of 2023, Amazon as a whole is the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy in the world, a position it has held since 2020, and has a global portfolio of over 20 GW of renewable energy capacity.[132] In 2022, 90% of all Amazon operations, including data centers, were powered by renewables.[133]
Denaturalization protest[edit]
US Department of Homeland Security has employed the software ATLAS, which runs on Amazon Cloud. It scanned more than 16.5 million records of naturalized Americans and flagged approximately 124,000 of them for manual analysis and review by USCIS officers regarding denaturalization.[134][135] Some of the scanned data came from the Terrorist Screening Database and the National Crime Information Center. The algorithm and the criteria for the algorithm were secret. Amazon faced protests from its own employees and activists for the anti-migrant collaboration with authorities.[136]