## TL;DR

AWS is the world's largest cloud provider, launched in 2006 with S3 and EC2. It offers 200+ services across compute, storage, database, ML, IoT, and serverless. AWS holds ~32% cloud market share (2025). Key services: EC2 (VMs), S3 (object storage), Lambda (serverless), DynamoDB (NoSQL), RDS (managed databases).

## Core Explanation

Regions (geographic area, e.g., us-east-1) and Availability Zones (isolated data centers within region). Free Tier includes 750 hours/month EC2 t2.micro for 12 months. IAM controls access via users, roles, policies. Infrastructure as Code: CloudFormation, CDK. AWS was named after the river — not literally 'Amazon Web Services' in other contexts.

## Further Reading

- [AWS Documentation](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/)