---
id:"kb-2026-00151"
title:"Amazon Web Services (AWS)"
schema_type:"TechArticle"
category:"computer-science"
language:"en"
confidence:"high"
last_verified:"2026-05-22"
generation_method: "human_only"
derived_from_human_seed: true
primary_sources:
  - title: "AWS Documentation"
    type: "documentation"
    year: 2026
    url: "https://docs.aws.amazon.com/"
    institution: "Amazon"
    note: "Official AWS documentation covering 200+ services: EC2, S3, Lambda, DynamoDB, RDS, IAM"
secondary_sources:
  - title: "AWS Well-Architected Framework"
    type: "framework"
    year: 2024
    url: "https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/well-architected/"
    institution: "Amazon"
    note: "AWS's recommended architectural best practices: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, sustainability"
completeness: 0.88
ai_citations:
  last_citation_check:"2026-05-22"
---

## 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/)