Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud computing platform run by Amazon Web Services, Inc. A business rents computing services over the internet instead of buying and running its own servers. AWS lists more than 240 services. Its data centers form 124 Availability Zones (separate groups of data centers) in 39 geographic regions around the world.
Amazon EC2 rents virtual servers of many sizes, and Lightsail sells virtual servers as bundles at a fixed monthly price. Amazon S3 stores files as objects (object storage). Aurora and Amazon RDS run managed relational databases such as PostgreSQL and MySQL. Amazon Bedrock is a platform for generative AI: a program calls foundation models (large AI models trained on broad data) from many AI companies through the AWS API, and Bedrock adds tools to build agents, to customize models with company data and to block harmful content. AWS states that Bedrock does not store customer data or use it to train models.
AWS is free to join. Each service is billed by use, with its own price list, and a free tier gives limited free use of many services.