Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of
Amazon
Amazon most often refers to:
* Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek mythology
* Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin
* Amazon River, in South America
* Amazon (company), an American multinational technolog ...
that provides
on-demand cloud computing
Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over mu ...
platform
Platform may refer to:
Technology
* Computing platform, a framework on which applications may be run
* Platform game, a genre of video games
* Car platform, a set of components shared by several vehicle models
* Weapons platform, a system or ...
s and
APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered pay-as-you-go basis. These cloud computing
web services provide
distributed computing
A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages to one another from any system. Distributed computing is a field of computer sci ...
processing capacity and software tools via AWS
server farms. One of these services is
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a part of Amazon.com's cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), that allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications. EC2 encourages scalable deployment o ...
(EC2), which allows users to have at their disposal a
virtual cluster of computers, available all the time, through the Internet. AWS's virtual computers emulate most of the attributes of a real computer, including hardware
central processing unit
A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor or just Processor (computing), processor, is the electronic circuitry that executes Instruction (computing), instructions comprising a computer program. The CPU per ...
s (CPUs) and
graphics processing unit
A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, m ...
s (GPUs) for processing; local/
RAM
Ram, ram, or RAM may refer to:
Animals
* A male sheep
* Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish
People
* Ram (given name)
* Ram (surname)
* Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director
* RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch
* ...
memory; hard-disk/
SSD storage; a choice of operating systems; networking; and pre-loaded application software such as
web servers,
database
In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases s ...
s, and
customer relationship management
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a process in which a business or other organization administers its interactions with customers, typically using data analysis to study big data, large amounts of information.
CRM systems data collectio ...
(CRM).
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 required
availability
In reliability engineering, the term availability has the following meanings:
* The degree to which a system, subsystem or equipment is in a specified operable and committable state at the start of a mission, when the mission is called for at ...
,
redundancy,
security" \n\n\nsecurity.txt is a proposed standard for websites' security information that is meant to allow security researchers to easily report security vulnerabilities. The standard prescribes a text file called \"security.txt\" in the well known locat ...
, and service options. Subscribers can pay for a single virtual AWS computer, a dedicated physical computer, or clusters of either.
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.
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. 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 Google Cloud Platform offers numerous integrated cloud-computing services, including compute, network, and storage.
Products
Past and present products under the Google Cloud platform include:
Current
* Google Cloud Datastore, a NoSQL databa ...
have 21%, and 10% respectively, according to Synergy Group.
Services
As of 2021, AWS comprises over 200
products and services including
computing
Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and development of both hardware and software. Computing has scientific, ...
,
storage,
networking,
database
In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases s ...
,
analytics,
application services,
deployment
Deployment may refer to:
Engineering and software Concepts
* Blue-green deployment, a method of installing changes to a web, app, or database server by swapping alternating production and staging servers
* Continuous deployment, a software e ...
,
management
Management (or managing) is the administration of an organization, whether it is a business, a nonprofit organization, or a Government agency, government body. It is the art and science of managing resources of the business.
Management includ ...
,
machine learning
Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence.
Machine ...
,
mobile
Mobile may refer to:
Places
* Mobile, Alabama, a U.S. port city
* Mobile County, Alabama
* Mobile, Arizona, a small town near Phoenix, U.S.
* Mobile, Newfoundland and Labrador
Arts, entertainment, and media Music Groups and labels
* Mobile ( ...
,
developer tools, RobOps and tools for the
Internet of Things. The most popular include
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a part of Amazon.com's cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), that allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications. EC2 encourages scalable deployment o ...
(EC2),
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3),
Amazon Connect, and
AWS Lambda
Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Amazon that provides Software as a service, on-demand cloud computing computing platform, platforms and Application programming interface, APIs to individuals, companies, and gover ...
(a
serverless function enabling serverless
ETL e.g. between instances of EC2 & S3).
Most services are not exposed directly to end users, but instead offer functionality through APIs for developers to use in their applications. Amazon Web Services' offerings are accessed over
HTTP
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide We ...
, using the
REST
Rest or REST may refer to:
Relief from activity
* Sleep
** Bed rest
* Kneeling
* Lying (position)
* Sitting
* Squatting position
Structural support
* Structural support
** Rest (cue sports)
** Armrest
** Headrest
** Footrest
Arts and enter ...
architectural style and
SOAP
Soap is a salt of a fatty acid used in a variety of cleansing and lubricating products. In a domestic setting, soaps are surfactants usually used for washing, bathing, and other types of housekeeping. In industrial settings, soaps are use ...
protocol for older APIs and exclusively
JSON for newer ones.
History
Founding (2000–2005)
The genesis of AWS came in the early . After building ''Merchant.com'', Amazon's e-commerce-as-a-service platform that offers third-party retailers a way to build their own web-stores, Amazon pursued
service-oriented architecture
In software engineering, service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an architectural style that focuses on discrete services instead of a monolithic design. By consequence, it is also applied in the field of software design where services are provide ...
as a means to scale its engineering operations,
led by then
CTO Allan Vermeulen.
Around the same time frame, Amazon was frustrated with the speed of its software engineering, and sought to implement various recommendations put forth by Matt Round, an engineering leader at the time, including maximization of autonomy for engineering teams, adoption of
REST
Rest or REST may refer to:
Relief from activity
* Sleep
** Bed rest
* Kneeling
* Lying (position)
* Sitting
* Squatting position
Structural support
* Structural support
** Rest (cue sports)
** Armrest
** Headrest
** Footrest
Arts and enter ...
, standardization of infrastructure, removal of gate-keeping decision-makers (bureaucracy), and
continuous deployment
Continuous deployment (CD) is a software engineering approach in which software functionalities are delivered frequently and through automated deployments.
Continuous deployment contrasts with continuous delivery (also abbreviated CD), a similar ...
. He also called for increasing the percentage of the time engineers spent building the software rather than doing other tasks. Amazon created "a shared
IT platform" so its engineering organizations, which were spending 70% of their time on "undifferentiated heavy-lifting" such as IT and infrastructure problems, could focus on customer-facing innovation instead.
Besides, in dealing with unusual peak traffic patterns, especially during
the holiday season, by migrating services to commodity Linux hardware and relying on
open source software
Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Open ...
, Amazon's Infrastructure team, led by Tom Killalea, Amazon's first
CISO
A chief information security officer (CISO) is a senior-level executive within an organization responsible for establishing and maintaining the enterprise vision, strategy, and program to ensure information assets and technologies are adequately pr ...
, had already run its data centers and associated services in a "fast, reliable, cheap" way.
In July 2002, ''Amazon.com Web Services'', managed by Colin Bryar, launched its first
web services, opening up the Amazon.com platform to all developers. Over one hundred applications were built on top of it by 2004.
This unexpected developer interest took Amazon by surprise and convinced them that developers were "hungry for more."
By the Summer of 2003,
Andy Jassy
Andrew R. Jassy (born January 13, 1968) is an American business executive who is the president and chief executive officer (CEO) of Amazon. Before being appointed by Jeff Bezos and the Amazon board during the fourth quarter of 2020, Jassy served ...
had taken over Bryar's portfolio
at
Rick Dalzell Rick Dalzell (born Richard Lane Dalzell on April 7, 1957 in Kentucky) was the chief information officer and senior vice president of Amazon.com from 1997 until November 2007. During his ten years at Amazon.com, he was the driving force behind the g ...
's behest, after Vermeulen, who was Bezos' first pick, declined the offer. Jassy subsequently mapped out the vision for an "Internet
OS"
made up of foundational infrastructure primitives that alleviated key impediments to shipping software applications faster. By fall 2003,
databases
In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases spa ...
,
storage, and
compute
Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and development of both hardware and software. Computing has scientific, e ...
were identified as the first set of infrastructure pieces that Amazon should launch.
Jeff Barr, an early AWS employee, credits Vermeulen, Jassy, Bezos, himself, and a few others for coming up with the idea that would evolve into
EC2,
S3, and
RDS; Jassy recalls the idea was the result of brainstorming for about a week with "ten of the best
technology
Technology is the application of knowledge to reach practical goals in a specifiable and Reproducibility, reproducible way. The word ''technology'' may also mean the product of such an endeavor. The use of technology is widely prevalent in me ...
minds and ten of the best
product management
Product management is the business process of planning, developing, launching, and managing a product or service. It includes the entire lifecycle of a product, from ideation to development to go to market. Product managers are responsible for ...
minds" on about ten different Internet applications and the most primitive building blocks required to build them.
Werner Vogels
Werner Hans Peter Vogels (born 3 October 1958) is the chief technology officer and vice president of Amazon in charge of driving technology innovation within the company. Vogels has broad internal and external responsibilities.
Early life and ...
cites Amazon's desire to make the process of "invent, launch, reinvent, relaunch, start over, rinse, repeat" as fast as it could be leading them to break down
organizational structures with "two-pizza teams" and
application structures with
distributed systems
A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages to one another from any system. Distributed computing is a field of computer sci ...
; and that these changes ultimately paved way for the formation of AWS
and its mission "to expose all of the atomic-level pieces of the Amazon.com platform". According to
Brewster Kahle, co-founder of
Alexa Internet, which was acquired by Amazon in 1999, his start-up's compute infrastructure helped Amazon solve its
big data problems and later informed the innovations that underpinned AWS.
Jassy assembled a founding team of 57 employees from a mix of engineering and business backgrounds to kick-start these initiatives,
with a majority of the hires coming from outside the company; Jeff Lawson,
Twilio
Twilio () is an American company based in San Francisco, California, which provides programmable communication tools for making and receiving phone calls, sending and receiving text messages, and performing other communication functions using i ...
CEO, Adam Selipsky,
Tableau
Tableau (French for 'little table' literally, also used to mean 'picture'; tableaux or, rarely, tableaus) may refer to:
Arts
* ''Tableau'', a series of four paintings by Piet Mondrian titled '' Tableau I'' through to ''Tableau IV''
* ''Tableau vi ...
CEO, Mikhail Seregine, co-founder at Outschool among them.
In late 2003, the concept for compute, which would later launch as
EC2, was reformulated when Chris Pinkham and Benjamin Black presented a paper internally describing a vision for Amazon's retail computing infrastructure that was completely standardized, completely automated, and would rely extensively on web services for services such as storage and would draw on internal work already underway. Near the end of their paper, they mentioned the possibility of selling access to virtual servers as a service, proposing the company could generate revenue from the new infrastructure investment.
Thereafter Pinkham,
Willem van Biljon
Willem van Biljon (born 1961) is an entrepreneur and technologist born, raised and educated in South Africa.
Van Biljon graduated from the University of Cape Town with a degree in Computer Science.
He held engineering and research positions a ...
and lead developer Christopher Brown developed the Amazon EC2 service, with a team in
Cape Town
Cape Town ( af, Kaapstad; , xh, iKapa) is one of South Africa's three capital cities, serving as the seat of the Parliament of South Africa. It is the legislative capital of the country, the oldest city in the country, and the second largest ...
, South Africa.
In November 2004, AWS launched its first
infrastructure service for public usage:
Simple Queue Service (SQS).
S3, EC2, and other first generation services (2006–2010)
On March 14, 2006, AWS launched
Amazon S3
Amazon S3 or Amazon Simple Storage Service is a service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that provides object storage through a web service interface. Amazon S3 uses the same scalable storage infrastructure that Amazon.com uses to run its ...
cloud storage followed by EC2 in August 2006.
Andy Jassy
Andrew R. Jassy (born January 13, 1968) is an American business executive who is the president and chief executive officer (CEO) of Amazon. Before being appointed by Jeff Bezos and the Amazon board during the fourth quarter of 2020, Jassy served ...
, AWS founder and vice president in 2006, said at the time that Amazon S3 "helps free developers from worrying about where they are going to store data, whether it will be safe and secure, if it will be available when they need it, the costs associated with server maintenance, or whether they have enough storage available. Amazon S3 enables developers to focus on innovating with data, rather than figuring out how to store it."
Pi Corporation, a startup
Paul Maritz
Paul Alistair Maritz (born March 16, 1955) is a computer scientist and software executive. He held positions at large companies including Microsoft and EMC Corporation. He currently serves as chairman of Pivotal Software.
Early life
Paul Marit ...
co-founded, was the first beta-user of
EC2 outside of Amazon, whilst
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...
was among EC2's first
enterprise
Enterprise (or the archaic spelling Enterprize) may refer to:
Business and economics
Brands and enterprises
* Enterprise GP Holdings, an energy holding company
* Enterprise plc, a UK civil engineering and maintenance company
* Enterpris ...
customers. Later that year,
SmugMug
SmugMug is a paid image sharing, image hosting service, and online video platform on which users can upload photos and videos. The company also facilitates the sale of digital and print media for amateur and professional photographers. On Apri ...
, one of the early AWS adopters, attributed savings of around
US$
The United States dollar (symbol: $; code: USD; also abbreviated US$ or U.S. Dollar, to distinguish it from other dollar-denominated currencies; referred to as the dollar, U.S. dollar, American dollar, or colloquially buck) is the official ...
400,000 in storage costs to S3. According to Vogels, S3 was built with 8
microservices
A microservice architecture – a variant of the service-oriented architecture structural style – is an architectural pattern that arranges an application as a collection of loosely-coupled, fine-grained services, communicating through lightwe ...
when it launched in 2006, but had over 300 microservices by 2022.
In September 2007, AWS announced its annual ''Start-up Challenge'', a contest with prizes worth
$100,000 for entrepreneurs and software developers based in the US using AWS services such as S3 and EC2 to build their businesses. The first edition saw participation from
Justin.tv, which Amazon would later acquire in 2014.
Ooyala, an online media company, was the eventual winner.
Additional AWS services from this period include
SimpleDB,
Mechanical Turk
The Turk, also known as the Mechanical Turk or Automaton Chess Player (german: Schachtürke, ; hu, A Török), was a fraudulent chess-playing machine constructed in the late 18th century. From 1770 until its destruction by fire in 1854 it wa ...
,
Elastic Block Store
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provides raw block-level storage that can be attached to Amazon EC2 instances and is used by Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). It is one of the two block-storage options offered by AWS, with the other b ...
,
Elastic Beanstalk,
Relational Database Service,
DynamoDB,
CloudWatch, Simple Workflow,
CloudFront, and Availability Zones.
Growth (2010–2015)
![AWSSummit2013NYC2](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/AWSSummit2013NYC2.JPG)
In November 2010, it was reported that all of Amazon.com's retail sites had migrated to AWS. Prior to 2012, AWS was considered a part of Amazon.com and so its revenue was not delineated in Amazon financial statements. In that year industry watchers for the first time estimated AWS revenue to be over $1.5 billion.
On November 27, 2012, AWS hosted its first major annual conference, ''re:Invent'' with a focus on AWS' partners and ecosystem, with over 150 sessions.
The three-day event was held in Las Vegas because of its relatively cheaper connectivity with locations across the United States and the rest of the World. Andy Jassy and Werner Vogels presented keynotes, with Jeff Bezos joining Vogels for a fireside chat. AWS opened early registrations at
US$
The United States dollar (symbol: $; code: USD; also abbreviated US$ or U.S. Dollar, to distinguish it from other dollar-denominated currencies; referred to as the dollar, U.S. dollar, American dollar, or colloquially buck) is the official ...
1099 per head for their customers from over 190 countries. On stage with Andy Jassy at the event which saw around 6000 attendees,
Reed Hastings
Wilmot Reed Hastings Jr. (born October 8, 1960) is an American billionaire businessman. He is the co-founder, chairman, and co-chief executive officer (CEO) of Netflix, and sits on a number of boards and non-profit organizations. A former member ...
, CEO at
Netflix
Netflix, Inc. is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming service and production company based in Los Gatos, California. Founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph in Scotts Valley, California, it offers a fi ...
, announced plans to migrate 100% of Netflix's infrastructure to AWS.
To support industry-wide training and skills standardization, AWS began offering a certification program for computer engineers, on April 30, 2013, to highlight expertise in cloud computing. Later that year, in October, AWS launched ''Activate'', a program for start-ups worldwide to leverage AWS credits, third-party integrations, and free access to AWS experts to help build their business.
In 2014, AWS launched its partner network, AWS Partner Network (APN), which is focused on helping AWS-based companies grow and scale the success of their business with close collaboration and best practices.
In January 2015, Amazon Web Services acquired
Annapurna Labs, an Israel-based microelectronics company for a reported US$350–370M.
In April 2015, Amazon.com reported AWS was profitable, with sales of $1.57 billion in the first quarter of the year and $265 million of operating income. Founder
Jeff Bezos
Jeffrey Preston Bezos ( ;; and Robinson (2010), p. 7. ''né'' Jorgensen; born January 12, 1964) is an American entrepreneur, media proprietor, investor, and commercial astronaut. He is the founder, executive chairman, and former preside ...
described it as a fast-growing $5 billion business; analysts described it as "surprisingly more profitable than forecast". In October, Amazon.com said in its Q3 earnings report that AWS's operating income was $521 million, with operating margins at 25 percent. AWS's 2015 Q3 revenue was $2.1 billion, a 78% increase from 2014's Q3 revenue of $1.17 billion. 2015 Q4 revenue for the AWS segment increased 69.5% y/y to $2.4 billion with a 28.5% operating margin, giving AWS a $9.6 billion run rate. In 2015,
Gartner
Gartner, Inc is a technological research and consulting firm based in Stamford, Connecticut that conducts research on technology and shares this research both through private consulting as well as executive programs and conferences. Its client ...
estimated that AWS customers are deploying 10x more infrastructure on AWS than the combined adoption of the next 14 providers.
Market leadership (2016–present)
James Hamilton, who leads AWS' compute, data center, and network design, wrote a retrospective article in 2016 to highlight the ten-year history of the online service from 2006 to 2016. As an early fan and outspoken proponent of the technology, he joined the AWS engineering team in 2008.
In 2016 Q1, revenue was $2.57 billion with net income of $604 million, a 64% increase over 2015 Q1 that resulted in AWS being more profitable than Amazon's North American retail business for the first time. Jassy was thereafter promoted to CEO of the division.
Around the same time, Amazon experienced a 42% rise in stock value as a result of increased earnings, of which AWS contributed 56% to corporate profits.
AWS had $17.46 billion in annual revenue in 2017.
By end of 2020, the number had grown to
$46 billion.
Reflecting the success of AWS, Jassy's annual compensation in 2017 hit nearly $36 million.
In January 2018, Amazon launched an
autoscaling Autoscaling, also spelled auto scaling or auto-scaling, and sometimes also called automatic scaling, is a method used in cloud computing that dynamically adjusts the amount of computational resources in a server farm - typically measured by the numb ...
service on AWS.
In November 2018, AWS announced customized ARM cores for use in its servers. Also in November 2018, AWS is developing ground stations to communicate with customer's satellites.
In 2019, AWS reported 37% yearly growth and accounted for 12% of Amazon's revenue (up from 11% in 2018).
In April 2021, AWS reported 32% yearly growth and accounted for 32% of $41.8 billion cloud market in Q1 2021.
In June 2022, it was reported that in 2019 Capital One had not secured their AWS resources properly, and was subject to a data breach by a former AWS employee, Paige Thompson (It is important to note this was not an issue with AWS security, but rather how Capital One had used AWS). The employee was convicted of hacking into the company’s cloud servers to steal customer data and use computer power to mine cryptocurrency. The ex-employee was able to download the personal information of more than 100 million Capital One customers.
In June 2022, AWS announced they had launched the AWS snow cone a small, rugged, secure edge computing device to the
International Space Station
The International Space Station (ISS) is the largest modular space station currently in low Earth orbit. It is a multinational collaborative project involving five participating space agencies: NASA (United States), Roscosmos (Russia), JAXA ( ...
on the
Axiom Mission 1
Axiom Mission 1 (or Ax-1) was a privately funded and operated crewed mission to the International Space Station (ISS). The mission was operated by Axiom Space out of Axiom's Mission Control Center MCC-A in Houston, Texas. The flight launched ...
. The device had to be run through rigorous testing including vacuum, vibration, acoustic, and thermal. The device did not need
radiation hardening
Radiation hardening is the process of making electronic components and circuits resistant to damage or malfunction caused by high levels of ionizing radiation ( particle radiation and high-energy electromagnetic radiation), especially for environ ...
because it was being used in the shielded ISS environment.
In June 2022, Amazon announced and displayed a preview of their latest AI tools for programmers called CodeWhisperer. While currently only available to people who received an invitation though the AWS IDE Toolkit, CodeWhisperer is an IDE plugin that will examine the users code and comments and present users with syntactically correct suggestions. The Suggestions will be based on coding style and variable names and are not just snippets. Set to be free for the review period, the company will be charging for the product on a subscription bases upon full release.
Customer base
* On March 14, 2006, Amazon said in a press release:
"More than 150,000 developers have signed up to use Amazon Web Services since its inception."
* In November 2012, AWS hosted its first customer event in
Las Vegas
Las Vegas (; Spanish for "The Meadows"), often known simply as Vegas, is the 25th-most populous city in the United States, the most populous city in the state of Nevada, and the county seat of Clark County. The city anchors the Las Vegas ...
.
* On May 13, 2013, AWS was awarded an Agency Authority to Operate (ATO) from the
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under the
Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program
The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) is a United States federal government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and servi ...
.
* In October 2013, it was revealed that AWS was awarded a $600M contract with the
CIA
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, ...
.
* In August 2014, AWS received Department of Defense-Wide provisional authorization for all U.S. Regions.
* During the 2015 re:Invent keynote, AWS disclosed that they have more than a million active customers every month in 190 countries, including nearly 2,000 government agencies, 5,000 education institutions and more than 17,500 nonprofits.
* On April 5, 2017, AWS and
DXC Technology
DXC Technology is an American multinational information technology (IT) services and consulting company headquartered in Ashburn, Virginia.
History
DXC Technology was founded on April 3, 2017 when the Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company (HPE ...
(formed from a merger of CSC and HPE's Enterprise Services Business) announced an expanded alliance to increase access of AWS features for enterprise clients in existing data centers.
Notable customers include
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil List of government space agencies, space program ...
, the
Obama presidential campaign of 2012, and
Netflix
Netflix, Inc. is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming service and production company based in Los Gatos, California. Founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph in Scotts Valley, California, it offers a fi ...
.
In 2019, it was reported that more than 80% of
Germany
Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...
's listed
DAX
Dax or DAX may refer to:
Business and organizations
* DAX, stock market index of the top 40 German companies
** DAX 100, an expanded index of 100 stocks, superseded by the HDAX
** TecDAX, stock index of the top 30 German technology firms
* Dax ...
companies use AWS.
In August 2019, the
U.S. Navy
The United States Navy (USN) is the maritime service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. It is the largest and most powerful navy in the world, with the estimated tonnage o ...
said it moved 72,000 users from six commands to an AWS cloud system as a first step toward pushing all of its data and analytics onto the cloud.
In 2021,
DISH Network announced they will develop and launch its
5G network on AWS.
In October 2021, it was reported that spy agencies and government departments in the UK such as
GCHQ
Government Communications Headquarters, commonly known as GCHQ, is an intelligence and security organisation responsible for providing signals intelligence (SIGINT) and information assurance (IA) to the government and armed forces of the Uni ...
,
MI5
The Security Service, also known as MI5 ( Military Intelligence, Section 5), is the United Kingdom's domestic counter-intelligence and security agency and is part of its intelligence machinery alongside the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), G ...
,
MI6
The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), commonly known as MI6 ( Military Intelligence, Section 6), is the foreign intelligence service of the United Kingdom, tasked mainly with the covert overseas collection and analysis of human intelligenc ...
, and the
Ministry of Defence, have contracted AWS to host their classified materials.
Multiple financial services firms have shifted to AWS in some form in recent years.
Significant service outages
* On April 20, 2011, AWS suffered a major outage. Parts of the Elastic Block Store service became "stuck" and could not fulfill read/write requests. It took at least two days for service to be fully restored.
* On June 29, 2012, several websites that rely on Amazon Web Services were taken offline due to
a severe storm in
Northern Virginia
Northern Virginia, locally referred to as NOVA or NoVA, comprises several counties and independent cities in the Commonwealth of Virginia in the United States. It is a widespread region radiating westward and southward from Washington, D.C. Wit ...
, where AWS' largest data center cluster is located.
* On October 22, 2012, a major outage occurred, affecting many sites such as
Reddit
Reddit (; stylized in all lowercase as reddit) is an American social news aggregation, content rating, and discussion website. Registered users (commonly referred to as "Redditors") submit content to the site such as links, text posts, imag ...
,
Foursquare,
Pinterest
Pinterest is an American image sharing and social media service designed to enable saving and discovery of information (specifically "ideas") on the internet using images, and on a smaller scale, animated GIFs and videos, in the form of pinboard ...
, and others. The cause was a memory leak bug in an operational data collection agent.
* On December 24, 2012, AWS suffered another outage causing websites such as
Netflix
Netflix, Inc. is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming service and production company based in Los Gatos, California. Founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph in Scotts Valley, California, it offers a fi ...
to be unavailable for customers in the Northeastern United States. AWS cited their
Elastic Load Balancing service as the cause.
* On February 28, 2017, AWS experienced a massive outage of S3 services in its Northern Virginia region. A majority of websites that relied on AWS S3 either hung or stalled, and Amazon reported within five hours that AWS was fully online again. No data has been reported to have been lost due to the outage. The outage was caused by a
human error
Human error refers to something having been done that was " not intended by the actor; not desired by a set of rules or an external observer; or that led the task or system outside its acceptable limits".Senders, J.W. and Moray, N.P. (1991) Human ...
made while
debugging, that resulted in removing more server capacity than intended, which caused a domino effect of outages.
* On November 25, 2020, AWS experienced several hours of outage on the Kinesis service in North Virginia (us-east-1) region. Other services relying on Kinesis were also impacted.
* On December 7, 2021, an outage mainly affected the Eastern United States, disrupting delivery service, streaming.
Availability and topology
, AWS has distinct operations in 30 geographical "regions":
7 in
North America, 1 in
South America
South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere at the northern tip of the continent. It can also be described as the sout ...
, 8 in
Europe
Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a subcontinent of Eurasia and it is located entirel ...
, 2 in the
Middle East
The Middle East ( ar, الشرق الأوسط, ISO 233: ) is a geopolitical region commonly encompassing Arabia (including the Arabian Peninsula and Bahrain), Asia Minor (Asian part of Turkey except Hatay Province), East Thrace (Europ ...
, 1 in Africa and 11 in
Asia Pacific
Asia-Pacific (APAC) is the part of the world near the western Pacific Ocean. The Asia-Pacific region varies in area depending on context, but it generally includes East Asia, Russian Far East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia and Pacific Isla ...
.
Each region is wholly contained within a single country and all of its data and services stay within the designated region.
Each region has multiple "Availability Zones", 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
The term downtime is used to refer to periods when a system is unavailable.
The unavailability is the proportion of a time-span that a system is unavailable or offline.
This is usually a result of the system failing to function because of an u ...
from failures.
As of December 2014, Amazon Web Services operated an estimated 1.4 million servers across 11 regions and 28 availability zones. 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.
AWS is about to launch 21 more of its availability zones as part of seven additional regions in Australia (Melbourne), Canada (Calgary), India (Hyderabad), Israel, New Zealand, Spain, and Switzerland.
In 2014, AWS claimed its aim was to achieve
100% renewable energy
100% renewable energy means getting all energy from renewable resources. The endeavor to use 100% renewable energy for electricity, heating, cooling and transport is motivated by climate change, pollution and other environmental issues ...
usage in the future. In the United States, AWS's partnerships with renewable energy providers include Community Energy of Virginia, to support the US East region;
Pattern Development, in January 2015, to construct and operate Amazon
Wind Farm Fowler Ridge;
Iberdrola Renewables, LLC, in July 2015, to construct and operate Amazon Wind Farm US East;
EDP Renewables North America
EDP Renewables North America (former names: Zilkha Renewable Energy and Horizon Wind Energy) and its subsidiaries develop, construct, own, and operate wind farms and solar parks throughout North America.
Headquartered in Houston, Texas, with 58 w ...
, in November 2015, to construct and operate Amazon Wind Farm US Central; and
Tesla Motors
Tesla, Inc. ( or ) is an American multinational automotive and clean energy company headquartered in Austin, Texas. Tesla designs and manufactures electric vehicles (electric cars and trucks), battery energy storage from home to grid- ...
, to apply battery storage technology to address power needs in the US West (Northern California) region.
Pop-up lofts
![Amazon Web Services (AWS) Loft - NYC (48129118457)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/Amazon_Web_Services_%28AWS%29_Loft_-_NYC_%2848129118457%29.jpg)
AWS also has "pop-up lofts" in different locations around the world. These market AWS to entrepreneurs and startups in different tech industries in a physical location. Visitors can work or relax inside the loft, or learn more about what they can do with AWS. In June 2014, AWS opened their first temporary pop-up loft in
San Francisco
San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...
. In May 2015 they expanded to New York City, and in September 2015 expanded to Berlin. AWS opened its fourth location, in Tel Aviv from March 1, 2016, to March 22, 2016. A pop-up loft was open in London from September 10 to October 29, 2015. The pop-up lofts in New York and San Francisco are indefinitely closed due to the
COVID-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identi ...
while Tokyo has remained open in a limited capacity.
Charitable work
In 2017, AWS launched AWS re/Start in the
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the European mainland, continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...
to help young adults and military veterans retrain in technology-related skills. In partnership with the
Prince's Trust
The Prince's Trust ( cy, Ymddiriedolaeth y Tywysog) is a charity in the United Kingdom founded in 1976 by King Charles III (then Prince of Wales) to help vulnerable young people get their lives on track. It supports 11-to-30-year-olds who are u ...
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
The Sage Group plc, commonly known as Sage, is a British multinational enterprise software company based in North Tyneside, England. As of 2017, it is the UK's second largest technology company, the world's third-largest supplier of enterpri ...
,
EDF Energy
EDF Energy is a British integrated energy company, wholly owned by the French state-owned EDF (Électricité de France), with operations spanning electricity generation and the sale of natural gas and electricity to homes and businesses through ...
, and
Tesco Bank
Tesco Bank is a British retail bank which was formed in July 1997 (as Tesco ''Personal Finance''), and which has been wholly owned by Tesco plc since 2008. The bank was formed as part of a 50:50 joint venture between The Royal Bank of Scotland a ...
.
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.
Environmental impact
In 2016,
Greenpeace assessed major tech companies—including cloud services providers like AWS, Microsoft, Oracle, Google, IBM, Salesforce.com 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, its plans to launch multiple wind and solar farms across the United States. The organization stated that Amazon is opaque about its
carbon footprint.
In January 2021, AWS joined an industry pledge to achieve
climate neutrality
Carbon neutrality is a state of net-zero carbon dioxide emissions. This can be achieved by balancing emissions of carbon dioxide with its removal (often through carbon offsetting) or by eliminating emissions from society (the transition to the "p ...
of data centers by 2030, the
Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact
The Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact is a pledge of industry players and trade association of cloud infrastructure services and data centres in Europe to achieve climate neutrality by 2030. It is supported by the European Commission and Frans Ti ...
.
Denaturalization protest
US
Department of Homeland Security
The United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is the U.S. federal executive department responsible for public security, roughly comparable to the interior or home ministries of other countries. Its stated missions involve anti-terr ...
has employed the software ATLAS, which runs on Amazon Cloud. It scanned more than 16.5 million of records of naturalized Americans and flagged approximately 124,000 of them for manual analysis and review by
USCIS
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is an agency of the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that administers the country's naturalization and immigration system. It is a successor to the Immigration and Naturaliza ...
officers regarding
denaturalization
Denaturalization is the loss of citizenship against the will of the person concerned. Denaturalization is often applied to ethnic minorities and political dissidents. Denaturalization can be a penalty for actions considered criminal by the stat ...
. Some of the scanned data came from
Terrorist Screening Database and
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.
See also
* Cloud-computing comparison
* Comparison of file hosting services
* Tim Bray
* James Gosling
Notes
References
External links
*
{{Authority control
Amazon Web Services,
2006 software
Amazon (company), Web Services
Cloud computing providers
Cloud infrastructure
Cloud platforms
Web hosting