Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a subsidiary of the parent Amazon, which gives on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to developers, companies, and world governments, on a subscription pay-as-you-go model. Its cloud computing web services present a set of fundamental tools for abstract technical infrastructure and distributed computing around the world. 

The AWS technology is implemented at server farms worldwide and managed by the Amazon subsidiary. The fees are determined by the hardware, operating system, software, or networking features taken by subscribers, required availability, redundancy, security, and service alternatives. Subscribers can pay for a private virtual AWS computer, a dedicated physical computer, or clusters of either. 

The AWS platform was first introduced in July 2002. In its initial stages, the platform included only a few different tools and services. Then next year, in late 2003, the AWS concept was publicly revamped when Chris Pinkham and Benjamin Black presented a paper elaborating a plan for Amazon’s retail computing infrastructure, which was fully standardised, automated, and would depend extensively on web services for services like storage. 

Near the end of their paper, they also talked about the possibility of selling enterprises the clients access to virtual servers as a service and stated that the company could make revenue from the new infrastructure investment. The company found that they were actually very good at operating infrastructure services, such as computing, storage, and databases. So they began to focus on building the AWS platform.

As the first company to launch cloud services and leader of the cloud service market for more than a decade, AWS remains the cloud giant with more than one-third of the cloud computing market share. AWS has become accustomed to being imitated by various types of competitors. But why is AWS so strong? 

Continuously Introduce New Functions And Services To Meet User Needs

AWS owns a dominant share in the cloud market while the next three competitors Google, Microsoft, and IBM, have a much smaller market share. As of 2020, AWS comprises more than 212 services, including storage, networking, database, computing, developer tools, analytics, application services, deployment, management, mobile, etc. The most well known including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

Over the years, the number of new features and services launched by AWS every year has been rising rapidly. The unprecedented speed of innovation stems from the fact that AWS’s innovation is customer-centric, and continues to develop new products based on customer-first concepts and customer feedback. In addition, AWS’ infrastructure will continue to introduce new technologies, and through advanced architecture design, it will maintain its leading position in terms of stability, reliability, security, and efficiency of resource utilization.

AWS has a philosophy: every service and function has been used by its own team, and it is only launched after it is used. It can be said that every service and function launched by AWS has been thoroughly refined. As a technology learner, you should pay more attention to AWS technology, architecture, ideas, and so on. If time permits, you can really take an AWS cloud architect certification.

The investment in infrastructure has a strong scale effect. At the same time, the scale effect can also bring a series of benefits: AWS’s number of customers, industry type, application type, scale distribution, geographical and cultural distribution, all other cloud service providers are beyond the reach. Let’s take a chestnut: when you encounter the same technical problem and need help from others, you will find that AWS has a lot of technical circles, and it is easy to find the answer, and your problem is basically not new.

Customer-Centric Corporate Culture

The first piece of AWS’ corporate culture is customer service. This is more than just a slogan, for example, there is a function called Trusted Advisor that will monitor customers’ utilization of AWS resources. If the resource utilization rate is too low or idle, AWS will actively contact the customer and let the user save the money. Over the past few years, AWS Trusted Advisor has saved customers hundreds of millions of dollars each year. 

In order to serve customers well, even if some practices will lead to a decrease in revenue in the short term, they will not hesitate. There are fourteen corporate cultures in AWS. AWS believes that cloud computing must be a specialized division of labour, and AWS’ core competence is a technology and product innovation.

After intensively looking at AWS, you can find beliefs that the development of AWS today occupies major advantages. The AWS team has accumulated a lot of lessons in building and operating AWS cloud computing services. These services not only ensure security, availability, and scalability but also provide predictable performance at the lowest cost. Given that AWS is a pioneer in building and operating such services around the world, these lessons are critical to the business. Considering that AWS has more than one million active users per month, and these users may serve hundreds of millions of their customers. Therefore, the opportunities to accumulate the above lessons are everywhere in AWS, and these lessons have become the basis, foundation, and motivation for AWS to continue to progress.

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