DevOps Dictionary

AWS (Amazon Web Services) is Amazon’s cloud computing platform that provides on-demand infrastructure and managed services such as virtual servers, object storage, networking, databases, and analytics, so teams can build and run applications without owning or operating physical data centers. It addresses slow hardware procurement and heavy operational overhead by exposing these resources as programmable building blocks you create and change through a console, APIs, or infrastructure as code (versioned configuration that defines cloud resources). At a high level, engineers choose the services they need, control access with identity and permissions, observe systems with logs and metrics, and design for resilience by spreading workloads across multiple availability zones.

With AWS, you can provision capacity in minutes and scale up or down while paying for what you use; without it, you typically face fixed capacity, longer lead times, and more manual maintenance and recovery work. This gap exists because AWS standardizes the underlying infrastructure and automates common operations at cloud scale.