DevOps Dictionary

AWS (Amazon Web Services) is a cloud computing platform that provides on-demand infrastructure and managed services such as virtual servers, storage, networking, databases, and analytics. It addresses the problem of building and operating reliable systems without buying, provisioning, and maintaining physical hardware. At a high level, teams create and configure resources through APIs and consoles, automate deployments with infrastructure as code (machine-readable definitions of cloud resources), and rely on managed services to handle tasks like scaling, patching, backups, and high availability across multiple data centers.

With AWS, you can provision capacity in minutes, scale to match traffic, and pay only for what you use; without it, you typically face long procurement cycles, fixed capacity, and higher operational risk from manual maintenance and limited redundancy. This gap exists because AWS standardizes infrastructure primitives and exposes them as programmable building blocks that can be composed, monitored, and secured consistently.