AWS Cloud Overview

AWS Cloud Overview

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world is leading cloud computing platform, offering over 200 fully featured services from data centers around the globe. In this lesson, you will learn about the history of AWS, its market position, and why it has become the dominant cloud provider.

A Brief History of AWS

AWS was born out of Amazon.com is own need for scalable infrastructure:

• 2002 — Amazon.com internally launched its first web services
• 2004 — SQS (Simple Queue Service) became the first publicly available AWS service
• 2006 — AWS officially launched with S3 (Simple Storage Service) and EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)
• 2007 — Over 180,000 developers had signed up for AWS
• 2010 — Amazon.com moved all of its retail operations to AWS
• 2013 — AWS certifications program launched
• 2015 — AWS revenue exceeded $7 billion annually
• 2020 — AWS revenue exceeded $45 billion annually
• 2024 — AWS revenue exceeded $100 billion annually

AWS Market Position

AWS is the clear market leader in cloud computing:

AWS has maintained its leadership position by continuously innovating and launching new services faster than its competitors.

AWS Global Infrastructure

AWS operates a massive global infrastructure designed for high availability, fault tolerance, and low latency:

Regions

An AWS Region is a physical location in the world where AWS has multiple data centers. As of 2026, AWS operates 30+ Regions globally. Each Region is completely independent and isolated from other Regions.

Example Regions:
- us-east-1      (N. Virginia)
- us-west-2      (Oregon)
- eu-west-1      (Ireland)
- ap-southeast-1 (Singapore)
- sa-east-1      (São Paulo)

Availability Zones (AZs)

Each Region contains multiple Availability Zones — typically 3, sometimes up to 6. Each AZ is one or more discrete data centers with redundant power, networking, and connectivity.

Region: us-east-1 (N. Virginia)
├── AZ: us-east-1a
├── AZ: us-east-1b
├── AZ: us-east-1c
├── AZ: us-east-1d
├── AZ: us-east-1e
└── AZ: us-east-1f

AZs within a Region are connected with high-bandwidth, low-latency networking, but they are physically separated to protect against localized failures.

Edge Locations

AWS has 400+ Edge Locations and 10+ Regional Edge Caches worldwide. These are used by services like Amazon CloudFront (CDN) to deliver content to users with low latency.

How to Choose an AWS Region

When deciding which Region to use, consider these four factors:

1. Compliance — Some data must stay in specific geographic areas due to regulations
2. Proximity — Choose a Region close to your users for lower latency
3. Available services — Not all services are available in every Region
4. Pricing — Prices vary between Regions

Key AWS Advantages

AWS offers several distinct advantages:

• Most functionality — Over 200 services covering compute, storage, databases, ML, IoT, and more
• Largest community — The most customers and partners of any cloud provider
• Most secure — Meets the security requirements of military, global banks, and sensitive organizations
• Fastest pace of innovation — Launches more new features annually than any competitor
• Most operational experience — Over 18 years of cloud operations experience

Pro Tip: For the CLF-C02 exam, remember the four factors for choosing a Region: compliance, proximity, available services, and pricing. This is a commonly tested topic.

Key Takeaways

• AWS launched in 2006 and is now the world is leading cloud provider with over 31% market share
• AWS offers 200+ services from 30+ Regions worldwide
• Each Region contains multiple Availability Zones for high availability
• Edge Locations power CDN and low-latency content delivery
• Choose a Region based on compliance, proximity, service availability, and pricing
• AWS differentiates itself through breadth of services, security, and pace of innovation