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Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Comprehensive cloud platform with 200+ services for enterprises and developers.

Pay-as-you-go per service; free tier for 12 months on select services

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world's most comprehensive cloud platform, offering over 200 services from data centers globally. For organizations that need any service imaginable — from quantum computing to satellite ground stations — AWS is the safe, deep choice.

Key Services

  • EC2 — virtual machines across instance families and ISVs
  • EKSmanaged Kubernetes with deep IAM/VPC integration ($0.10/hr per cluster)
  • ECS / Fargate — container orchestration with serverless compute
  • RDS — managed PostgreSQL, MySQL, Aurora, SQL Server, Oracle
  • S3 — object storage with 11 nines of durability
  • Lambda — event-driven serverless functions
  • CloudFormation / CDK — infrastructure as code
  • Bedrock / SageMaker — generative AI and ML platform

Best For

Enterprises and teams with dedicated cloud operations who need maximum service breadth, compliance certifications (FedRAMP, HIPAA, SOC 2), and global reach. The trade-off: pricing complexity requires dedicated tooling and the EKS learning curve is steep. Compare alternatives: AWS vs DigitalOcean, AWS vs GCP, AWS vs Azure. See our buying guide: Best Cloud Platforms for Developers.

  • Best for: Cloud Platforms
  • Pricing: Pay-as-you-go per service; free tier for 12 months on select services

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Features

Compute (VMs / Instances)

Virtual machines and compute instances for general-purpose workloads

EC2: 600+ instance types, bare metal, spot, reserved

Container Registry

Managed Docker/OCI container image registry

ECR: fully managed, integrated with EKS/ECS

Free Tier

Generous free tier for getting started without upfront costs

Always-free tier: Lambda, S3 (5 GB), DynamoDB (25 GB), 1 yr EC2

Global CDN

Content delivery network for low-latency global content distribution

CloudFront: global CDN, 450+ edge locations, Origin Shield

Managed Databases

Managed relational and NoSQL database services

RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, DocumentDB, Neptune

Managed Kubernetes

Managed Kubernetes cluster service for container orchestration

EKS: managed Kubernetes, Fargate serverless option

Multi-Region Deployment

Deploy workloads across multiple geographic regions worldwide

30+ regions, 105+ availability zones worldwide

Object Storage

S3-compatible or similar object storage for unstructured data

S3: unlimited scale, 99.9999999999% durability

Serverless Functions

Event-driven serverless compute (FaaS) for running code without provisioning servers

Lambda: up to 10 GB RAM, 15 min timeout, 1M req/mo free

VPC / Private Networking

Virtual private cloud with private networking, subnets, and firewalls

VPC: advanced networking, Transit Gateway, PrivateLink

Best For

Find the right DevOps tools for your specific needs. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is featured in these buying guides:

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