What is AWS
AWS (Amazon Web Services) is Amazon’s cloud computing business. According to Amazon’s official overview whitepaper, AWS began offering IT infrastructure services to businesses as web services — now commonly known as cloud computing — in 2006. Resources are provisioned on demand with pay-as-you-go pricing, so customers do not need to purchase servers up front.
Business and main services
The same official whitepaper lists more than 200 cloud products across compute, storage, databases, analytics, networking, mobile, developer tools, management tools, IoT, security, and enterprise applications, serving hundreds of thousands of businesses in 190 countries. Specific products such as compute, object storage, and serverless services can be looked up in the catalog on the AWS website; current availability is defined by the official pages.
Two threads connect AWS to other entries on this site: Stripe announced a partnership with AWS on June 15, 2026 to enable payments for AI agents (see the Stripe newsroom), and the frontend platform Vercel runs its hosting infrastructure on AWS (see the Vercel entry).
Discussion in the show
In Weekly #001’s chapter “AI 应用市场回暖了吗？利润空间比需求更现实” (Is the AI app market recovering? Margin matters more than demand), Orange says GPT, AWS, and Microsoft can offer API discounts of 20–25 percent, leaving no margin for resellers, in the Chinese transcript.
In Weekly #002’s chapter “Agent 服务会成为新的云基础设施吗” (Will agent services become the new cloud infrastructure), Yang Pan compares the old model of renting hosts from AWS or Alibaba Cloud with a future of renting an agent’s host, in the Chinese transcript. In the same episode’s chapter on whether models really get dumber, Orange notes that the Amazon version of Claude Opus 4.6 — the AWS API — kept performing well, in the Chinese transcript. These are host experiences and opinions, not official assessments. See the episode 001 chapter, the episode 002 chapter, and another episode 002 chapter; English transcript chapters are not available.
Frequently asked questions
What company owns AWS?
AWS is not a product of an independent company; it is Amazon’s cloud computing business, launched in 2006 with on-demand, pay-as-you-go cloud services. See the AWS Wikipedia entry and the official overview whitepaper.
What year did AWS launch?
The official whitepaper states that AWS began offering IT infrastructure services as web services in 2006; the object storage and elastic compute services that anchored the platform both followed that year.
What categories of services does AWS offer?
Compute, storage, databases, analytics, networking, developer tools, IoT, security, and enterprise applications, totaling more than 200 cloud products. The full breakdown is in the official overview whitepaper; the latest catalog is on the AWS products page.
What is AWS’s official website?
The global site is aws.amazon.com, and the corporate overview is at About AWS. A Chinese-language site is available at aws.amazon.com/cn/.