Amazon Web Services (AWS) was officially launched in 2006 by its parent company, Amazon. At that time, it was an online book store. The business saw an opportunity in the marketplace to deliver services based on in-house experience in building highly scalable web application services, which they were using for Amazon. The mid 2000s was a time when the first massive, web-scale applications were starting to really take off, and Amazon was running such a web application. They had also invested heavily in the underlying technologies, infrastructure, and data centers to run their application reliably, with the best possible response times on a global scale. Those data centers and the services to run them were, of course, designed to meet highly variable capacity requirements so that Amazon could be run. This variability was due to the nature of the business, where traffic to Amazon would increase dramatically whenever they were running any promotions or sales, or due to an increase in purchase traffic during the holiday season. For this reason, an enormous amount of standby capacity had to be designed so that the system could handle any kind of spikes in traffic. The business initially saw an opportunity to market this unused capacity to developers so that they could run their test environments. Overnight, word spread and demand increased, as not only were developers able to use the available capacity but also the tools and services that Amazon developed to make its own site highly available and resilient to any possible failure in the backend and traffic increase from the frontend. With the increase in demand, even more capacity was dedicated to the external tenants and Amazon Web Services as we know it today was born.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• What is the AWS platform?
• The shared responsibility model
• Advantages of using AWS
• AWS Foundation Services
• AWS Platform Services
• Using Amazon Web Services
• Cloud native and serverless designs
• Choosing availability zones and regions