Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services is a cloud computing platform and subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand computing infrastructure, storage, databases, analytics and other technology services to businesses, governments and individuals. Headquartered in Seattle, Washington, with major data centres across the Americas, Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Africa, the company operates as the world's largest cloud services provider by market share and revenue. AWS offers more than 200 fully featured services including computing power through Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), storage via Simple Storage Service (S3), database management, machine learning, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things and content delivery networks. The platform serves millions of customers ranging from startups and enterprises to public sector organisations, enabling them to scale infrastructure without upfront capital expenditure on physical servers and data centres. AWS operates on a pay-as-you-go pricing model, charging customers only for the computing resources and services they consume. The company has expanded its African footprint with data centre regions and edge locations to support growing demand for cloud services across the continent, particularly in South Africa. Major corporations, financial institutions, mining companies and energy providers use AWS infrastructure to host applications, process data and deploy digital transformation initiatives. Amazon Web Services was launched in 2006 as one of the first large-scale cloud computing platforms, pioneering the infrastructure-as-a-service model that has since become standard across the technology industry.