What is cloud computing?
Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Instead of buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centers and servers, you can access technology services, such as computing power, storage, and databases, on an as-needed basis from a cloud provider like Amazon Web Services (AWS).
What is cloud computing?
Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Instead of buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centers and servers, you can access technology services, such as computing power, storage, and databases, on an as-needed basis from a cloud provider like Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Who is using cloud computing?
Organizations of every type, size, and industry are using the cloud for a wide variety of use cases, such as data backup, disaster recovery, email, virtual desktops, software development and testing, big data analytics, and customer-facing web applications. For example, healthcare companies are using the cloud to develop more personalized treatments for patients. Financial services companies are using the cloud to power real-time fraud detection and prevention. And video game makers are using the cloud to deliver online games to millions of players around the world.
Benefits of cloud computing
Agility
The cloud gives you easy access to a broad range of technologies so that you can innovate faster and build nearly anything that you can imagine. You can quickly spin up resources as you need them–from infrastructure services, such as compute, storage, and databases, to Internet of Things, machine learning, data lakes and analytics, and much more.
You can deploy technology services in a matter of minutes, and get from idea to implementation several orders of magnitude faster than before. This gives you the freedom to experiment, test new ideas to differentiate customer experiences, and transform your business.
Agility
The cloud gives you easy access to a broad range of technologies so that you can innovate faster and build nearly anything that you can imagine. You can quickly spin up resources as you need them–from infrastructure services, such as compute, storage, and databases, to Internet of Things, machine learning, data lakes and analytics, and much more.
You can deploy technology services in a matter of minutes, and get from idea to implementation several orders of magnitude faster than before. This gives you the freedom to experiment, test new ideas to differentiate customer experiences, and transform your business.
Elasticity
With cloud computing, you don’t have to over-provision resources up front to handle peak levels of business activity in the future. Instead, you provision the amount of resources that you actually need. You can scale these resources up or down to instantly grow and shrink capacity as your business needs change.
Elasticity
With cloud computing, you don’t have to over-provision resources up front to handle peak levels of business activity in the future. Instead, you provision the amount of resources that you actually need. You can scale these resources up or down to instantly grow and shrink capacity as your business needs change.
Cost savings
The cloud allows you to trade capital expenses (such as data centers and physical servers) for variable expenses, and only pay for IT as you consume it. Plus, the variable expenses are much lower than what you would pay to do it yourself because of the economies of scale.
Cost savings
The cloud allows you to trade capital expenses (such as data centers and physical servers) for variable expenses, and only pay for IT as you consume it. Plus, the variable expenses are much lower than what you would pay to do it yourself because of the economies of scale.
Deploy globally in minutes
With the cloud, you can expand to new geographic regions and deploy globally in minutes. For example, AWS has infrastructure all over the world, so you can deploy your application in multiple physical locations with just a few clicks. Putting applications in closer proximity to end users reduces latency and improves their experience.
Deploy globally in minutes
With the cloud, you can expand to new geographic regions and deploy globally in minutes. For example, AWS has infrastructure all over the world, so you can deploy your application in multiple physical locations with just a few clicks. Putting applications in closer proximity to end users reduces latency and improves their experience.
Types of cloud computing
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
IaaS contains the basic building blocks for cloud IT. It typically provides access to networking features, computers (virtual or on dedicated hardware), and data storage space. IaaS gives you the highest level of flexibility and management control over your IT resources. It is most similar to the existing IT resources with which many IT departments and developers are familiar.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
IaaS contains the basic building blocks for cloud IT. It typically provides access to networking features, computers (virtual or on dedicated hardware), and data storage space. IaaS gives you the highest level of flexibility and management control over your IT resources. It is most similar to the existing IT resources with which many IT departments and developers are familiar.
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
PaaS removes the need for you to manage underlying infrastructure (usually hardware and operating systems), and allows you to focus on the deployment and management of your applications. This helps you be more efficient as you don’t need to worry about resource procurement, capacity planning, software maintenance, patching, or any of the other undifferentiated heavy lifting involved in running your application.
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
PaaS removes the need for you to manage underlying infrastructure (usually hardware and operating systems), and allows you to focus on the deployment and management of your applications. This helps you be more efficient as you don’t need to worry about resource procurement, capacity planning, software maintenance, patching, or any of the other undifferentiated heavy lifting involved in running your application.
Software as a Service (SaaS)
SaaS provides you with a complete product that is run and managed by the service provider. In most cases, people referring to SaaS are referring to end-user applications (such as web-based email). With a SaaS offering, you don’t have to think about how the service is maintained or how the underlying infrastructure is managed. You only need to think about how you will use that particular software.
Software as a Service (SaaS)
SaaS provides you with a complete product that is run and managed by the service provider. In most cases, people referring to SaaS are referring to end-user applications (such as web-based email). With a SaaS offering, you don’t have to think about how the service is maintained or how the underlying infrastructure is managed. You only need to think about how you will use that particular software.
Helping customers innovate faster
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Manufacturing
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Financial Services
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Fitness
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Real Estate
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Healthcare
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Gaming
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Media & Entertainment
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Manufacturing
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Siemens Innovates in Energy, Healthcare, and Manufacturing Using AWS
Learn how Siemens used AWS to adapt its culture, encourage innovation, and drive results for its business.Learn More
Pioneering Across Industries
Siemens is a more than 170-year-old company that started with an idea for improving the telegraph machine. Since its founding, the company has become a transformational leader across the energy, healthcare, and manufacturing industries.
Democratizing Innovation
Siemens encourages a culture of experimentation to discover new business opportunities and realize untapped customer value. The company uses AWS to adopt more agile development processes, including decentralized development teams, democratized data, and startup-like working methods.
Continuing a Tradition of Transformation
Siemens’ cultural transformation has delivered business results. These include bringing industrial IOT to railways and factories, developing intelligent building infrastructure, and using machine learning in its cybersecurity platform.
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Financial Services
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FICO Uses AWS to Innovate Faster, Reduce Costs, and Expand Global Reach
Learn how FICO used AWS to develop products and deploy them to market faster.Learn More
Betting Big on the Cloud
For years, FICO lacked the agility to quickly develop and deploy its solutions to the market. New products sometimes took years to create and deliver. Seeking to focus on implementing software more efficiently, FICO turned to AWS.
Breaking the Financial High Score
FICO chose AWS as its cloud provider in part because of its built-in security. AWS also offered the necessary experience to help FICO navigate its increasingly complex regulatory and compliance requirements.
Investing in Innovation
Using AWS, FICO can deliver solutions in a matter of hours instead of weeks. FICO developers now have more time to build and enhance products instead of provisioning and managing servers.
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Fitness
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Peloton Powers Connected, At-Home Fitness Community Using AWS
Learn how the global interactive fitness platform is growing its business and serving its members better using AWS.Learn More
Transforming Home Fitness
Peloton was founded in 2012 by a team of five people, and launched on Kickstarter in 2013. The company was born on AWS and delivered its first bike in 2014. In seven years, Peloton has grown to more than 1.4 million members who collectively have ridden hundreds of million of virtual miles.
Powering Communities at Scale
Peloton uses AWS to power the leaderboard in its live-streamed and on-demand fitness classes, and it requires high elasticity, low latency, and real-time processing to deliver customizable rider data for the community of more than 1.4 million members riding together from their homes.
Launching New Features to Serve Members Better
Using AWS, Peloton can quickly test and launch new features to improve the unique experience of home-based community fitness.
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Real Estate
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Zillow Transforms Real Estate Using AWS
Zillow helped bring the real estate industry online, then reinvented the home-search process using AWS Cloud. Using AWS, Zillow delivers accurate home data to buyers, sellers, and renters, allowing them to make informed decisions in fast-paced markets.Learn More
Growing Demand for Speed and Scale
When Zillow created its home-valuation tool—Zestimate—nearly 15 years ago, it had to develop an on-premises machine learning framework to process an array of data. But, as its popularity and complexity grew, Zillow needed a better way to deliver Zestimates on nearly 100 million homes across the country.
Faster, More Dynamic Home Valuations
Zillow moved its Zestimate framework to AWS, giving it the speed and scale to deliver home valuations in near-real time. The more dynamic valuations better reflect both the unique features of each home and what’s happening in the local housing market, so customers have the latest data as they explore the buying or selling process.
Reaching Customers at the Market’s Pace
In hot housing markets, homes can go from listing to offer in just days. Zillow built AWS technologies into its infrastructure to quickly and reliably deliver hundreds of millions of emails each month, keeping customers apprised of the latest listings, home statuses, and more.
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Healthcare
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GE Healthcare Helps Detect Critical Conditions Faster Using Machine Learning on AWS
Learn how GE Healthcare uses Amazon SageMaker to build, train, and deploy machine-learning models that help radiologists identify health issues faced by people around the world.Learn More
A Mission to Improve Lives
*510(k) pending at US FDA. Not available for sales in the United States.
Better Care Using Machine Learning
GE Healthcare uses AWS and Amazon SageMaker to ingest data, store data compliantly, orchestrate curation work across teams, and build machine-learning algorithms.
Better, Faster Models
GE Healthcare reduced the time to train its machine-learning models from days to hours, allowing it to deploy models more quickly and continually improve patient care.
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Gaming
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Epic Games Uses AWS to Power Worldwide Game Fortnite
Learn MoreLearn how Epic Games uses AWS to deliver Fortnite to more than 200 million players around the world.
Building a Foundation on the Cloud
Epic Games has been using AWS since 2012 and is now all in on the AWS Cloud, running its worldwide game-server fleet, backend platform systems, databases, websites, analytics pipeline, and processing systems on AWS.
An Overnight Sensation
In 2017, Epic Games launched Fortnite, a cross-platform, multiplayer game that became an overnight sensation. In its first year, Fortnite’s user base grew by more than 100 times to 200 million players worldwide.
Pushing the Boundaries of Scale
AWS is integral to the success of Fortnite. Using AWS, Epic Games hosts in-game events with hundreds of millions of invited users without worrying about capacity, ingests 125 million events per minute into its analytics pipeline, and handles data-warehouse growth of more than 5 PB per month.
Providing the Best Gaming Experience
Using AWS, Epic Games is always improving the experience of its players and offering new, exciting games and game elements. The company plans to expand its use of AWS services in the future, including machine learning and containerized services.
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Media & Entertainment
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Live Nation Entertainment Innovates Faster, Reduces Costs, and Improves Application Availability Using AWS
Learn how the world’s leading live-entertainment company uses AWS Cloud to deliver improved experiences to its customers faster.Learn More
Seeking a Better Customer Experience
Live Nation is the global leader in live entertainment that produces concerts, sells tickets, and connects brands to music. In 2016 Live Nation announced it was moving its global IT infrastructure to AWS in an effort to deliver better experiences to its customers.
An Easy Migration
The company moved 118 applications and 668 servers to AWS within 17 months without adding headcount or budget.
Business-Changing Benefits
By moving to AWS, Live Nation has moved from troubleshooting hardware to delivering on innovative ideas that serve its customers better. Since implementation, Live Nation realized a 58-percent reduction in total cost of ownership, supported 10 times as many projects with the same staff, and saw a 99-percent improvement in application availability.
Cloud services
AWS has more services, and more features within those services, than any other cloud provider, including compute, storage, databases, networking, data lakes and analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence, IoT, security, and much more.
Cloud solutions
Cloud services
AWS has more services, and more features within those services, than any other cloud provider, including compute, storage, databases, networking, data lakes and analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence, IoT, security, and much more.
Cloud solutions
Learn more about cloud computing on AWS
Pricing
AWS offers a pay-as-you-go approach for pricing.
Pricing for each service is unique.
Products
AWS has over 175 fully featured services for a wide range of technologies, industries, and use cases.
Global infrastructure
AWS has the most extensive, reliable, and secure global cloud infrastructure.