What is AWS?

Amazon Web Services is a cloud platform that lets you rent computing resources on demand instead of buying your own servers.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world's most widely used cloud platform. Instead of buying and maintaining physical servers, you rent computing power, storage and networking from Amazon and pay only for what you use.

What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing means using someone else's data centers over the internet. You can launch a server in minutes, store files, run databases and scale up or down whenever you need to.

Why teams choose AWS

  • Pay-as-you-go — no upfront hardware costs.
  • Elastic — grow or shrink capacity in minutes.
  • Global — deploy close to your users worldwide.
  • Managed services — Amazon runs the hard parts (patching, backups, replication) for you.

AWS offers over 200 services. This tutorial focuses on the core building blocks you will use most: compute, storage, networking, databases and security.

Example

Example · bash
# Check that the AWS CLI is installed and see its version
aws --version

# Example output:
# aws-cli/2.15.30 Python/3.11.8 Linux/6.5 exe/x86_64

When to use it

  • A startup hosts its entire web application on AWS instead of buying physical servers, paying only for what it uses each month.
  • A data science team spins up GPU instances on AWS to train machine learning models and shuts them down when done to save cost.
  • An e-commerce company uses AWS to handle Black Friday traffic spikes by adding capacity on demand rather than over-provisioning year-round.

More examples

Check AWS CLI Identity

Verifies your AWS credentials are configured and shows the account, user ID, and ARN of the calling identity.

Example · bash
aws sts get-caller-identity

List Available AWS Regions

Fetches all enabled AWS regions for your account, demonstrating that AWS spans a global infrastructure.

Example · bash
aws ec2 describe-regions \
  --query 'Regions[].RegionName' \
  --output table

Describe Current Account Details

Retrieves account metadata in JSON format, confirming your credentials and identifying the active AWS account.

Example · bash
aws sts get-caller-identity --output json
# Returns:
# {
#   "UserId": "AIDAEXAMPLE",
#   "Account": "123456789012",
#   "Arn": "arn:aws:iam::123456789012:user/alice"
# }

Related

aws cloud modelsaws cli setup

Discussion

  • Be the first to comment on this lesson.