Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services is Amazon.com's cloud subsidiary, run by CEO Matt Garman since June 2024, marking its 20th year in 2026 (S3 launched March 14, 2006; EC2 that August). It's a proprietary, pay-as-you-go commercial platform under the AWS Customer Agreement — no open-source license. Technically: EC2's Graviton5 custom Arm chips (announced re:Invent 2025) pack 192 cores per chip on 6th-gen Nitro Cards, up to 25% faster than Graviton4; S3 now supports single objects up to 50TB. Footprint: 39 regions, 123 Availability Zones, plus a January 2026 European Sovereign Cloud partition. Synergy Research puts AWS at 28% of the global cloud infrastructure market for Q1 2026 — still #1 ahead of Azure (~21%) and Google Cloud (~14%) — on a ~$150B annual run rate. Current version/status: N/A — continuously deployed service, no version numbers; 2026 marks AWS's 20th year of operation (launched March 2006). License: Proprietary commercial cloud service, governed by the AWS Customer Agreement — not open source. Pricing: Pay-as-you-go, no upfront commitment. New accounts (created on/after July 15, 2025) get a Free Plan: $100 credit plus up to $100 more via 5 onboarding tasks, expiring after 6 months or when credits run out. Legacy accounts retain the old 12-month tier: 750 hrs/month of t2/t3.micro EC2 + 30GB EBS. On-Demand EC2 starts around $7.59/mo for a t3.micro (us-east-1, Linux); Savings Plans
Pick AWS when you need the deepest service catalog on the market plus enterprise-grade compliance — FedRAMP, HIPAA, or the new EU Sovereign Cloud partition — or ML/inference workloads that benefit from purpose-built silicon like Graviton5 and Trainium. Skip it for a solo side project or a pre-revenue startup: DigitalOcean or Railway get you to production in an afternoon without IAM's notorious learning curve. Even AWS's own practitioner community's top recurring complaint, echoed at every re:Invent and across r/aws, is billing opacity — surprise cross-AZ data-transfer charges and byzantine service quotas that blindside teams without a dedicated cloud-cost owner. Known weakness: Cost and complexity opacity — cross-AZ data-transfer fees, IAM's steep learning curve, and byzantine service quotas are the most consistently cited frustrations from AWS's own practitioner community (re:Invent talks, r/aws), and billing surprises hit even experienced teams without dedicated cost governance.
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