What is Cloud Computing?
Learn about the AWS Free Tier
Whether you are running applications that share photos or support the critical operations of your business, you need rapid access to flexible and low cost IT resources. The term "cloud computing" refers to the on-demand delivery of IT resources via the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing.
Why Cloud Computing:
Learn about Cloud Computing with AWS and the benefits AWS provides to hundreds of thousands of customers globally.
No Upfront Investment: Replace upfront infrastructure investment with low monthly costs
Building on-premises infrastructure can be slow and expensive. There is expensive hardware that needs to be ordered, paid for, installed and configured - and all of this needs to happen long before you actually need it. With Cloud Computing, you don’t have to spend time on these activities; instead you just pay for the resources you consume on a variable basis.
“We avoided significant costs including $800,000 in CapEx costs and $5,000 - $8,000 per month in OpEx costs.”
- Waleed HanafiSVP - CTO for Global Blue
Read the Global Blue Case Study
Products Used: Amazon EC2, Amazon S3
Low Ongoing Cost: Reduce your overall IT costs
Cloud Computing helps you reduce your overall IT costs in multiple ways. Our massive economies of scale and efficiency improvements allow us to continually lower prices, and our multiple pricing models allow you to optimize costs for both variable and stable workloads. Additionally, Cloud Computing drives down up-front and on-going IT labor costs and gives you access to a highly distributed, full-featured platform at a fraction of the cost of traditional infrastructure.
“We were able to reduce operating expenses by 40% - 50%, not including the depreciated costs to build the application.”
- Simon BallGlobal Head of Operations, Multimedia Delivery, and Infrastructure, Thomson Reuters
Read the Thomson Reuters Case Study
Products Used: Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic Block Store
Flexible Capacity: Eliminate guessing on your infrastructure capacity needs
Predicting how customers are going to adopt your new application is difficult, and it’s hard to get right. So, when you make a capacity decision prior to deploying an application, you often either end up sitting on expensive idle resources or dealing with limited capacity. If you run out of capacity then you are faced with a poor customer experience until you can acquire more resources. With Cloud Computing, these problems go away. You provision the amount of resources you need. If you need more, you can easily scale up. If you don’t need them, just turn them off and stop paying.
“AWS gave us the flexibility to easily bring a massive amount of capacity online in a short period of time.”
- Jason TitusCTO, Shazam
Read the Shazam Case Study
Products Used: Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB
Speed & Agility: Develop and deploy applications faster
With traditional infrastructure, it can take weeks to get a server procured, delivered, and running. These long timelines stifle innovation. With Cloud Computing, you can provision resources as you need them. You can deploy hundreds or even thousands of servers in minutes, without talking to anyone. This self-service environment changes how quickly you can develop and deploy applications and allows your team to experiment more quickly and more frequently.
“Unilever’s digital data program now processes genetic sequences twenty times faster and supports ten times as many scientists simultaneously.”
- Pete KeeleyUnilever Researchs eScience IT Lead for Cloud Solutions
Read the Unilever Case Study
Products Used: Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon S3
Apps not Ops: Focus on projects that differentiate your business, not the infrastructure
Cloud Computing lets you shift resources away from data center investments and operations and move them to innovative new projects. Specifically, you can have your scarce IT and engineering resources focus on projects that grow your business instead of having them focus on IT infrastructure - which is important but hardly ever differentiates your business.
“AWS enables us to avoid certain operational ‘keeping the lights on’ distractions so we can maintain our focus on core business strategies.”
- David BarbieriRed Lion’s SVP and CIO
Read the Red Lion Case Study
Products Used: Amazon EC2, Amazon VPC, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon S3
Global Reach: Take your apps global in minutes
Whether you are a large global company or small start-up, you may have potential customers around the world. With traditional infrastructure, it’s hard to deliver great performance to a broadly distributed user base and most companies focus on one geographic region at a time to save costs and time. With Cloud Computing, the game changes - you can easily deploy your application in any or all of the nine AWS regions around the world. This means you can provide a lower latency and better experience for your customers at minimal cost.
“The global scale of AWS allows us to easily deliver a high quality streaming experience to customers around the world.”
- Yury IzrailevskyVP of Cloud & Platform Engineering, Netflix
Watch the Netflix Case Study Video
Products Used: Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Auto Scaling
AWS Cloud Computing Use Cases
Amazon Web Services provides a complete set of cloud computing services that enable you to build sophisticated, scalable applications. Today, hundreds of thousands of customers of all sizes take advantage of these cloud computing services in a diverse set of industries, including healthcare, media, financial services, insurance, real estate, retail, education and the public sector.Web, Mobile, & Social Apps
Use AWS' Cloud Computing services to power web, mobile, and social apps.Big Data
Use Cloud Computing to store and process large datasets to solve business problems.Backup & Storage
Store and retrieve any data, anywhere, any time with AWS’ Cloud Computing services.Digital Media
Use AWS’ Cloud Computing services to ingest, store, encode, protect, and stream your media.Enterprise Applications
Run enterprise applications using AWS’ Cloud Computing services.Gaming
Use AWS' Cloud Computing services to deliver casual or MMO games.Get Started with Cloud Computing on AWS
Step 1: Sign up for AWS
By signing up for AWS, you have access to Amazon’s Cloud Computing services. Note: The sign-up process requires a credit card, which will not be charged until you start using services. There are no long-term commitments and you can stop using AWS at any time.
Step 2: Launch an Application
To start using AWS for web hosting, watch this 10 minute video about Cloud Computing website hosting to help you get started. This video will show you how to use a CloudFormation template to quickly launch a WordPress website using AWS' Cloud Computing services, or:
Find developer tools, sample applications, and technical documentation in our Resource Center, or:
Use the point-and-click AWS Management Console to launch and manage your Cloud Computing resources.
Step 3: Get Help
Want help? Get assistance from AWS technical support engineers with AWS Support, or:
Find an AWS Solution Provider from our ecosystem of Systems Integrators and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), or:
Get your questions about Cloud Computing and AWS answered by the AWS community on the AWS Community Forum.
If you are a corporate customer interested in Cloud Computing on AWS, contact one of our global sales representatives with questions.
Introductory Webinars – Cloud Computing with AWS
If you are interested in learning more about Cloud Computing with AWS, we are offering an introductory global webinar series that will answer the following questions:
- What is Cloud Computing?
- What are the benefits of Cloud Computing?
- Who is using the cloud and what are they using it for?
- What are AWS’s products and what workloads can I run with them?
View the previous introductory webinars: