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Service
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
A short explanation of AWS in our glossary
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud computing platform from Amazon and the most comprehensive and widely used cloud platform in the world. AWS is used by large customers such as Netflix, Reddit and Dropbox to store vast amounts of data.
To safeguard the stability of the system and minimise the impact of downtime, AWS is divided into regions with various data centres that act as central hubs. These exist in North America (US region: East and West), South America (São Paulo region, Brazil), Europe/Middle East/Africa (EU region: Ireland, Frankfurt) and Asia Pacific (Asia Pacific region and China).
AWS offers a whole range of services, such as:
- Cloud servers, like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud 2
- Storage via the Amazon Simple Storage Service (AWS S3)
- Amazon Cloud Drive: uploading and accessing music, videos, documents and photos across internet-connected devices
- CloudFront: global content delivery and a dedicated DNS server