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.
What is Cloud Computing?
What is Amazon Web Services?
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.
NASDAQ FinQloud
"We found that firms can save up to 80% getting the same, if not better, and more enhanced services."
Ted Myerson
Global Head of Access Services
Viocorp
"We are probably saving about 50% of the cost we were spending with our previous dedicated provider."
Ian Gardner
Chief Executive Officer
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.
Mortar Data
"Had we not been on AWS, we would have had to raise an additional $4 million for capital expenses."
K. Young
Chief Executive Officer
Schumacher
"We were able to get started for $4,000 to $5,000 versus an $80,000 cost with our own data center."
Douglas Menefee
Chief Information Officer
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.
Adobe
"AWS has allowed us to deliver products that we really couldn't have delivered in other ways."
Mitch Nelson
Director, Managed Services
Thismoment
"Instead of engineers worrying about how to bring up servers, they are working on things like responsive design."
Scott Bedard
Chief Technology Officer and Founder
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.
"Being in the AWS Cloud gives us the scalability of adding application and database servers as we need them."
Keith Mitchell
Programmer
Obama for America
"AWS allowed us to have a technology partner that matched our scaling internally with the organization."
Harper Reed
Chief Technology Officer
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.
Ubisoft
"Without AWS it would have been very difficult for us to achieve what we have in the past 18 months."
Lenin Gali
Sr. Director, Dev Operations/Analytic Services
Ooyala
"There isn't a way we could be as agile as we are without AWS. AWS has allowed us to move faster and iterate quicker."
Sean Knapp
Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder
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.
Coursera
"We rely on AWS to provide the speed, service, and agility required to serve our students worldwide."
Brennan Saeta
Software Engineer
Engine Yard
"The benefits that we get with working with AWS amount to flexibility, scalability, and global reach."
Carsten Puls
Vice President of Product Management
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.
Get Started with Cloud Computing on AWS
Create an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account, launch a virtual machine with Amazon EC2, and create an Amazon S3 bucket for your storage needs in less than 15 minutes. We've produced three short videos to help you get up and running quickly.
Create an AWS account
Learn how to create a free AWS account in minutes and receive answers to frequently asked questions, including why a credit card is required.
Launch a virtual server
Learn how to launch a virtual server using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) in just four minutes.
Store your media & files
Learn how to create an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket for your storage needs in just two minutes.
Introductory Webinars – Cloud Computing with AWS
If you are interested in learning more about Cloud Computing with AWS, we offer an introductory global webinar series. These webinars series will explain the benefits of Cloud Computing, how you can use the Cloud, and describe AWS products and solutions.
| Upcoming Webinars | ||
|---|---|---|
| Region | Language | Webinar Schedule |
| North America | English | Feb. 12, 9:00 AM PST |
| March 12, 9:00 AM PST | ||
| EMEA | English | Jan.30, 10:00 AM GMT / 11:00 AM CET |
| 日本 | 日本語 | 2014年1月28日（火）(18:00～19:30 JST) ※ オンラインセミナーの申込みおよび参加方法はこちら » |
View recorded introductory webinars:
