What is Amazon Web Services (AWS)?

So what's AWS? To answer this question, it's best if we visit aws.amazon.com and there, we already find the answer to what the A stands for, for Amazon. AWS stands for Amazon Web Services and it's a subsidiary of Amazon. Now Amazon Web Services offers a broad range of cloud computing services, which means services using their infrastructure which is hosted on various data centers all over the world which you can rent to run your own solutions, your own applications on them. If we have a look at all the products, we see they offer a lot of services, starting at traditional cloud hosting services where you can spin up your own servers and for example, run your own web page or run extensive calculations on them over storage and data-based services to content delivery and analytics services. They got it all and with these services, you can basically build anything you could think of, that is what makes AWS such a powerful platform. They also offer a very fair pricing. If you have a look at the pricing page, you can see that they have a free tier which allows you to use many of these services for free within a one year period as long as you stay in certain boundaries regarding the usage. Check out this page to learn more about that but even if you leave the free tier, the pricing is still very fair and allows you to run your applications at low cost. That is what AWS is and in this course, we're going to use some of these services here to build our serverless application. Now you will then learn which services are and how they work and if you want to learn more about AWS, definitely have a look at the article after this lecture where I provide some useful links which allow you to dive deeper into that in case that's all brand new to you.