AWS launched in 2006 from the internal infrastructure that Amazon.com built to handle its online retail operations. AWS was one of the first companies to introduce a pay-as-you-go cloud computing model that scales to provide users with compute, storage or throughput as needed.
Amazon Web Services provides services from dozens of data centers spread across availability zones (AZs) in regions across the world. An AZ represents a location that typically contains multiple physical data centers, while a region is a collection of AZs in geographic proximity connected by low-latency network links.
More than 100 services comprise the Amazon Web Services portfolio, including those for compute, databases, infrastructure management, application development and security. These services, by category, include:
Big data management, analytics:
AWS includes a variety of big data analytics and application services. Amazon Elastic MapReduce offers a Hadoop framework to process large amounts of data, while Amazon Kinesis provides several tools to process and analyze streaming data.
AWS Glue is a service that handles extract, transform and load jobs, while the Amazon Elasticsearch Service enables a team to perform application monitoring, log analysis and other tasks with the open source Elasticsearch tool.
To query data, an analyst can use Amazon Athena for S3, and then visualize data with Amazon QuickSight.