The rise of cloud computing provides businesses the ability to quickly provision computing resources without the costly and laborious task of building data centers, and without the costs of running servers with underutilized capacity due to variable workloads.
The most popular of these services include Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3).
The AWS platform launched in 2006, though new services and "regions" (data centers) have been added continually since launch.
You can get started with AWS using the free tier, which allows limited free use for up to one year.
For pricing at the US East region, S3 pricing starts at $0.023 per GB, while EC2 instances start at $0.0059 per hour.
CloudFront, a content-delivery network (CDN), mirrors resources at "edge locations" to improve page loading time.