AWS
Amazon Web Services
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
AWS is like a giant magical warehouse where you can rent computers, storage, databases, and basically anything tech-related — by the minute. Amazon built it for themselves, realized everyone else needed it too, and now it's the biggest cloud provider on Earth. It has so many services it's basically its own universe.
Real Talk
Amazon Web Services is a comprehensive cloud computing platform offering over 200 fully-featured services including compute (EC2), storage (S3), databases (RDS, DynamoDB), networking, AI/ML, and more. It operates globally across multiple regions and is the market leader in cloud infrastructure.
Show Me The Code
# Deploy a static site to S3
aws s3 sync ./dist s3://my-bucket --delete
aws cloudfront create-invalidation --distribution-id ABCDEF123 --paths "/*"
When You'll Hear This
"We're hosting everything on AWS." / "The Lambda function is timing out — check the AWS console."
Related Terms
Azure
Azure is Microsoft's cloud — and if your company already runs on Windows, Active Directory, and Office 365, Azure fits like a glove because everything talk...
CloudFront
CloudFront is AWS's CDN — it copies your files to data centers all over the world so users get content from a server near them instead of one far away.
EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)
EC2 is AWS's way of renting you a virtual computer in the cloud. You pick how powerful it is, what OS it runs, and pay by the hour.
GCP (Google Cloud Platform)
GCP is Google's version of the giant rental computer warehouse.
IAM (Identity and Access Management)
IAM is the permission system for AWS. It controls who (users, roles, services) can do what (read S3, start EC2, invoke Lambda) on which resources.
Lambda
AWS Lambda is where you upload a function and AWS runs it when something happens — an HTTP request, a file upload, a database change.