Amazon Web Services (AWS) is provided by of Amazon.com. It offers a wide range of cloud-computing services that provide software as a service, platofrm as a service, and infrastructure as a service. These services operate across various geographical regions across the world. They include Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, also known as "EC2", and Amazon Simple Storage Service, also known as "S3". AWS has more than 70 services, spanning a wide range, including compute, storage, networking, database, analytics, application services, deployment, management, mobile, developer tools and tools for the Internet of things. Amazon markets AWS as a service to provide large computing capacity quicker and cheaper than a client company building an actual physical server farm.
As with all cloud-service providers care must taken in setting up the service so that demand can be catered but pay the lowest cost.
For advice about Amazon Web Services, please contact researchsupport@it.ox.ac.uk
