Amazon Web Services
The broadest public cloud platform, spanning compute, storage, data, machine learning and managed services.
What the architecture looks like underneath
What it is
Understanding Amazon Web Services
AWS is a public cloud provider offering infrastructure, platform and managed services. Its breadth is its defining characteristic: there is usually more than one AWS service that solves a given problem, which makes architectural discipline and cost governance more consequential than on narrower platforms.
Why it matters
Elastic capacity and managed services remove the need to provision for peak and to operate undifferentiated infrastructure. The value is realized only where architecture and cost management change alongside the migration — moving unchanged workloads relocates cost rather than reducing it.
Problems it addresses
- “Our data-center lease is ending and we need a migration path.”
- “Capacity planning forces us to provision for peak all year.”
- “We migrated and our costs went up.”
- “Environments differ from each other and defects appear late.”
Capabilities
Landing zone design
Account structure, network, identity, policy and guardrails established before workloads arrive.
Migration
Rehost, replatform and refactor assessed per workload rather than applied uniformly.
Cloud-native architecture
Containers, serverless and managed services chosen against operational capacity.
FinOps
Cost attribution, rightsizing, commitment planning and continuous optimization.
Reliability engineering
Service level objectives, observability and tested recovery.
Use cases
Data-center exit
Migrate an estate against a hard deadline with rollback planned at every stage.
Elastic workloads
Scale capacity to demand for seasonal or event-driven load.
Data platform hosting
Storage, streaming and analytics infrastructure at scale.
Before you commit
Prerequisites, governance and risks
The questions that determine whether this will work in your environment, rather than in a demonstration.
What has to be true first
- Landing zone before workloads
- Cost attribution model defined before migration, not after the first invoice
- Identity and network architecture agreed upfront
Governance
Guardrails belong in policy, not in documentation. Service control policies, tagging enforcement, budget alerting and a defined set of approved services are what keep a large estate coherent. The alternative is per-team divergence that becomes very expensive to reconcile.
Risks
- Cost growth without attribution and rightsizing discipline
- Service sprawl across teams choosing different solutions to the same problem
- Lift-and-shift that relocates operational constraints rather than removing them
Where Amazon Web Services leads
Every connection below is recorded in the content itself, and each one says why it is here.
Capabilities
- Cloud & InfrastructureAmazon Web Services is delivered through this capability.
- Product & Platform EngineeringAmazon Web Services is delivered through this capability.
- Data, Analytics & AIAmazon Web Services is delivered through this capability.
- Managed Services & SupportAmazon Web Services is delivered through this capability.
- IoT, Edge & Digital TwinsThis capability lists Amazon Web Services among the technologies it works with.
Technologies
Sectors
Explore solutions using Amazon Web Services
Open the guided finder with this technology already selected, and see which capabilities apply to your goal, sector and environment — with the reasoning shown.
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