- What is AWS?
- AWS is Amazon's cloud computing platform, selling infrastructure and managed services on metered usage.
- What does it do?
- Provides virtual machines, object storage, managed databases, networking, serverless functions and hundreds of other services across global regions. Resources are provisioned through the console, CLI or infrastructure-as-code.
- Who is it for?
- Engineering teams that need service breadth, compliance coverage and worldwide regions. Its billing and IAM complexity is a lot to carry for a small app or a solo developer.
- What are the alternatives to AWS?
- Hetzner, DigitalOcean and Linode sell simpler servers with predictable pricing, Render and Fly.io deploy apps without you managing infrastructure, and Cloudflare Workers targets edge functions.
Top alternatives
Smaller, founder-led tools that quietly compete with AWS.
Developer cloud.
A short, predictable menu of servers and managed databases instead of hundreds of services.
Akamai cloud Linux.
Flat-rate Linux instances with far simpler pricing than AWS's per-service model.
Cloud for any app.
A managed platform with no IAM policies to write before an app can go live.
$7/mo
Edge servers.
Puts your container in several regions at once so requests land near the user.
Pay as you go