Amazon Web Services, or AWS, is Amazon's cloud computing platform. It provides a broad catalogue of on-demand services, including virtual servers, storage, databases, networking, security tools and artificial intelligence services, which organisations rent over the internet rather than building in their own data centres.
Customers sign in to an account, choose a region, and assemble services as needed. Typical building blocks include EC2 for virtual servers, S3 for object storage, RDS for managed databases, Lambda for running code without managing servers, CloudFront for content delivery and IAM for controlling who can access what. Billing is usage based.
Retailers use AWS to host ecommerce sites and apps, run integration code between systems, store images and backups, serve content quickly to customers and analyse sales data. Its regions in Australia allow data to be kept onshore where that matters.
Teams should plan carefully. Costs can climb if resources are oversized or forgotten, so budgets and alerts help. Security depends on correct configuration, including least-privilege access, multi-factor authentication on the root account and encryption of stored data. Architecture choices also matter, because a poorly designed setup can be slow, fragile or hard to move later. Good tagging and documentation make environments manageable as they grow.
AWS matters because it is one of the most widely used cloud platforms, with a large ecosystem of skills and tools. RetailCare provides cloud services on AWS to host and support retail applications and integrations.