# AWS Intro

AWS is one of the many cloud providers available today. This wasn't always the case. Amazon launched it in 2006 as a way to increase their revenue by renting their computing resources - they had a lot of spare capacity left after scaling their resources for holiday sales - they have been planning it for a while and their mission was to create the "operating system of the internet".

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You can find out more about the history of AWS in this TechCrunch article (opens new window).

It took several years for any competitor to respond which translated to an overwhelming market share owned by AWS even today and to more mature services.
It currently offers over 200 services for various use cases (hosting, AI, ML, IoT, media encoding and streaming, etc.). Some of them are very specific to a certain use case while others are more general and most likely are the building blocks of the rest. We will focus on the latter.