---
title: What is AWS? (Amazon Web Services)
description: "Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a comprehensive public cloud platform offering on-demand compute, storage, networking, databases, analytics, AI/ML, security, and developer tooling. It lets you provision resources programmatically, pay only for what you use, and scale globally across Regions and…"
url: "https://www.relianoid.com/resources/knowledge-base/misc/what-is-aws-amazon-web-services/"
updated: "2025-11-05"
category: Misc
---

# What is AWS? (Amazon Web Services)

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a comprehensive public cloud platform offering on-demand compute, storage, networking, databases, analytics, AI/ML, security, and developer tooling. It lets you provision resources programmatically, pay only for what you use, and scale globally across Regions and Availability Zones.

## How AWS Works

AWS is organized into **Regions** (geographical areas) composed of multiple isolated **Availability Zones (AZs)**. You deploy resources—such as *Amazon EC2* virtual machines, *Amazon S3* object storage, and *Amazon VPC* networks—within a Region/AZ. Identity and access are governed by *AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)*. Networking is based on VPCs, subnets, routing tables, security groups, and network ACLs. Most services expose APIs and SDKs for full automation.

## Core Building Blocks

- **Compute:** EC2, Auto Scaling, ECS/Fargate, EKS (Kubernetes), Lambda (serverless).
- **Storage & Data:** S3, EBS, EFS, FSx; RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache.
- **Networking:** VPC, Elastic IP, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect, Route 53.
- **Load Balancing & Edge:** Elastic Load Balancing (ALB/NLB/GWLB), CloudFront, Global Accelerator.
- **Security & Observability:** IAM, KMS, Secrets Manager, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, Config.
- **DevTools:** CloudFormation, CDK, Systems Manager, CodeBuild/Deploy/Pipeline.

## Typical Architecture Pattern

1. Create a VPC with public and private subnets across at least two AZs.
2. Place application instances (EC2, containers, or EKS) in private subnets.
3. Expose traffic via a load balancer in public subnets with security groups.
4. Use managed databases (RDS/Aurora) and object storage (S3) for data.
5. Automate with IaC (CloudFormation/CDK/Terraform) and apply least-privilege IAM.

## Reliability, Security, and Cost Model

High availability is achieved by distributing workloads across AZs and using health checks, auto scaling, and multi-AZ databases. Security relies on IAM, encryption (KMS), network segmentation, and logging. Pricing is pay-as-you-go with options like Savings Plans and Reserved Instances for predictable workloads.

## Why Deploy *RELIANOID* Load Balancer on AWS?

Deploying **RELIANOID** on AWS gives you a cloud-agnostic, high-performance L4/L7 application delivery layer that you fully control. You can run RELIANOID as EC2 instances in multiple AZs behind an AWS Network Load Balancer or Elastic IPs to:

- **Enhance performance:** Advanced proxying with HTTP/2 and smart connection management to reduce latency and CPU overhead for backends.
- **Increase resilience:** Active-active or active-standby pairs across AZs with health checks and hot restart to minimize disruption during changes.
- **Strengthen security:** Centralize TLS termination, enforce mTLS, implement WAF-adjacent policies, and segment east-west traffic within the VPC.
- **Unify control:** Consistent policies and observability across hybrid/multi-cloud, independent of native AWS ALB/NLB feature cycles.
- **Automate:** Provision via IaC, bootstrap with cloud-init, and integrate with CI/CD for repeatable, auditable deployments.

This approach is ideal when you need advanced traffic policies, protocol control, or consistent behavior across multiple clouds and on-premises.

## Resources

[Deploy RELIANOID Enterprise Edition on AWS](https://www.relianoid.com/resources/knowledge-base/enterprise-edition-v8-administration-guide/relianoid-v8-deployment-guide-as-byol-in-aws/)
 [Deploy RELIANOID Community Edition on AWS](https://www.relianoid.com/resources/knowledge-base/community-edition-v7-administration-guide/relianoid-community-v7-deployment-guide-in-aws/)

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