In this video I break down what AWS (Amazon Web Services) actually is from a backend engineer’s perspective. AWS is basically a massive collection of services Amazon built to help power web applications, and it’s mostly used by backend teams. The big idea of “the cloud” is simple: you’re renting someone else’s machines (Amazon’s) to run your code, servers, and applications instead of running everything on a computer you own. I walk through the AWS console and the categories you’ll see—compute, databases, networking, storage, security, and more—and I call out the services you’ll hear about the most. Compute is the bread and butter (EC2, Lambda, Elastic Beanstalk), storage includes things like S3 (think Google Drive but for your code/files), and networking is where stuff like VPC comes in (your cloud resources still need IP addresses and routing). I also share the reality that nobody knows all the AWS services; in my day-to-day I’ve used a handful (like EC2, Lambda, ECS, S3, DynamoDB, CloudWatch, IAM, SNS/SQS, EventBridge). Finally, I explain why teams pick AWS (one-stop shop + easier integration) and the main alternatives (Azure and Google Cloud), and I tee up this as the start of a series where I’ll go deeper on the most popular services.