AWS

Amazon Web Services is the market-leading cloud platform by revenue, breadth of services, and enterprise adoption. For organizations without a strong Microsoft or Google dependency, AWS is often the default enterprise cloud choice.

Where AWS leads: compute (EC2), object storage (S3), managed databases (RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB), and the overall maturity and operational depth of its infrastructure services. AWS regions and availability zones give organizations fine-grained control over where data and compute physically run.

The services most relevant to enterprise infrastructure work: EC2 (virtual machines), S3 (object storage), VPC (network isolation), IAM (access control within AWS), RDS (managed relational databases), and Route 53 (DNS). AWS IAM is notably granular — and notably complex. Getting IAM right is one of the most consequential and most frequently mishandled aspects of an AWS deployment.

The multi-cloud reality: most mid-market organizations aren't running AWS and Azure and GCP simultaneously by design — they're running one primary cloud and a second because a SaaS vendor or acquisition required it. Rationalizing cloud sprawl is often worth the effort.