Non-techies don’t. Here’s how CNN answered, what is AWS?

“Amazon Web Services (AWS) is Amazon’s internet based cloud service connecting businesses to people using their apps or online platforms.”

Uh.. yeah.

Kudos to the Globe/AP for getting it right:

> An Amazon Web Services outage is causing major disruptions around the world. The service provides remote computing services to many governments, universities and companies, including The Boston Globe.

> On DownDetector, a website that tracks online outages, users reported issues with Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite online broker Robinhood, the McDonald’s app and many other services.

That's actually a fairly decent description for the non-tech crowd and I am going to adopt it, as my company is in the cloud native services space and I often have a problem explaining the technical and business model to my non-technical relatives and family - I get bogged down in trying to explain software defined hardware and similar concepts...

It's the difference between connecting your home to the grid to get electricity vs having your own generator.

It's the same as having a computer room but in someone else's datacentre.

This one's great too, thanks.

I asked ChatGPT for a succinct definition, and I thought it was pretty good:

“Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud computing platform that provides on-demand access to computing power, storage, databases, and other IT resources over the internet, allowing businesses to scale and pay only for what they use.”

For us techies yes, but to the regular folks that is just as good as our usual technical gobbledy-gook - most people don´t differentiate between a database and a hard-drive.

You make a good point.

This part:

    > access to computing power, storage, databases, and other IT resources

could be simplified to: access to computer servers

Most people who know little about computers can still imagine a giant mainframe they saw in a movie with a bunch of blinking lights. Not so different, visually, from a modern data center.

Ah, yes, servers. I have seen those at Chili's and TGI Fridays!