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Re:Major AWS Outage Happening by hansmayer on Monday October 20, 2025 @06:41AM (#45642374)
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...
Re:Major AWS Outage Happening by rswail on Monday October 20, 2025 @07:48AM (#45642839)
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.

Re:Major AWS Outage Happening by hansmayer on Monday October 20, 2025 @08:09AM (#45642980)
This one's great too, thanks.
Re:Major AWS Outage Happening by cubix on Monday October 20, 2025 @07:06AM (#45642551)
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.”

Re:Major AWS Outage Happening by hansmayer on Monday October 20, 2025 @07:31AM (#45642720)
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.
Re:Major AWS Outage Happening by throwaway2037 on Monday October 20, 2025 @07:52AM (#45642862)
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.

Re:Major AWS Outage Happening by herewulf on Monday October 20, 2025 @02:33PM (#45647436)
Ah, yes, servers. I have seen those at Chili's and TGI Fridays!