AWS is Amazon's cloud computing platform, offering hundreds of on-demand services — from EC2 virtual machines and S3 storage to Lambda serverless functions and RDS managed databases. It's the #3 most-used cloud tool in the world, reported in roughly 43.3% of developer surveys, and it's the largest cloud provider by market share. Companies use it because it removes the need to buy and manage physical servers, and it's the single most in-demand cloud skill on job listings.
The AWS CLI lets you manage any AWS service from the terminal. Here's a common pattern — uploading a file to S3 and listing running EC2 instances.
# upload a local file to an S3 bucket
aws s3 cp ./build/index.html s3://my-website-bucket/index.html
# list running EC2 instances in the default region
aws ec2 describe-instances --filters "Name=instance-state-name,Values=running"
# deploy a Lambda function from a zip file
aws lambda update-function-code --function-name my-func --zip-file fileb://function.zipCreate a free-tier AWS account, install the AWS CLI, then configure it with your access keys.
# install the AWS CLI (example: via pip)
pip install awscli
# configure credentials (access key, secret key, region)
aws configure
# verify it works
aws sts get-caller-identity