AWS — Amazon Web Services — is the biggest cloud platform in the world. It rents you computing power, storage, and databases over the internet, so you can run a website or an app without buying a server. Netflix, Airbnb, and countless startups run on AWS. If you want your project to be reachable by anyone, anywhere, at any scale, learning AWS is the most useful cloud skill you can start with.

How does AWS work? You create an account, and AWS gives you access to services: EC2 for virtual servers, S3 for storing files, RDS for databases, and Lambda for running code without a server at all. You pay only for what you use, and the free tier lets you experiment for a year at no cost within limits. You manage everything from the web console, or from the command line with the AWS CLI.…