Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud computing platform that was launched by Amazon in 2006. AWS was initially designed to support the needs of Amazon's own e-commerce business but was soon made available to other businesses as a way to build, deploy, and scale applications in the cloud. 

AWS is now the leading cloud computing platform, serving millions of customers worldwide. It offers over 200 different services across various categories, including computing, storage, database, networking, analytics, machine learning, security, and more. 

The early years of AWS were marked by rapid innovation and growth. In 2007, AWS launched its first major service, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), which provided a scalable and durable storage solution for businesses. This was followed by the launch of Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) in 2008, which provided scalable computing resources in the cloud. 

Over the years, AWS has continued to expand and introduce new services and features to meet the evolving needs of its customers. Some of the notable milestones in the history of AWS include: 
2009: Launch of Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) and Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) 
2010: Launch of Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) and Amazon CloudWatch 2011: Launch of Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Elastic Beanstalk 2012: Launch of Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) and Amazon SNS (Simple Notification Service) 
2013: Launch of Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Machine Learning, and AWS Lambda 2014: Launch of Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) and Amazon ECS (Elastic Container Service)
2015: Launch of Amazon Aurora and Amazon Lex 
2016: Launch of Amazon Athena, Amazon EC2 Container Registry, and Amazon EC2 Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) 

Today, AWS is used by millions of businesses around the world and is considered the leading cloud computing platform. It continues to innovate and introduce new services and features to meet the changing needs of its customers.