AWS is used daily by millions of businesses to serve their content and
services online. But AWS is much more than Virtual Infrastructure. At
it's most basic level, it is a complex development environment that
enables you to split out your required resources, thus making your
service more reliable and cost effective.
If you think about a typical web service setup. You start out with your
domain, this is the brand of your company but it is useless without a
service behind it. So you go out and get web hosting. This web hosting
will usually consist of a shared server which holds your website and
your backend database. It might even hold your email server too. So what
happens when it goes down? You lose everything. What happens if it is
slow, you might have to move everything to a new server. It gets messy
fast.
AWS has many layers. It offers standalone database solutions, both
relational and NoSQL, that you can make use of. But you don't need to get the beefiest
systems you can, you start small and build it up as you go.