[throwaway2016a]

> Amazon offers basically hardware.

AWS is way more than hardware.

Lambda - on demand code execution

Route53 - DNS and domain registration

S3 - File storage with redundancy and an HTTP interface

RDS - Managed relational databases

DynamoDB - NoSQL key/value store with indexing and scanning

SQS - Job queue-ing without needing to manage servers

SES - Email service with the ability to both send and receive email and also trigger a Lambda function when email is received

SNS - Fan out notifications with multiple destinations (iOS, Android, Email, SMS, webhook, etc)

IAM KMS - Manage your encryption keys

EC2 - Ok, this one actually is hardware

Git hosting, docker file hosting. Etc...

That is just off the top of my head. However, if you want to avoid vendor lock-in, then yes, it is just hardware.

[DocG]

You are correct. They are also huge ecommerce site and book store.

I understood previous question as "What CMS amazon is offering for clients in website hosting", to where I think my answer still stands.

[throwaway2016a]

> They are also huge eCommerce site and book store.

That is a complete miss-categorization. Amazon AWS is a single business unit with EC2 being a single product inside of it. When people say Amazon Web Services it very clearly means more than just EC2.

To compare EC2 to SQS (simple queuing service) and saying they are different is the same as comparing Amazon Book sales to Amazon Clothing Sales. It is a distinction that not many people would make.

Actually in a way it is more like saying that Amazon Selling the Twilight novels is different than Amazon selling college textbooks.