[hansmayer]

That's actually a fairly decent description for the non-tech crowd and I am going to adopt it, as my company is in the cloud native services space and I often have a problem explaining the technical and business model to my non-technical relatives and family - I get bogged down in trying to explain software defined hardware and similar concepts...

[cubix]

I asked ChatGPT for a succinct definition, and I thought it was pretty good:

“Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud computing platform that provides on-demand access to computing power, storage, databases, and other IT resources over the internet, allowing businesses to scale and pay only for what they use.”

[hansmayer]

For us techies yes, but to the regular folks that is just as good as our usual technical gobbledy-gook - most people don´t differentiate between a database and a hard-drive.

[throwaway2037]

You make a good point.

This part:

    > access to computing power, storage, databases, and other IT resources

could be simplified to: access to computer servers

Most people who know little about computers can still imagine a giant mainframe they saw in a movie with a bunch of blinking lights. Not so different, visually, from a modern data center.

[herewulf]

Ah, yes, servers. I have seen those at Chili's and TGI Fridays!

[rswail]

It's the difference between connecting your home to the grid to get electricity vs having your own generator.

It's the same as having a computer room but in someone else's datacentre.

[hansmayer]

This one's great too, thanks.