In the 15 years since its launch, Amazon Web Services transformed how companies do business

Amazon Web Services, which opened for business 15 years ago, doesn’t have the same consumer cachet as two-day shipping or Prime Video. Yet the importance of AWS to Amazon, consumers and the global Internet economy is difficult to overstate. — Dreamstime/TNS

It enables glitch-free Netflix streaming. It hosts digital drug-design tools of the kind that led to Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine. The Seahawks use its computing power to analyse game data. It stores a digital repository of King County’s archives. And even The Seattle Times relies on it to make sure the website doesn't crash during surges of reader traffic.

What is it?