15 Interesting facts about AWS

Every time I hear the word “Cloud”, I have three white letters and a cute orange arrow in my mind. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has become synonymous with cloud computing. Whether you’re a startup, enterprise, or solo developer, AWS is often the backbone of infrastructure. But beyond EC2 and S3, AWS has many surprising features, scale metrics, and hidden capabilities. This article highlights 15 compelling AWS facts, grouped for beginners, business users, developers, and those you probably didn’t know and shows how your company is well positioned to turn these into real client value.

What Is AWS, And Why Is It Dominant?

At its core, AWS (Amazon Web Services) is Amazon’s cloud computing arm, offering on-demand infrastructure, platform, and software services (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) globally. From virtual machines and storage to analytics, AI/ML, IoT, and serverless, AWS covers the whole stack.

Why do people talk about it so much? Because AWS has:

• First-mover advantage (launched in 2006)
  
• Massive scale: more global infrastructure than most competitors
  
• Broad, mature service portfolio
  
• Strong ecosystem: partners, tools, communities
  
• Robust reliability, compliance, and enterprise credentials
  

As of mid-2025, AWS publicly states that its cloud spans 120 Availability Zones across 38 Geographic Regions, with additional zones and regions to be announced.

Each AWS Region contains multiple AZs (at least three in most cases), which helps with fault tolerance and high availability.

Because of that infrastructure scale, AWS can offer resilience, global reach, and low-latency services to clients worldwide.

5 Facts for Beginners

These are things that surprise newcomers but showcase AWS’s power.

Source: Image generated by AI

1. Amazon Snowball
   It’s not “a snowball machine” in the fun-snowball sense it’s a hardware appliance with storage + compute capabilities, shipped to your location. AWS Snowball is a physical data transport device (a rugged appliance) used to move large volumes of data (terabytes to petabytes) in and out of AWS when network connectivity is inadequate or too slow. You copy data locally, then ship it back to AWS, where they ingest the data into S3 and securely erase the device.
   
2. Tricky AWS services’ names
   Have you ever thought why the AWS services are named so strangely?
   Well, there is a cool article that explains the AWS names in simple words.
    
3. During Prime Day 2025, AWS handled an extraordinary load
   
   • ECS launched ~18.4 million tasks per day (77% increase over prior year)
   • Lambda ran 1.7 trillion invocations in that period.
   • API Gateway processed over 1 trillion requests internally
     
4. AWS has over 1.45 million business customers
   These range from small and medium businesses to enterprise giants.
   
5. AWS holds ~30%+ market share among cloud infrastructure providers
   It continues to lead, ahead of Azure and GCP in many analyses

3 Impressive Facts for Business / Executives

These facts show AWS’s relevance for business strategy, cost, and scale.

1. CapEx and scale investment
   AWS invests heavily in infrastructure, making capital expenditures in the tens of billions to maintain and expand data centers, a barrier for most smaller competitors. For example, news reports indicate Amazon’s data center spending has topped $100B, exceeding the GDP of some small countries.
   
2. Massive scale during peak events
   As mentioned above, during Prime Day 2025, the infrastructure load surged (ECS tasks, Lambda invocations, API Gateway traffic), showing AWS’s ability to handle unpredictable spikes.
   
3. Operational experience and maturity
   AWS claims “more operational experience at scale,” with more than 3× the number of data centers compared to the next largest cloud provider. This level of maturity is a competitive moat: reliability, best practices, and support emerge from decades of operating at scale.

3 Impressive Facts for Developers / Architects

These are facts that resonate with engineers designing applications on AWS.

1. AWS Graviton processors
   AWS designs its own ARM-based CPUs (Graviton) for EC2, achieving better energy efficiency and cost per compute compared to standard x86.
   
2. You Can Slash NAT Gateway Costs with Smarter Network Design
   One of the hidden costs in AWS is outbound traffic via NAT Gateways, which can easily run you $30–$100+ per month per AZ, depending on your architecture and data egress. Developers and DevOps architects can reduce or entirely eliminate this cost using clever VPN-based alternatives.
   If your private subnet workloads don’t need outbound internet access except for controlled updates or CLI/SSH access, you can: 

• Use OpenVPN deployed in a public subnet as a secure tunnel to your private resources (costs $0 if using community AMI and spot instance).
• Leverage AWS Client VPN (a fully managed VPN service) to provide secure user-level access to private resources, without needing NAT or public IPs.
• Use a bastion host + AWS SSM (Systems Manager) Session Manager for remote access and updates, with zero open ports and no NAT fees.

This is especially powerful in non-production, IoT, or high-compliance environments where restricting internet access is a bonus, not a drawback.

3. Edge / Low-latency infrastructure
   In addition to regions and AZs, AWS has Local Zones and Wavelength zones to bring compute closer to users. These allow developers to place resources (compute, storage) nearer to end users, improving performance.

4 Impressive Facts You Probably Didn’t Know

These are lesser-known but intriguing.

1. AWS’s global expansion plans remain aggressive
   They have announced planning for new AZs and regions, including 12 new availability zones and four additional regions (New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, and European Sovereign Cloud) by future dates. They have 140 datacenters upcoming, which is around 50% of what they have right now.
   
2. AWS’s container orchestrator comparison 2025.

3. Opt-in regions after 2019
   Regions introduced after March 20, 2019, are opt-in in AWS accounts, meaning you must enable them manually before use.
4. AWS’s largest outage in 2023
   The outage happened in the summer of 2023. It lasted for over 2h, affecting multiple AWS services and clients. 

How Fordewind.io Can Help Clients with AWS

Your company’s expertise in AWS becomes a strong differentiator in turning these facts into client value.

What We Offer:

• Design & Architecture
  We help clients architect scalable, fault-tolerant AWS solutions leveraging regions, AZs, Local Zones, and serverless resources.
• Migration & Optimization
  We migrate existing systems to AWS, optimize cost, leverage Graviton instances, design autoscaling, and implement proper Partitioning strategies.
• DevOps & Automation
  CI/CD, infrastructure as code, monitoring, logging, alerting, we build turnkey delivery pipelines.
• IoT & Connected Systems
  Because many of your projects are IoT-heavy, you can connect devices to AWS IoT Core, edge compute, data pipelines, and dashboards. Our AWS-native experience accelerates delivery.

Every project we deliver is on AWS. Our deep familiarity with the platform means we already know best practices, pitfalls, and innovations, which means faster, more secure, and future-ready implementations.

Conclusion: These Nightmares Are Real, But So Are the Solutions

AWS is the foundation for modern digital infrastructure. From its vast global footprint to advanced processors, edge zones, and massive serverless scale, AWS delivers what many platforms only promise for years.

For beginners, AWS’s scale and reach are awe-inspiring. For businesses, it offers operational certainty and investment-level scale. For developers, it gives tools, flexibility, and performance. And behind the scenes, there’s a story of hidden infrastructure, incentives, and continuous innovation.

With your company’s AWS expertise, you’re in the perfect position to transform client ideas into a robust, scalable reality. Leverage the strengths of AWS and build solutions people will rely on for years to come.