It's a bunch of someone else's computers that you can rent processing time and storage on, so you don't have to buy the entire machine yourself.

It's beneficial because you don't have to deal with owning the computers so if they break its not your problem. It's also beneficial because you can just buy more time if you suddenly need more computing done for a few days or weeks a year but not the rest of the year.

It can be used pretty much as any other headless (without its own display) computer.

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AWS - Amazon Web Services EDIT - TLDR "Think of AWS as a big IT rental store. They rent just about anything and everything you could possibly think you might need to run a business IT wise, save for physical hardware like Laptops" AWS is the single largest Cloud hosting provider on Earth (at the time of this post) with 32% of the market share. Its competitors are Microsoft Azure (22%), Google Cloud (11%), Alibaba (4%), and numerous other smaller players. So what do they do? AWS leases servers and products like hosted software and AI analytics to companies. Rather than purchasing a physical server you can lease processing resources from AWS instead for a monthly fee. "There is no such thing as the Cloud, it's just someone else's server" This is attractive for a lot of businesses because it transforms a big capital up-front purchase into a monthly operational fee. Since AWS takes care of the hardware, datacenters, cooling, power, etc it also reduces the need for a business to have IT, infrastructure, and purchasing people to maintain all of that. If you are on a platform like AWS you don't need to build and maintain a big datacenter onsite. AWS allows smaller players to have the toys the big boys do, like hosting your data in multiple locations or in different countries that would be cost prohibitive if you tried to do that in-house. You can also lease tools like load balancers, and AI tools that would otherwise be too expensive for a smaller company. Cloud providers also allow companies to lease resources on demand. For example if your busiest season is Christmas you can lease extra servers during that time to meet extra demand, and then spin them down and not pay for them for the rest of the year. Another example is during the pandemic getting server hardware was difficult to get due to chip shortages and many companies turned to big hosting providers to spin up their new servers on demand rather than putting up with long delays before hardware would arrive. Since AWS and Microsoft were so large, and have so many customers, they would often get priority from big vendors for chips during the shortage. One good example of an AWS customer is Reddit. Cloud providers have recently come under fire for being more expensive than buying your own hardware, but this really depends on the particular situation of your business and what you are doing. Since the pandemics close there has been an industry wide trend to downscale cloud resources to save money, while some companies have been returning to on-premises hardware in some cases as it is more cost effective and gives the business more direct control over their own spending and data. One of the major problems is that Cloud compute is so easy to manage that companies can and will spin up far more resources than they need causing monthly costs to rocket out of control. More on reddit.com

I found that AWS had better transparency in regards to its pricing in comparison to Azure. More on reddit.com

AWS and all the cloud platforms are worth getting into because there’s so much unfamiliarity and still growing. No it is not worth paying 6k for training. A ton of information is free on YouTube to start. If you’re more curious, you can purchase $15 udemy courses (Stephane AWS course). Even after you pass a test, does not guarantee a job in most cases, but it’s a good start More on reddit.com