AWS

Three strengths

• A long track record. AWS launched in March 2006 with its storage service S3, so it has been running businesses' software for close to two decades. 2
• The most used cloud. 43.3% of developers surveyed in 2025 said they use it, ahead of Azure at 26.3% and Google Cloud at 24.6%. 4
• No servers to manage. With its Lambda service, you run code without provisioning or managing servers. 3

What it is

Software has to run on a computer somewhere, and for a long time that meant a business buying its own servers and looking after them. Cloud computing changed that. The US standards body NIST defines it as "a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction". 1 In plain terms, you rent computing power over the internet, use as much as you need, and hand it back when you don't.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is Amazon's version of that idea. It launched its first service, S3 (a place to store files online), on 14 March 2006, which its own blog later described as a basic building block, "Malloc for the Internet". 2 Today it offers a wide range of services, from storage and computing to Lambda, a serverless service that runs a developer's code only when something triggers it. 3 It's also the most widely used of the big three clouds: 43.3% of developers surveyed in 2025 said they use AWS. 4

AWS also runs a certification program for the people who design on it. Its Solutions Architect Professional certification is meant to show "advanced knowledge and skills in providing complex solutions to complex problems", including optimising security, cost and performance. 5

We choose it because it's mature, widely understood, and a good fit for the way we build: small pieces of code that run on demand.

How we use it

AWS is the main home for our serverless work. We run the behind-the-scenes code of your apps on AWS Lambda, which is why a serverless build usually starts there, written in TypeScript on Node.js or in Python. We use Azure where a client's systems already live in Microsoft's cloud.

In Software Development, that gives you software that scales as your users grow. In Solution Architecture, it's one of the platforms we plan around. One of our co-founders holds both the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate and Professional certifications, so the systems we design on AWS are planned by someone certified to weigh security, cost and performance together.

References

1. Peter Mell and Tim Grance, "The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing", NIST Special Publication 800-145, National Institute of Standards and Technology, September 2011. https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/sp/800/145/final (accessed 28 October 2026)
2. Jeff Barr, "Eight Years (and Counting) of Cloud Computing", AWS News Blog, 14 March 2014. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/eight-years-and-counting-of-cloud-computing/ (accessed 28 October 2026)
3. Amazon Web Services, "What is AWS Lambda?", AWS Lambda Developer Guide. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/welcome.html (accessed 28 October 2026)
4. Stack Overflow, "2025 Developer Survey: Technology", survey.stackoverflow.co, 2025. https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology (accessed 28 October 2026)
5. Amazon Web Services, "AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional", aws.amazon.com/certification. https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-solutions-architect-professional/ (accessed 28 October 2026)