A w s was founded in the early two thousands out of amazon's frustration with its own tex situation. Rather than buying computing power or storage, you can pay as you go,. effectively renting space from a w s based on your server needs at this very moment in time. A w s is super capital intensive, given it is investing in and maintaining hundreds of thousands of servers across dozens of countries that individual companies would have to have maintained themselves if a w s didn't exist. As a w s has more customers,  it can then charge customers less overtime, which makes it that much harder for competitors to win in the cloud computing game.