Amazon is an American multinational technology company that focuses on e-commerce, cloud computing, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It started as an online bookstore in 1995 and has since expanded to sell a wide variety of products and services to customers worldwide. In 2006, Amazon launched Amazon Web Services (AWS), which offers cloud computing services and has become one of the largest providers of these services. AWS provides access to computing resources and services through application programming interfaces, allowing customers to take advantage of elastic and scalable resources without having to manage their own hardware infrastructure.