“Invention comes in many forms and at many scales. The most radical and transformative of inventions are often those that empower others to unleash their creativity- to pursue their dreams”
– Jeffery P. Bezos
In 2006, commercial cloud services emerged and had a transformational effect on the public cloud, deeply impacting how we live, transact, and conduct business operations. Amazon was a key player, aiding this massive transformation by launching Amazon Web Services (AWS). It became a predominant and go-to cloud provider for the global market, paving an effective way to create IT infrastructure. The uptake of cloud services is growing at an exponential phase, and AWS is expanding its services, bestowing organizations the capabilities of designing and building IT solutions for operational success. While AWS does the heavy lifting in operational IT infrastructure, companies can focus on improving their business value and achieving customer excellence. With AWS services by their side, organizations can be well assured that they will have ample support to resolve the hurdles they face tomorrow and not just today’s problems.
So, who is using AWS and how they use it and why? This blog provides an overview of big companies that use AWS and details about AWS becoming the most sought-after global cloud provider in the market.
About Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is Amazon’s cloud computing platform and it’s most profitable division. Over the years AWS has become a preferred cloud service provider and the sector’s reckoning force. Launched in 2004 as Simple Queue Service (SQS) that served as a precursor for AWS, further in 2006, Amazon added a seminal cloud service storage solution, Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to its cloud platform to provide businesses the capabilities to build full-fledged cloud-based applications. Over the years, AWS has rapidly expanded to a myriad of products, including VR (Virtual Reality), IoT, AR (Augmented Reality), quantum computing, and more. Given its realm of unique and innovative products, you will not find a problem that AWS fails to provide a first-party solution for!
Aws Running the Show for Global Conglomerates: Amazon Web Services Customers List
Be it technology giants, media houses, banks, food manufacturers, or governments, AWS is the preferred cloud choice for companies, and organizations across industries and verticals for developing, deploying, and hosting applications. It is the cloud service provider for 1.45 million businesses across the globe! More than 123,000 customers belong to Internet industries, while the next large segment is media, with about 48,807 users.
Here is an ultimate list of big companies that use AWS:
| Name | Industry | Region |
|---|---|---|
| 3M | Manufacturing | United States |
| Airbnb | Travel | United States |
| Canva | Software & Internet | Australia |
| Coca-Cola | Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) | Americas |
| Formula 1 | Automotive | United Kingdom |
| GoDaddy | Software & Internet | United States |
| Goldman Sachs | Financial Services | United States |
| Heineken | Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) | Benelux |
| Johnson & Johnson | Life Sciences | United States |
| LaunchDarkly | Software & Internet | United States |
| MAN | Automotive | Germany |
| McAfee | Software & Internet | United States |
| Moderna | Life Sciences | United States |
| Netflix | Media & Entertainment | United States |
| Okta | Software & Internet | United States |
| Panasonic | Manufacturing | United States |
| Digital Marketing | United States | |
| Salesforce | Healthcare | United States |
| Samsung Electronics | Electronics & Semiconductor | Korea |
| Siemens | Manufacturing | Germany |
| ŠKODA | Automotive | Czech Republic |
| Snap | Software & Internet | United States |
| Starbucks | Hospitality | North America |
| State Farm | Financial Services | United States |
| Thomson Reuters | Media & Entertainment | United States |
| Toyota | Automotive | United States |
| TUI | Hospitality | Germany |
| Vanguard | Financial Services | United States |
| Verizon | Telecommunications | North America |
| Warner Bros. Discovery | Media & Entertainment | United States |
Some of the biggest spenders on AWS are:
What Makes AWS the Foremost Cloud Provider?
1. The Advantage of Being a Pioneer
AWS is the pioneer of cloud services. It has the advantage of being the first entrant in the market and has added major data-heavy companies like Netflix, Airbnb, and more to its list of customers. The customers are ever-inclined towards AWS, owing to the multitude of benefits they derive from it.
2. Constantly Innovating
AWS is constantly innovating and refining its products and services to meet every need of all industries and verticals. Due to this aspect, its initial offerings, such as EC2, S3, Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), and Elastic Block Store (EBS), have stayed relevant. They are yet capable of catering to companies of different functional capacities. Besides this, AWS provides highly versatile and reliable services, including Amazon Deep Lens, Amazon Sagemaker, and Amazon Sumerian, which are leaps ahead in terms of innovation compared to AWS’ cloud competitors.
3. Boundless Computing and Storage Resources
Due to AWS’ excellent and comprehensive infrastructure capabilities, its customers can access limitless computing and storage resources. The users cannot expect the same benefits from other cloud providers. Extensive computing and storage resources allow behemoths to rely on AWS even if they need it on short notice. Whenever the demand arises, customers can successfully take the benefit of several AWS tools like Auto Scaling, and Elastic Load Balancing and effectively scale their applications.
4. Offers Stability
AWS is a scalable, reliable, and secure global computing infrastructure that delivers stability in spades. It ensures serviceability and minimal latency by expanding across the globe and hosting worldwide data centers. AWS allows its users to compute rapidly whenever there is a demand and need to scale, even at a moment’s notice.
5. Security is Priority
AWS’ core principle is “Security is job zero” AWS provides tools companies need to secure and optimize their infrastructure. It allows them to deliver operations faster and securely, which might not be possible with other cloud providers.
The Widespread Use Cases of AWS
With an understanding of different types of AWS services, let us take a closer look at how AWS’ marquee clients are using this innovative cloud service. According to Contino insights, here is a brief summary about few of the popular AWS use cases:
Netflix
The streaming giant Netflix is one of the prominent early users of AWS. It relies heavily on AWS for its computing and storage needs, including databases, analytics, and video transcoding. It accomplishes all these by leveraging around 100,000 server instances of AWS.
Unilever
Unilever relies heavily on AWS’s cloud-based option to support its 1,700 digital marketing web assets worldwide. They are able to accelerate the launch of their websites and make rapid changes to their marketing campaigns after migrating to AWS. AWS remains Unilever’s preferred choice of cloud for comprehensive backup and disaster recovery.
Shell
The energy giant Shell was looking at ways to protect itself from cyber threats. It was in dire need of a cyber-threat hunting function to detect the vulnerabilities. Using EC2, Shell has created cyber security capabilities to analyze real-time and historical data to shield itself from cyber-attacks and threats.
Airbnb
The property owners and traveler’s rental marketplace, Airbnb is a longtime user of AWS. It leverages Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud to manage its core applications, search servers, and other AWS cloud products to handle incoming traffic between the servers for data processing, dissemination, and backups. By using AWS services, Airbnb has scaled its operations cost-effectively.
Lenovo
Lenovo, one of the largest technology companies in the world, is an esteemed customer of AWS. Lenovo needed the right tech stack to automate modeling and forecasting steps to drive predictions. They incorporated advanced AWS technology to create an automated machine-learning platform for data scientists to rapidly construct, deploy, and use machine-learning models. It allowed Lenovo users across the cloud to build world-class prediction models easily and quickly to scale up operation cycles.
Wrapping Up:
Being the first entrant to the cloud service market proved to be a vantage point for AWS. It is leading the cloud pack with a whooping market share of 32% as it maintained its position by staying relevant. It never stopped innovating and built a wide array of nearly 200 fully featured services, making it a compelling cloud leader. Around 150+ companies with a billion-dollar tag prefer using AWS as their cloud service provider to improve developer and customer experience and gain a competitive edge.