Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered, pay-as-you-go basis. Clients will often use this in combination with autoscaling (a process that allows a client to use more computing in times of high application usage, and then scale down to reduce costs when there is less traffic). These cloud computing web services provide various services related to networking, compute, storage, middleware, IoT and other processing capacity, as well as software tools via AWS server farms. This frees clients from managing, scaling, and patching hardware and operating systems. The genesis of AWS came in the early 2000s. After building Merchant.com, Amazon’s e- ommerce-as-a-service platform that offers third-party retailers a way to build their own web-stores, Amazon pursued service-oriented architecture as a means to scale its engineering operations, led by then CTO Allan Vermeulen.