Software systems designed to support communication between different computers over the internet using standard protocols. Like a universal translator that lets different programs talk to each other.
A weather web service provides current conditions and forecasts that any website or app can request and display to users.
“Web services” is a general software/API concept (e.g., REST, SOAP, gRPC) rather than a single cloud product. All major clouds host and expose web services using compute (VMs/containers/serverless), API gateways, and managed integration tools.