Amazon Web Services are a set of Cloud hosted services that provide programmatic access to Amazon’s ready-to-use computing infrastructure. The robust computing platform that was built and refined over the years by Amazon is now available to anyone who has access to the Internet. Amazon provides several different Web services, but this series will focus only on the basic building block services that fulfill some of the core needs of most systems: storage, computing, messaging, and datasets. You can architect complex and diverse enterprise applications by layering functions on top of the reliable, cost-effective building block services provided by Amazon. The Web services themselves live in a cloud outside your environment and are highly available.
If you need CPU cycles, you can spin up virtual machines with Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). If it’s data you want to store, you can park objects of up to 5GB in the Simple Storage Service (S3). Amazon has also built a limited database on top of the S3. To wrap it all up, your machines can talk among themselves with the Simple Queue Service (SQS), a message-passing API. All of these services are open to the Web and accessible as Web services. The documentation provided is extensive, and Amazon makes it relatively easy to wade through the options.
The ease, though, is relative because almost everything you do needs a command line. Amazon built a great set of tools with sophisticated security options for sending orders to your collection of machines in the sky, but they all run from the command line. I found myself cutting and pasting commands from documentation because it was too easy to mistype some certificate file name, for example. It’s hard to go into enough detail about all of the offerings described here, but Amazon is the most difficult because it has the most extensive solutions. Amazon is thoroughly committed to the cloud paradigm, rethinking how we design these systems and producing some innovative tools
Freedom from the shackles of big infrastructure investment and its maintenance opens up great opportunities for innovation. You can now focus on your business ideas instead of fretting over the number of servers you have, worrying about running out of disk space, and so on. According to Amazon’s estimates, businesses spend about 70 percent of their time on building and maintaining their infrastructures while using only 30 percent of their precious time actually working on the ideas that power their businesses. Amazon worries about the mundane details of the hardware and infrastructure and how to make it highly available while you can concentrate on bringing your ideas to life.
