Amazon Web Services

File:Amazon Web Services logo.png

Amazon Web Services logo

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) are a collection of remote computing services (also called web services) offered over the Internet by Amazon.com.

Launched in July 2002, Amazon Web Services provide online services for other web sites or client-side applications. Most of these services are not exposed directly to end users, but instead offer functionality that other developers can use. In June 2007, Amazon claimed that more than 330,000 developers had signed up to use Amazon Web Services.

Amazon Web Services’ offerings are accessed over HTTP, using REST and SOAP protocols. All are billed on usage, with the exact form of usage varying from service to service.

List of AWS services

• Alexa Web Services, providing traffic data, thumbnails, and other information about web sites.
• Amazon Associates Web Service (A2S, formerly Amazon E-Commerce Service or ECS), providing access to Amazon's product data and electronic commerce functionality.
• Amazon AWS Authentication is an implicit service, the authentication infrastructure used to authenticate access to the various services.
• Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery network (CDN) for distributing objects stored in S3 to so-called "edge locations" near the requester.
• Amazon DevPay, currently in limited beta, is a billing and account management system for applications that developers have built atop Amazon Web Services.
• Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), providing persistent block level storage volumes for EC2.
• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), providing scalable virtual private servers using Xen.
• Amazon Elastic MapReduce, a web service that enables businesses, researchers, data analysts, and developers to easily and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data. It utilizes a hosted Hadoop framework running on the web-scale infrastructure of EC2 and Amazon S3.
• Amazon Flexible Payments Service (FPS), currently in limited beta, provides an interface for micropayments.
• Amazon Fulfillment Web Service provides a programmatic web service for sellers to ship items to and from Amazon using Fulfillment by Amazon.
• Amazon Historical Pricing, providing access to Amazon's historical sales data from its affiliates. (Appears this service has been discontinued)
• Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk), managing small units of work distributed amongst many people.
• Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), providing a scalable MySQL compatible database server.
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), providing Web Service based storage.
• Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), providing a hosted message queue for web applications.
• Amazon SimpleDB, allows developers to run queries on structured data. It operates in concert with EC2 and S3 to provide "the core functionality of a database."
• Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), in limited beta, a web service that creates a logically isolated set of Amazon EC2 instances to be connected to an existing network using a VPN connection.
• AWS Management Console (AWS Console), A web-based point and click interface to manage and monitor the Amazon infrastructure suite including EC2, EBS, Amazon Elastic MapReduce, and Amazon CloudFront.
• AWS Simple Monthly Calculator helps you estimate your AWS monthly costs

Similar or related services

• IBM has announced Blue Cloud, a service based on Linux, Hadoop, Xen, and PowerVM.
• RightScale and
• 3Tera offer administration tools to manage seamlessly machines based on different data centers operated by Internet hosting services around the world.
• opsource Offers a similar service too.
• Google App Engine was released in April 2008 and allows web applications to be deployed to Google infrastructure.
• Microsoft has announced Windows Azure and the Azure Services Platform, a similar cloud-computing infrastructure intended to host both managed and unmanaged .Net applications. It is free like Google App Engine, however a token is needed, and are in limited supply
• Rackspace has released a similar cloud-computing platform under the brand Mosso, which includes Cloud Sites, Cloud Files, and Cloud Servers
• ServePath has similar to Rackspace offer under the name of GoGrid.
• RightScale provides a service to help manage your cloud. This can also be done via Amazon's API, or Amazon's web based management console. Amazon's management console however does not offer control over all features supported by AWS.
• vCloud Express from VMware service provider partners is another cloud service based on VMware infrastructure.

Provider	Root	Pricing	Bandwidth IN	Bandwidth OUT	Base Price RAM	Base Price Disk Space	Price for 1.7GB Ram (approx)
Amazon EC2	Yes	$0.085/h	$0.10	$0.17	1.7 GB	160 GB	$0.10
GoGrid	Yes	$0.095/h	Free	$0.50	512MB	30GB	$0.19/h (2Gig)
RackSpace (Mosso)	Yes	$0.015/h	$0.08	$0.22	256MB	10GB	$0.12/h (2Gig)

Pricing up to date as of August 1, 2009. Based on their web sites. At first glance, Amazon appears to be the most expensive per hour, compared to the other two. However, taking into account ram, Amazon appears to the least expensive. To further complicate things, Amazon also charges for persistence storage, static IP address, load balancer, and regional data transfer.

External links

• Amazon Web Services main page
• Presentation about Amazon Web Services by Amazon Evangelist Jeff Barr, from QCon London 2008
• Interview about Amazon Web Services with Amazon Evangelist Jeff Barr, from QCon London 2008
• Interview with Amazon VP Adam Selipsky in The Guardian newspaper, 26 March 2009, by Mark Harris
• Bezos Opens Web-Services Sharing for Profits
• Jeff Bezos' Risky Bet