Amazon Web Services

Amazon is by far the biggest online retailer with an almost worldwide presence. Everyone has heard about Amazon and the possibilities that this type of store present to the busy society of the 21st century: they offer home delivery of pretty much anything that can be bought in a conventional store.

Amazon was founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos, and since then, it has grown consistently every year, offering more and more products and services, but at some point, they got into the cloud computing business. It makes sense that a big company such as Amazon needs a lot of processing power, is reliable, and is able to adapt to the necessities of the business quickly.

Initially, the cloud services were an internal solution to satisfy the high availability needs of the business as well as have the capacity to grow in a uniform way. This created a lot of expertise within the company in building a top notch Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) that, at some point, they realized could be sold to customers.

By 2006, there was nothing in the market to compete with them, so they were in the sweet spot for a successful start.

I remember I was only in college when the first two services, EC2 and EC3, were introduced in a conference.

EC2 allowed you to create virtual machines on the cloud with an API that was manipulated through a command-line interface as well as a web interface that would act as a monitor of your resources.

S3 was a key value (kind of) storage that allowed you to store immense sets of data at a very low price manipulated through the command-line interface as well.

It really was a revolution. It was a complete paradigm shift: now you could ask for more resources as you need. This was as simple as an API call, and there you go: three new machines ready to be used in 2 minutes. The following screenshot is a list of services on AWS:

In the last few years, Amazon has been adding services very often, up until a point where it is hard to keep up with the pace. In this chapter, we are going to walk through the main services (or what I consider the most useful), showing their features and areas of application.