Amazon: The New Web Empire
Amazon: The New Web Empire
I have been trying to sit down to write this article for a while, but I never seem to have the time. I had put together some links while researching that were pretty good, so I figured I would publish them anyway so interested people would have somewhere to start from.
Amazon.com, while building a book selling machine, has put together a pretty extensive set of cloud computing services. This article is meant to give you a brief overview of a few of their services and give you a starting point if you are interested in researching this technology.
Amazon Web Services
This is a good place to start if you are a marketing person or just want to
get a basic idea what is going on. This is a non-technical overview of their
services. This gives you info about SLAs and a basic idea of the technical
relevance, but does not get into too much detail. It is basically an info and
sign up section.
Amazon Developer Connection
If your like me, you learn by getting your hands dirty. You will want to sign
up for an amazon web services account and get into their APIs and development
documentation. This is the starting point for getting into that for each of
their services.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Beta) (EC2)
Marketing: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Beta)
Developers: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Beta)
This is basically like a web based CPU that you can run processes on. Need a
computer to do some thinking for you? Check this service.
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
Marketing: Amazon Simple Storage Service
Developer: Amazon Simple Storage Service
This is basically like a web based Hard Drive that you can store files on.
Does your app have files that need to be stored somewhere? Check this service.
Amazon SimpleDB
Marketing: Amazon SimpleDB
Developer: Amazon SimpleDB
This is basically a web based Database that you can use for storage. Does your
app need a database? Check this service.
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
Marketing: Amazon Simple Queue Service
Developer: Amazon Simple Queue Service
This is basically the way that the different Amazon web services can talk to
each other and tell each other what to do. Do you need EC2 to talk to S3?
Check this service.
Amazon Dynamo: The Next Generation Of Virtual Distributed
Storage
This is an interesting article about how Amazon stores their data in a cloud.
Amazon has a lot of cool things going right now and they are definitely a company to watch. If you are a developer, you may want to check out the different interfacing that they have with many of the popular networks and technologies. Primarily building Facebook applications with Ruby on Rails.
