Amazon

Overview

Amazon is probably one of the best known web-based, or online, businesses in the world. Today, Amazon.com is a $15 billion business. However, Jeff Bezos, Amazon's Chairman and CEO, realized that it wasn't just their ability to sell books online that was impressive. They had also gained a tremendous amount of experience and expertise in designing and running a global web infrastructure, which many other companies and developers would probably like to use if only it was available to them. In 2006, customers and developers got their wish answered with the launch of Amazon Web Services (AWS), the first major player in what has become knows as the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market.

Amazon Web Services gives companies easy access to infrastructure services delivered via the cloud allowing them the ability to select capacity on-demand, paying pay as you go services for compute power, storage, identity, database, messaging, and other solutions. From a development perspective it is platform agnostic, so developers can choose the programming model that suits their needs.

As a result, AWS is valuable for the flexibility it brings to a company data center since resources can be added and subtracted as needed, on the fly, based on the customer's resource demands. It's also a very cost-effective approach for customers and developers because of the pay as you go model. And, as the AWS infrastructure grows so do the economies of scale, making it easier for Amazon to get even more aggressive with its pricing and pass the savings along, further enticing people to try its service. In addition, the platform itself is "battle-tested" and brings a highly-scalable, reliable, and secure web environment within easy reach of thousands of organizations.

Value Proposition

AWS includes the following benefits: highly dependable, scalable, and secure web-scale infrastructure, which is the same one that supports Amazon's core business; cost-effective, pay as you go model with no contract or minimum usage required; flexible application development and deployment environment; and a comprehensive cloud platform covering identity, payment, database, messaging, and other services.

Products & Services

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) allows customers to "rent" server capacity to run their own applications in the cloud. Applications are deployed using a web interface to create virtual machines (i.e. Amazon Machine Instance or AMI), which can be managed and terminated as needed.
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an cloud-based storage service that provides unlimited storage through a web interface. It provides an inexpensive way for customers to store and retrieve data on-demand. Customers pay to transfer data to Amazon S3, unless it's between it and Amazon EC2 in which case it's free.
• Amazon SimpleDB is a distributed database and works in concert with Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3, that eliminates the need for administrative tasks like modeling, indexing, and tuning.
• Amazon CloudFront provides content delivery giving customers an easy way to distribute content to end users with low latency, high data transfer speeds, and no commitments.
• Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) is a highly scalable, hosted distributed messaging service. Customers pay on a per-use rate, thereby negating the need for a dedicated server.
• Amazon Elastic MapReduce provides capacity-on-demand for very data-intensive tasks, such as data mining or web indexing, and utilizes the Hadoop framework (the open source version of Google's MapReduce).
• AWS Premium Support provides individual support to help customers build and run applications on AWS for a monthly fee.

AWS also includes the following services: Amazon Flexible Payments Services (Amazon FPS), Amazon DevPay, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Alexa Web Information Service (AWIS), Amazon Fullfillment Web Service (Amazon FWS), and Amazon Associates Web Service.