Overview
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a collection of remote computing services that together make up a cloud computing platform. AWS provides a large computing capacity much faster and cheaper than building a physical server farm.
The most well-known is Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3.
Amazon is an example of an IAAS (Infrastructure as a Service) provider.
Terminologies
AWS
Amazon Web Services, a division of Amazon focusing on hosting our applications and data
SimpleDB
AWS’s always-available replacement for RDBMSs. Specifically SimpleDB is their hosted, replicated key-value store that is always available and accessible as a web service
S3
(a.k.a Simple Storage Service) AWS’s always-available file storage solution accessible as a web service
SQS
(a.k.a Simple Queue Service) AWS’s always-available queueing service accessible as a web service
ELB
(a.k.a Elastic Load Balancer) AWS’s always-available load balancing service accessible as a web service
EC2
(a.k.a Elastic Compute Cloud) AWS’s on-demand server offering accessible as a web service
CloudFront
AWS’s CDN (a.k.a Content Delivery Network) offering accessible as a web service
Benefits
Basically, by moving these services out of your data center and into the cloud, you:
No longer need to run and maintain a data center. You no longer need the associated staff
Get a more scalable and available infrastructure without trying to build it yourself