What are Amazon Web Services?

Amazon Web Services are a set of services provided by Amazon, including S3 (Simple Storage Service) and EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), provided to developers and web service providers that allow them to take advantage of Amazon’s large datacenter infrastructure in a pay-as-you-go, infinitely scalable way.

S3 is a scalable storage solution that makes storing files on the Internet easy. With it, you never have to worry about running out of disk space or making sure your data is redundantly accessible again!

EC2 provides powerful on-demand computing that can be scaled up or down as you need, while paying per hour for the use of virtual machine instances.

EBS, or Elastic Block Store, is a way to persistently store your data with EC2. Think of EBS as a removable hard drive that can be attached to any machine that contains your data. Snapshots are easy with EBS, so your data is always backed up and a click away from a restore.

Services Provided

	Creation of a custom AMI for rapid deployment and scaling, reducing build time
	Setting up RDS, MySQL, or PostgreSQL with EC2 and EBS, with S3 snapshots
	Subversion and Git hosting to provide check-out location for application code
	Management of SimpleDB databases
	Use of CloudFront for rapid delivery of static content and media
	Creating Elastic MapReduce / Hadoop jobs
	Solutions to both utilize S3 for data storage and backup
	Assistance with the AWS Web Console
	Taking advantage of S3 and EC2′s powerful APIs to automate common tasks