1 What is Amazon Web Services?

This chapter covers

  • Overview of Amazon Web Services
  • The benefits of using Amazon Web Services
  • What you can do with Amazon Web Services
  • Creating and setting up an AWS account

Almost every IT solution gets labeled with the term cloud computing or even just cloud nowadays. Buzzwords like these may help sales, but they’re hard to work with when trying to teach—or learn—how to work with these technologies. So, for the sake of clarity, let’s start this book by defining some terms.

Cloud computing, or the cloud, is a metaphor for supply and consumption of IT resources. The IT resources in the cloud aren’t directly visible to the user; layers of abstraction exist in between. The level of abstraction offered by the cloud ...

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