Chapter 9. Using Amazon Web Services

IN THIS CHAPTER

  • Learning about Amazon Web Services

  • Instantiating Amazon Machine Images

  • Provisioning storage, databases, and other services

  • Learning about other AWS offerings

  • Realizing the potential of Infrastructure as a Service

Amazon.com is one of the most important and heavily trafficked Web sites in the world. It provides a vast selection of products using an infrastructure based on Web services. As Amazon.com has grown, it has dramatically grown its infrastructure to accommodate peak traffic times. Over time the company has made its network resources available to partners and affiliates, which also has improved its range of products.

Starting in 2006, Amazon.com made its Web service platform available to developers on a usage-basis model. The technologies described in this chapter represent perhaps the best example of Web services achieved through the Service Oriented Architecture of components that you learn about in Chapter 13. Through hardware virtualization on Xen hypervisors, Amazon.com has made it possible to create private virtual servers that you can run worldwide. These servers can be provisioned with almost any kind of application software you might envisage, and they tap into a range of support services that not only make distributed cloud computing applications possible, but make them robust. Some very large Web sites are running on Amazon.com's infrastructure without their client audience being any the wiser.

Amazon Web Services is ...

Get Cloud Computing Bible now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.