Understanding the Amazon Business Philosophy

Amazon Web Services was officially revealed to the world on 2006. AWS offered the Simple Storage Service, its first service. (As you may imagine, Simple Storage Services was soon shortened to S3.) The idea behind S3 was simple: It could offer the concept of object storage over the web, a setup where anyone could put an object — essentially, any bunch ofbytes — into S3. Those bytes may comprise a digital photo or a file backup ora software package or a video or audio recording or a spreadsheet file or —well, you get the idea.

 

The service is now offered throughout the world in a number of different regions. Objects can now be as large as 5 terabytes. S3 can also offer many more capabilities regarding objects. An object can now have a termination date, for example: You can set a date and time after which an object is no longer available for access. (This capability may be useful if you want to make a video available for viewing for only a certain period, such as the next two weeks.) S3 can now also be used to host websites — in other words, individual pages can be stored as objects, and your domain name (say, www.example.com) can point to S3, which serves up the pages.

A few months after Amazon began offering Simple Queue Service (SQS), which provides a way to pass messages between different programs. SQS can accept or deliver messages within the AWS environment or outside the environment to other programs (your web browser, for example) and can be used to build highly scalable distributed applications.

Later in 2006 came Elastic Compute Cloud (known affectionately as EC2). As the AWS computing service, EC2 offers computing capacity on demand, with immediate availability and no set commitment to length of use.