AWS Platform Services                                           

Amazon Web Services (AWS) gives you the core services S3, EC2, and Amazon EBS and then all the additional services such as IAM, ELB, and Route 53. The AWS platform services, areas of functionality:                          

✓ Services that provide additional application functionality: For example, Amazon’s Simple Queue Service (SQS) provides functionality to enable asynchronous communication between your application and its users or perhaps another application. I call them extended services.

✓ Additional applications that commoditize traditional software offerings that are important but have typically been expensive and complex: An example is the recently launched Redshift business intelligence application. Many established vendors occupy this space, and their applications have two characteristics in common: They cost a lot, and they’re difficult to use. Redshift aims to simplify the building and running of a business intelligence application and to make it much less expensive to operate.

✓ AWS management tools: The AWS API and Management Console are useful for managing specific AWS services (individual EC2 instances, for example), but they don’t provide much help in managing an aggregation of AWS resources that make up an application. How can you defineand manage the collection of resources that comprise your application? Amazon offers three separate tools: Elastic Beanstalk, CloudFormation,and OpsWorks. You should understand the differences between them so that you can select the right one.                           

 

AWS platform services offer the same benefits (and generate the same problems) as the core services. Though they provide useful, easy-to-use functionality at a reasonable price, they present the potential for lock-in — the investment of so many resources in a solution that changing course is almos timpossible. In fact, the lock-in potential is probably greater for platform services because they’re more closely tied to the AWS environment than many of the additional AWS services. Therefore, you must carefully evaluate whether the benefit you receive by embracing these services outweighs any concerns you may have regarding AWS lock-in.