Amazon web services: Where to start

Question

I am a recent grad and wanted to learn about doing web application using AWS. I have gone through the documentation and ran their sample Travel Log application Successfully.

But still I am not clear about the terminologies used. can anyone explain me the difference between Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon SimpleDB in simple words.

I am looking to come up with a web app that has a signin page and people posting some text there. may i know what services of amazon would be required for me to build this app.

Thanks

Answer 1

Amazon S3 is used for storage of files. It is basically like the hard drives like on your system you use C or D your files. If you are developing any application you can use S3 for storing the static files or any backup files.

Amazon EC2 is exactly like your physical machine. Only difference is EC2 is on cloud. You can install and run software, applications store files exactly you do on your physical machines.

Amazon Simple DB is a a database on cloud. you can integrate it with your application and make queries.

Answer 2

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is a scalable, high-speed, low-cost web-based service designed for online backup and archiving of data and application programs. It allows to upload, store, and download any type of files up to 5 TB in size. This service allows the subscribers to access the same systems that Amazon uses to run its own web sites. The subscriber has control over the accessibility of data, i.e. privately/publicly accessible.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides scalable computing capacity in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. Using Amazon EC2 eliminates your need to invest in hardware up front, so you can develop and deploy applications faster. You can use Amazon EC2 to launch as many or as few virtual servers as you need, configure security and networking, and manage storage. Amazon EC2 enables you to scale up or down to handle changes in requirements or spikes in popularity, reducing your need to forecast traffic.

Amazon SimpleDB

Amazon SimpleDB is a highly available NoSQL data store that offloads the work of database administration. Developers simply store and query data items via web services requests and Amazon SimpleDB does the rest.

Unbound by the strict requirements of a relational database, Amazon SimpleDB is optimized to provide high availability and flexibility, with little or no administrative burden. Behind the scenes, Amazon SimpleDB creates and manages multiple geographically distributed replicas of your data automatically to enable high availability and data durability. The service charges you only for the resources actually consumed in storing your data and serving your requests. You can change your data model on the fly, and data is automatically indexed for you. With Amazon SimpleDB, you can focus on application development without worrying about infrastructure provisioning, high availability, software maintenance, schema and index management, or performance tuning.

For more information, go through these:

https://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/concepts.html

https://www.tutorialspoint.com/amazon_web_services/amazon_web_services_s3.htm

Answer 3

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is for load static content , maybe images, videos, or something you want to save, You could think of it like a hard drive for storage.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud: ( EC2) basically is your Virtual Operative System, you can install whatever OS you want (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Centos, Windows Server, Suse enterprise). ( if your application uses server side processing this will be its home)

Amazon Simple DB, is a no-sql database system, that you could use for your aplications, and Amazon gives you as a service, but if you want to use something more, you could install yours on EC2, or use RDS for Database server (MySql for example)

If you want to know more, there are some books, like: "programming Amazon EC2" or see Amazon screencast at http://www.youtube.com/user/AmazonWebServices or its presentation on http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices