Whenever people are talking about Amazon. Most of the people will say “Ya, the online bookstore right?”. But now beside the online store, Amazon also offering a series of web services, Amazon Web Services or AWS in short.

The infrastructure services that are offered:

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
• Amazon SimpleDB
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
• Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)

Recently, my job required me to look into EC2 and S3. We need to design a scalable architecture of new web application. It is worth to take a deep look into them.

EC2 is about scalable application deployment. This service allows you to create virtual machine or instance  and run your web applications.  In layman’s term, it allows your to rent and run your web applications. What interesting is the service provides manageable compute capacity of applications through its simple web service interface. It is “elastic” because you can scale your applications based on your demand. It charged as low as $0.10 by hourly basis on each instance. Of course there is different charges on the data transfer usage as well. Presume that you do not own a servers farm, multiple machines or any similar infrastructure, EC2 is relatively flexible and cost-effectiveness to scale your application during high or low traffic usage. Sound good huh? But there is a main drawback of EC2. It is an image which means no permanent data will be stored. If something goes wrong on the hardware, power failure, or anything that you could possible imagine, then your data is gone. There is where S3 comes in to solve the problem.

S3 is a online storage service. It claimed to gives the developer the same scalable data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its business. Amazon charges $0.15 per GB a month.

I will start to setup up and run some applications on EC2. I will post more about the findings on AWS.