The Amazon Web Services Platform
I've been working with Amazon Web Services as part of a new job, and I was surprised to see how many rich services Amazon is offering under the AWS banner now. Â
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I made a point of looking at every one of them (as of October 2017) and reading enough about it to get what it's for. The scope of these services is incredible, and I get what the "serverless" trend is about now. Â You can build and deploy complete application back ends in AWS, start to finish. No surprise to many, I'm sure, but last time I looked at AWS it was mostly storage and VMs.
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Here's my cheat sheet.
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Code Hosting
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VMs in the cloud. |
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Docker containers in the cloud. |
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Cheap, simple VMs in the cloud. Backed by EC2. Check out this StackOverflow post for some details. |
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App hosting. You supply the your application code (Java, PHP, .NET, Node, Tomcat, Ruby, etc), and they run it on a managed server. |
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Function hosting. You write backend logic code in JS, C#, Java or Python, and it hooks up to an endpoint that you can call or trigger from other AWS activity. "Serverless". |
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Manages running large jobs in parallel Docker containers across many EC2 instances. |
File Storage
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Simple file storage with an HTTP API. Pay for the amount of storage and transfer you use. |
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Provides filesystem semantics on top of S3. |
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Slow, low-cost storage, for backups and archiving. |
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Software you run that acts as a local cache for your EFS data. Mount as iSCSI or as a share on your network. |
Database
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Hosted SQL databases (hosting MySQL, PostgreSQL, or a number of others). |
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Amazon's own MongoDB style noSQL database. |
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Hosted redis / memcached compatible in-memory caching. |
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"a fast, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse solution" |
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Artificial Intelligence
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Speech recognition and natural language understanding. Build a smart Slack bot. |
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Text to speech. |
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Imagine analysis and object detection. |
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Machine learning. Upload models, run them on data. |
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Messaging
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Message queueing service. Create queues, add messages to them, and have various things pull messages and act on them. |
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Send and receive email. SMTP gateway or API. |
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Pub/Sub messaging, for delivering notifications to different parts of your application, and SMS notification service. (Those two don't seem that similar to me). |
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Developer Tools
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Sort of a New Project wizard for creating projects that use Amazon services, in a large number of languages. Generates a Git repository and the provisions the services your project type needs. |
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Amazon does GitHub. |
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Amazon does continuous integration. |
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Automated deployment of built applications to EC2 instances. |
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Visual workflow tool for orchestrating builds and deployments. |
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Log and trace collection and analysis for distributed applications. |
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Migration
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Move your MySQL data into Amazon's Aurora SQL database. |
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Move your physical PC into an EC2 VM. |
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Move your local data into and out of Amazon by copying it to physical devices and shipping them around. |
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That's the core stuff. I'm not going to list every other service, just the ones that I think might be of interest to app developers.
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CDN. Make your content available quickly worldwide. |
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Amazon sells domains? |
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Monitoring for your AWS services. |
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Create templates for sets of services that you typically deploy together, with a visual editor for adding services and relationships. |
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Audit trail for things that happen across your AWS services. |
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Watches your AWS services and makes security, cost and other recommendations. |
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Automated security analysis of your services. |
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Free SSL certificates for your AWS-hosted services. |
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User account management services for your apps. Good blog post here. |
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Web application firewall. |
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Collect, process and analyze streaming data. |
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Online game server hosting, with game engine integration. |
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Helps you provision AWS services and integrate them into your mobile app. Not really a service itself. |
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Deploy your app to real physical devices for testing. "AWS Device Farm tests are run on real, non-rooted devices" |
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Spam your users with push notifications. I'm sorry, I mean "Engage Your Audience with Messaging Campaigns". Also includes app usage analytics. |
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High-level service that lets you create workflows by stringing together Lambda functions. |
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Another workflow service, which on the surface seems pretty similar to Step Functions. |
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Stream desktop applications to a web browser. |
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Video format conversion. |
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Define your own external API to give to your developers as a front end for the services you've built in AWS. |
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There are also services under the AWS banner, like WorkDocs, WorkMail, WorkSpaces and Chime, that seem more like Office365 type user services than developer services.