Here is extremely short version of various products from amazon for “cloud computing”. For anybody who is working with AWS this is very basic but for newcomers like me, this should give an idea.
Disclaimer: This is complied from various sources and not written by me.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that offers resizable compute capacity in the cloud and is designed to make web scaling easier for developers. Amazon EC2 provides a simple web interface that allows you to obtain and configure capacity with little difficulty. It allows you control of your computing resources. Amazon EC2 cuts the time it takes to obtain and boot new server instances to a few minutes, allowing you to change scale as your needs change. For instance, Amazon EC2 can run Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and is a way to deploy applications using the Microsoft Web Platform, including ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, Silverlight, and Internet Information Server (IIS).
Amazon EC2 allows you to run Windows-based applications on Amazon’s cloud computing platform. This might be web sites, web-service hosting, high-performance
computing, data processing, media transcoding, ASP.NET application hosting, or any other application requiring Windows software. EC2 also supports SQL Server Express and SQL Server Standard and makes those offerings available to customers on an hourly basis.
Amazon SimpleDB For database services
Amazon offers its Amazon SimpleDB. It provides core database functions of data indexing and querying. This service works closely with Amazon Simple
Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon EC2. This provides the ability to store, process, and query data sets in the cloud.
Amazon offers the feature because traditional relational databases require a sizable upfront expense. They are also complex to design and often require the employment of a database administrator. Amazon SimpleDB is—as the name says—simpler. It requires no schema, automatically indexes data, and provides a simple API for storage and access. This makes the process easier to manage and eliminates the administrative burden of data
modeling, index maintenance, and performance tuning.
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is Amazon’s storage solution for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
Amazon S3 utilizes a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the Web. It gives developers access to the same data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own retail empire.
Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront is a web service for content delivery. It works in conjunction with other Amazon Web Services to give developers and businesses an easy way to distribute content to clients. Amazon promises low latency, high data transfer speeds, and no commitments. The service delivers content using a global network of edge locations. Object requests are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best performance possible.
Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS)
Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) offers a scalable, hosted queue for storing messages as they travel between computers. Developers can move data between distributed components of their applications that perform different tasks, without losing messages or requiring each component to be always available. Amazon SQS allows an automated workflow to be created and works closely with Amazon EC2 and other Amazon Web Services.
Amazon SQS exposes Amazon’s web-scale messaging infrastructure as a web service. As such, any computer on the Internet can add or read messages without any specially installed software or special firewall configurations. Amazon SQS components can run independently, and need not be on the same network, developed with the same technologies, or running at the same time.
Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
Amazon also launched its Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), a persistent storage feature for the Amazon EC2. Amazon EC2 is an infrastructure service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. With Amazon EBS, storage volumes can be programmatically created, attached to Amazon EC2 instances, and if even more durability is desired, can be backed with a snapshot to the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
Prior to Amazon EBS, storage within an Amazon EC2 instance was tied to the instance itself so that when the instance was terminated, the data within the instance was lost. With Amazon EBS, users can choose to allocate storage volumes that persist reliably and independently from Amazon EC2 instances. Additionally, for even more durable backups and an easy way to create new volumes, Amazon EBS provides the ability to create point-intime, consistent snapshots of volumes that are then stored to Amazon S3. “For over two years, we’ve focused on delivering a cost-effective, web scale infrastructure to developers, giving them complete flexibility in the kinds of solutions they deliver,” said Peter De Santis, general manager of Amazon EC2. “Persistent block storage has been among the top requests of developers using Amazon EC2, and we’re excited to deliver Amazon Elastic Block Storage designed specifically for our cloud-based, elastic computing environment.”
Amazon EBS is well suited for databases, as well as many other applications that require running a file system or access to raw block-level storage. As Amazon EC2 instances are started and stopped, the information saved in your database or application is preserved in much the same way it is with traditional physical servers.