Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services has something for every web app. Whether its a small time blog or a hugely popular social web app with millions of users, Amazon will do the heavy lifting reliably and cost-effectively. Read on for some scenarios of what AWS can do for you.
Here is a bulleted list that sums up the benefits of the services. To read the description of each bullet point, check out the AWS about page.
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Cost-effective
- No contracts or commitments
- Pay as you go
- Transparent pricing
- Better economics
- Better use of your time
- Better environmental impact
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Dependable
- Scalable
- Can handle spikes
- Reliable and redundant
- Experience
- Secure
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Flexible
- Platform agnostic
- Ready on day one
- Application services
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Comprehensive
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2™)
- Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3™)
- Amazon CloudFront™
- Amazon SimpleDB™
- Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS™)
AWS for Blogs
With Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3™) Bloggers will find refuge from the high costs associated with serving thousands of static images from their blog. Seriously, check out the pricing. At the time of this post, data storage is $0.15/GB/Month, data transfer is free till June, and 1000 requests costs just one penny! By implementing a Content Delievery Network (CDN) with S3, images and other static content (documents, files, etc) can be served at extremely low cost and with no limit. Perhaps the greatest benefit of this solution is the blazing speeds that S3 brings to your blog. Since the bulky static content will be loading from Amazon’s state-of-the-art servers, your hosting server will be be able to focus on serving the page markup, scripts, and styles, resulting in an extremely fast page load.
If you run a WordPress blog, you can get an S3 CDN setup and running in no time with the Amazon S3 for WordPress plugin. All you need is an AWS S3 account and administrator account for your blog. This is a great plugin, but you’ll want to start using it sooner than later because there is currently no easy way to migrate your existing content to S3, only the content you’ll upload from the time you install the plugin.
Considerations and Tools
FTP
Amazon S3 has a somewhat nontraditional approach to storage. You can’t use just any FTP program to access your S3 content. You’ll have to find an app with special support for it. I recommend Panic’s Transmit 3 (the best FTP program) for Mac users or S3Fox which works on all platforms as a Firefox add-on.
API
No matter which AWS feature you plan to implement in your app, you’ll need the right API and/or client-library. There is a vast community of developers writing basic to complex enterprise systems using PHP, Java, Ruby, and Windows & .NET who contribute to the documentation.