What is AWS?

Amazon Web Services (abbreviated AWS) is a collection of remote computing services (also called web services) that together make up a cloud computing platform, offered over the Internet by Amazon.com. The most central and well-known of these services are Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3.

Why use AWS?

Of late, we have seen numerous web development services and service providers striving to make their presence felt and are competing to maintain their hierarchy in the e-market. As a result a lot of these new start-ups are abandoning the traditional web-hosting platforms and are building more and more scalable infrastructure. There comes the necessity of Amazon Web Services in the context of cloud computing.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) have been offering world class IT infrastructure services to businesses in the form of web services -- now commonly known as cloud computing ever since its inception in 2006. With cloud computing you can easily replace up-front capital infrastructure expenses with incredibly low variable costs that effortlessly scale with your business.

One of the key benefits of cloud computing is the opportunity to replace up-front capital infrastructure expenses with low variable costs that scale with your business. With the advent of serious cloud-computing, the need for pre-planning and advance procuring of servers and other IT infrastructures is no longer a hard and fast necessity. Instead, they can instantly spin up hundreds or thousands of servers in minutes and deliver better and quicker results.

Why not?

When it comes to the low end, Amazon is known to be an expensive service provider and might perform poorly compared to other dedicated servers. The web-based management console which is continuously evolving with numerous customized applications, currently provides only a subset of the API functionality. Moreover some advanced features will require you to either use AWS command line tools or a 3rd party app.

Target Customers:

Although Amazon started off with start-ups and micro-sized businesses in mind as the target market, later on many medium sized as well as large organizations including giants like Microsoft openly declared AWS as their web service provider. It has been observed that there are no specific businesses which can be excluded from the benefits AWS. In fact businesses of all sizes which have generated or would like to generate tremendous revenue opportunities through the web, especially B2C businesses can take enormous gains implementing their solutions on AWS.