This chapter covers
- Overview of Amazon Web Services
- The benefits of using Amazon Web Services
- What you can do with Amazon Web Services
- Creating and setting up an AWS account
Almost every IT solution is labeled with the term cloud computing or just cloud nowadays. Buzzwords like this may help sales, but they’re hard to work with in a book. So for the sake of clarity, let’s define some terms.
Cloud computing, or the cloud, is a metaphor for supply and consumption of IT resources. The IT resources in the cloud aren’t directly visible to the user; there are layers of abstraction in between. The level of abstraction offered by the cloud varies, from offering virtual machines (VMs) to providing software as a service (SaaS) based on complex distributed systems. Resources are available on demand in enormous quantities, and you pay for what you use.
The official definition from the National Institute of Standards and Technology:
| Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (networks, virtual machines, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. |
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| -- National Institute of Standards and Technology _The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing_ | ||
Offerings are often divided into three types: