Web Biz

In preparation for the upcoming presentation at our local CFUG (ColdFusion User Group) on Amazon Web Services with Amazon’s Mike Culver I thought I would revisit the web services provided by Amazon, and others.  The list of available web services from Amazon has grown substantially in the past year to include not only their E-Commerce service but several others as well.

If you have not heard of the Amazon S3 (Amazon Simple Storage Service) web service, then I highly recommend you check it out.  From their web site, it is summarized as:

Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites.

However, even more recently (I think) is their other services they are offering such as:

• Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS)
• Alexa Site Thumbnail
• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and
• Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS)

In my opinion, the most interesting new-comers are the EC2 and FPS services.

The EC2 service is meant to be paired with their S3 service, only the Elastic Compute Cloud service allows you to purchase computing power on-demand.  I can see how this would be especially relevant to web applications whose demand is increasing so fast that the hardware and software cannot scale given the current hardware and resource limitations.

The FPS service appears to be similar to the Paypal model.  The FPS service allows you to take electronic payments through your web site using an Amazon customer’s existing account information that is already being stored by Amazon.

Overall, it looks like Amazon has been busy investing heavily in your Web Services architecture.  I believe that web services like these will continue to be popular and increase in demand as enterprises shift heavily into Service Oriented Architectures.

Lastly, in researching Amazon’s web services portfolio, I thought I would poke around Yahoo! to see if their web service offerings have changed or if they are providing additional services.  When looking around, I happen to come across their ColdFusion Developer Center on the Yahoo! Developer Network site.  If you are new to web services, and Yahoo!’s in particular, I would recommend you check it out.