

What are all of Amazon's web services and what do they do? - kmfrk
http://www.quora.com/What-are-all-of-Amazons-web-services-and-what-do-they-do

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biot
This question sounds like crowdsourcing your research rather than doing the
legwork up front, saying "Here's what I found:" and asking if there have been
any gaps. It's the kind of question one might pay a virtual assistant in a
developing country to answer for you, only people seem to be willing to do
someone else's gruntwork for free.

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ceejayoz
It's especially lazy when Amazon has already compiled a list:
<http://aws.amazon.com/products/>

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dholowiski
I had heard of all of those except for HPC - which I'd probably never use
anyway. But I bet if you showed this list to a 'normal' person they'd be
shocked to discover that Amazon does more than sell books. As we found out
last week, Amazon is really becoming an 'essential service' for the internet,
much like electricity. If you want to do a fun thought experiment, think about
what would happen if Amazon went bankrupt and shut everything down tomorrow,
with no notice (unlikely but it could happen)...

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dangrossman
Amazon Marketplace sellers would be upset, and EBS/S3 users who didn't back up
data outside the cloud would have some work ahead of them. Aside from that, it
wouldn't be doomsday for very many people. Amazon's not really an exclusive
provider of anything they do. Consumers will buy from another store, AWS users
will spin up VPS instances somewhere else, CDN users can go back to Akamai,
Payments users will swap the button for PayPal or Google Checkout instead,
etc.

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philfreo
By that definition, it seems like no services are critical online, as there is
always _some_ alternative. The reality is that doing all the changes you
mentioned could literally cost some companies many months or even years of
time.

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dangrossman
I find that unlikely. AWS hasn't been a major provider for that long. They
weren't PCIDSS certified until just 5 months ago, so no big companies were
even doing ecommerce independently on their platform yet.

If it took a year to build your service on AWS products, it shouldn't take
years to do it again with another provider now that you've done it before. A
server is a server, whatever you've programmed to run on those virtual servers
will run on identical virtual servers at another company. It's only the parts
of your system that interact with Amazon's APIs, and your human
systems/policies, that have to be reworked.

And if you're big enough that your systems take years to build, you have a
disaster plan already. If Amazon blinked out of existence tomorrow, Netflix
wouldn't be standing there with _no idea_ what they'd do to get back online.

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asymptotic
I was about to agree with everyone about this being a lazy question, but now I
feel like an idiot because I never knew Amazon offered "AWS Identity and
Access Management (IAM)" (<http://aws.amazon.com/iam/>), which is a godsend.

What's a shame is that right now there isn't a web-based GUI for this service
yet, and the boto Python module's IAM support is currently undocumented, but
at least the code is there. A bit of code reading to get it up and running.

~~~
jscharf
AWS Management Console support for AWS IAM:
[http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/05/identity-and-access-
manag...](http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/05/identity-and-access-management-
console-support.html)

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benvanderbeek
Do Marketplace Web Services not count? <https://developer.amazonservices.com/>

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dabent
Maybe also the Product Advertising API: [https://affiliate-
program.amazon.com/gp/advertising/api/deta...](https://affiliate-
program.amazon.com/gp/advertising/api/detail/main.html)

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pcora
Great list!

