Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a very large suite of Cloud services provided by Amazon. AWS provides, at a base level, virtual machines and the services surrounding them. Many Cloud-based virtual machine services such as Google Compute Engine, DigitalOcean, Rackspace, Windows Azure, and so on provide the ability to bring up a machine from a supported base operating system image or snapshot, and it's up to the user to customize it further.

Amazon has made itself one of the leaders for Cloud-hosting by providing not just virtual machines, but configurable services and software implementations of hardware found in data centers. For most large-scale systems, the move to Cloud infrastructure brings to the table a huge set of questions on how to handle issues such as load balancing, content delivery networks, failover, and replication. The AWS suite can handle the same issues that a physical data center can, usually for a fraction of the cost. They can get rid of some of the red tape that comes with a data center such as requesting provisioning, repairs, and scheduling downtime.

Amazon is constantly offering new services to tackle new and unique problems encountered with Cloud infrastructure. However, this book may not cover every service offered by Amazon. The services that this book will cover include: