While learning about Amazon AWS I found many people weren’t sure about all these acronyms. So this is a short blog about these two in particular and my thoughts on using them.

 

Amazon AWS is a blanket term for a massive amount of web services offered by Amazon. It stands for “Amazon Web Services”. They sell anything from computing power, to storage space (S3), to push notification services for Android/iOS.

 

As you may have guessed above, S3 is their storage offerings. S3 stands for Simple Storage Service. Dropbox uses this as their backed, as well as countless other companies. It is incredibly cheap. 30 bucks a month for a terabyte of data, its how Dropbox can give free space to every user.

 

And AWS has a bunch of libraries for interacting with their service, so if you’re a solo or small team developer don’t be afraid to use these because they seem “enterprisy” these are powerful tools that can give you a leg up in the competition. You get a year free which includes 5 gigs and 20,000 GET requests a month. If you allow users to upload data on your site, you should be using S3.