A Closer Look: Amazon Web Services

Amazon has been doing some pretty nifty stuff lately. They've exposed their computing infrastructure to the rest of the world via RESTful web services. I think it's a brilliant move by Jeff Bezos and it realizes some of the technology promises of the last decade or so.

Amazon's web services have been getting a lot of great reviews from many bloggers and deservedly so. With their pay-as-you-use model, it's amazingly easy to scale up or down based entirely on workload; there's virtually no need for capacity planning and no need to manage physical systems at all! I've been using their web services for over a year now for a variety of tasks and it has been, for the most part, quite pleasant. They've saved me a lot of time and money but their services do have their faults. I'll be talking about some of the issues I've encountered with the design or implementation of their services over the next few posts.