Amazon web services: Where to start

Question

I am a recent grad and wanted to learn about doing web application using AWS. I have gone through the documentation and ran their sample Travel Log application Successfully.

But still I am not clear about the terminologies used. can anyone explain me the difference between Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon SimpleDB in simple words.

I am looking to come up with a web app that has a signin page and people posting some text there. may i know what services of amazon would be required for me to build this app.

Thanks

Answer 1

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is for load static content , maybe images, videos, or something you want to save, You could think of it like a hard drive for storage.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud: ( EC2) basically is your Virtual Operative System, you can install whatever OS you want (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Centos, Windows Server, Suse enterprise). ( if your application uses server side processing this will be its home)

Amazon Simple DB, is a no-sql database system, that you could use for your aplications, and Amazon gives you as a service, but if you want to use something more, you could install yours on EC2, or use RDS for Database server (MySql for example)

If you want to know more, there are some books, like: "programming Amazon EC2" or see Amazon screencast at http://www.youtube.com/user/AmazonWebServices or its presentation on http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices