Hundreds of thousands of customers have joined the Amazon Web Services™ community in order to build solutions for their businesses. The AWS cloud computing platform provides the flexibility to build your application, your way, regardless of your use case or industry. You can save time, money, and the difficulties of managing your own infrastructure, without compromising on scalability, security, or dependability.
A handful of the types of solutions customers have built include:
Application Hosting
Many existing application vendors are looking for ways to offer hosted alternatives to packaged software. Hosted applications offer numerous benefits, including: subscription-based revenue models, easier upgrade paths, reduced time to market, and more predictable costs. Amazon Web Services offers a number of products, including the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) that give application vendors an easy way to use the massive compute power of the Amazon cloud computing platform along with persistent storage functionality to host their existing software on the Internet. In addition, AWS upcoming content delivery services, together with Amazon S3, will offer an efficient and cost-effective means for serving large amounts of content to end-users.
Application Hosting Case Studies: Abaca, AdaptiveBlue, Autodesk Seek, DigitalChalk, Dreamfactory, LiveLeader, Mailtrust, Morph, rPath, Smartsheet
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Backup and Storage
Even as storage becomes more plentiful and affordable, you’re still faced with the task of managing your growing storage infrastructure. Amazon Web Services provides a cost-effective solution for storing information in the cloud that eliminates the burden of provisioning and managing hardware. The Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3™) is storage for the Internet. Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. With Amazon S3, you get a highly scalable, reliable, fast, and inexpensive data storage infrastructure that enables you to deliver cost-effective and dependable backup solutions. Thousands of customers already use Amazon S3 as their personal backup location, and several more customers deliver compelling end-user backup, storage, and disaster recovery solutions using Amazon Web Services, including:
Backup and Storage Case Studies: 37signals, Altexa, BeInSync, ElephantDrive, Jungle Disk, MediaSilo, MyOwnDB, Sonian, Zmanda
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Content Delivery
Amazon CloudFront makes it easier for developers and businesses to distribute content to end-users quickly, with low latency and high data transfer speeds. The service lets you deliver your content through a worldwide network of edge locations. Requests for your objects will be automatically routed to closest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance. Amazon CloudFront works seamlessly with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3™), which durably stores the original, definitive versions of your files. Like other Amazon Web Services, there are no long term contracts or monthly commitments for using Amazon CloudFront – you pay only for as much or as little bandwidth as you actually deliver through the service.
Content Delivery Case Studies: AF83
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E-Commerce
E-commerce solutions require proven credit card processing capabilities. Businesses and their customers alike demand proven security, scalability, and ubiquity. As part of Amazon Web Services, the Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS™) offers a powerful solution for handling the financial end of an e-commerce application. Amazon FPS automatically processes payments and refunds so that businesses can focus on delivering great solutions for their customers instead of the details of financial transactions. A number of customers deliver e-commerce solutions using Amazon FPS, including:
E-Commerce Case Studies: AdBrite, Amazon Products Feed, Associate-O-Matic, Giveness, GMP Services, Groupee, Inside, Net Applications, The Talk Market, Zoomii
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High Performance Computing
Many business problems could be solved if only there was infinite compute power available. Amazon Web Services provides cost-effective and massive compute power in the cloud. The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2™) is the computer processor for the Internet. Amazon EC2 provides developers with access to a tremendous amount of compute power, enabling you to upload very large data sets and process them across multiple virtual compute instances using any algorithm running in Amazon EC2. Both the data sets and the results of the processing algorithm may be stored in Amazon S3 for fast, reliable, and inexpensive access. Many customers already use Amazon Web Services to quickly process large amounts of data without having to purchase thousands of servers that would subsequently go unused. These customers include:
High Performance Computing Case Studies: Harvard Medical School, Washingtonpost.com
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Media Hosting
Media distribution can be an unpredictable and expensive business. Companies looking to serve media files can incur extremely high storage requirements, far exceeding those of many other businesses. Cost-effectiveness storage and distribution of those large files become primary concerns for making the business economics work. Amazon Web Services enables cost-effective, scalable, and dependable distribution of content. The Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is storage for the Internet and provides a very cost-effective way to store large files in Amazon’s reliable and dependable cloud computing platform, and to distribute files that are accessed with moderate or low frequency.
Media Hosting Case Studies: GigaVox Media, Indianapolis 500, Jamglue, SmugMug
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On-Demand Workforce
Businesses are always looking for people with specific skills to accomplish specific tasks that may not be possible or may be inordinately difficult using software. The Amazon Mechanical Turk™ web service helps businesses connect with people who have the skills they need to get work done. It gives businesses access to a vast network of human intelligence with the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of computers, and enables them to complete projects faster.
On-Demand Workforce Case Studies: Channel Intelligence, Casting Words, Hit-Builder, Von Kempelen
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Search Engines
Search engines and web crawlers require a large amount of processing power and storage in order to index the web and provide their customers with a satisfactory experience. Using the massive compute power and storage of Amazon Web Services, search engine vendors are able to scale to process and save the information necessary to deliver their service to their customers.
Search Engines Case Studies: Alexa, Hanzo
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Web Hosting
Web hosting development has unique requirements for databases, security, e-commerce support, and more. Amazon Web Services provides massive compute power that can scale as your business grows, very large amounts of storage that can handle the most demanding requirements your application may throw at it, a powerful database service that is both easy to use and flexible enough for the unique requirements of web applications, and several other services that satisfy your needs as a web developer. Many customers have built their web business on Amazon Web Services, including:
Web Hosting Case Studies: Digitaria, G.ho.st, Gumiyo, ShareThis