An Amazon Web Services primer

In fact, it's safe to say that Amazon Web Services has become synonymous with cloud computing; it's the platform on which some of the Internet's most popular sites and services are built. Nevertheless just as cloud computing is used as a simplistic catchall term for a variety of online services, the same can be said for AWS—there's a lot more going on behind the scenes than you might think.

Think of EC2 as the computational brain behind an online application or service. EC2 is made up of myriad instances, which is as a matter of fact just Amazon's way of saying virtual machines. Each server can run multiple instances at a time, in either Linux or Windows configurations, and developers can harness multiple instances—hundreds, even thousands—to handle computational tasks of varying degrees. This is what the elastic in Elastic Cloud Compute refers to; EC2 will scale based on a user's unequalled needs.

Instances can be configured as either Windows machines, or with various flavors of Linux. Again, each instance comes in different sizes, depending on a developer's needs. Micro instances, for instance, only come with 613 MB of RAM, during Extra Large instances can go up to 15GB. There are as well other configurations for various CPU or GPU processing needs.