Amazon Web Services FAQ

What is amazon web services?

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) are a collection of remote computing services (also called web services) offered over the Internet by Amazon.com.  With AWS you can requisition compute power, storage, and other services–gaining access to a suite of elastic IT infrastructure services as your business demands them. With AWS you have the flexibility to choose whichever development platform or programming model makes the most sense for the problems you’re trying to solve. You pay only for what you use, with no up-front expenses or long-term commitments, making AWS the most cost-effective way to deliver your application to your customers and clients.

And, with Amazon Web Services, you can take advantage of Amazon.com’s global computing infrastructure, that is the backbone of Amazon.com’s $15 billion retail business and transactional enterprise whose scalable, reliable, and secure distributed computing infrastructure has been honed for over 13 years.

Is Amazon web services secure?

In order to provide end-to-end security and end-to-end privacy, Amazon Web Services builds services in accordance with security best practices, provides appropriate security features in those services, and documents how to use those features. In addition, AWS customers must use those features and best practices to architect an appropriately secure application environment. Enabling customers to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of their data is of the utmost importance to AWS, as is maintaining trust and confidence.

For detailed information, please refer to the Amazon Security Center, or feel free to give us a call.

Are there performance concerns?

There are no inherent performance concerns surrounding Amazon Web Services.  As with any platform, performance is derived from a combination of workload, software, infrastructure components, and configuration.  AWS provides many unique scaling opportunities that allow instant scaling, without having to understand what a peak workload looks like.  For databases in particular, Blue Gecko has researched and defined best practices for database on AWS; we can work with you to understand your needs and will tell you if we think AWS is an appropriate platform or not.

Is AWS certified by the database vendors?

Yes. Many database vendors provide explicit support and licensing definitions for Amazon Web Services including Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, Postgres, and more.  Amazon is working aggressively to build stronger and stronger relationships with database vendors to simplify licensing and support for databases on the AWS cloud.