Three Important AWS Services Developers Should Know

We spent an entire season going over Amazon AWS services at a high level.  That shows how many options you have available in that world.  However, there are some options that are more important AWS services to know.  These are the core offerings upon which many other services are built.  Thus, it provides a good foundation for growth.

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

The first of our important AWS services is the Elastic Compute Cloud.  The short name for this service is EC2.  This service provides a virtual machine.  While the size, power, and storage can all vary, at its core, EC2 is a virtual machine.  There is a free tier option for this service that will allow you to create a UNIX server and work with it for a year. 

The power will not allow you to run a highly popular web site.  However, you can create a little development server, run a web or application server, and get familiar with all that you need for such a device.  While this may not seem very valuable to a software developer, it is an excellent secondary skill and experience to have.  EC2 is also a unique way to play around on a UNIX command-line and work with security.  

Installing WordPress on Amazon AWS EC2

Launching Your Apache Web Server on Amazon’s EC2

Simple Storage Service (S3)

While EC2 is a foundational service for processing, S3 is a foundational storage option.  This service is used by a lot of applications and sites to store data securely on an enterprise-grade platform.  Thus, you can backup files here, treat it as a CDN, or even as a file server of sorts.  The S3 administration tools are easy to learn, and you can get up and running in minutes. Also, the API is easy to learn and provides several examples to kickstart your development.

Cloud 9

This service provides a cloud-based IDE you can use for coding on your EC2 (or another vendor VM) server.  While this is useful for making adjustments to server-based code, this has grown to be good enough for creating virtual development environments in the Cloud.  Even better, this tool and its features are regularly improving.  Therefore, keep up with the latest developments here as the tool that is "not quite there" today may be your tool of choice next year.