Amazon Web Services

Introduced in July of 2002 and abbreviated as AWS, Amazon Web Services refers to a number of internet based applications that constitute a cloud-computing platform through the auspices of the online marketing giant, Amazon.com. The primary purpose of AWS is to furnish web-based services with a range of functions that can be utilized by developers, rather than catering expressly to end users. Within five years of its launch, Amazon boasted of signing over 330,000 developers as users of its web services. Billing for these services is usage based, with access via HTTP and the type of usage depending on the specific web service.

Amazon AWS

The collection of AWS includes some 20 different services, most notably Amazon Simple Storage Service, also known as S3, and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, commonly referred to as EC2. More familiar to general audiences are Amazon Associates Web Service and Amazon Flexible Payments Service. The former, known by the acronym A2S, was once dubbed Amazon E-Commerce Service; it furnishes access to the company’s product data and e-commerce or online marketing platforms. The latter, abbreviated as FPS, offers a platform for web-based payments.

One of the more intriguing of the many Amazon Web Services is its Amazon Mechanical Turk platform, referred to as MTurk. This platform serves as a virtual workplace interface where micro-tasks unsuitable for completion by computers are performed utilizing human intelligence in exchange for payment per task performed. The service gets its unusual name from an 18th century contraption called “The Turk“, eventually revealed as a clever ruse that in its time was billed as a chess-playing automaton.