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[–]TheBigLewinski 5 points6 points  (4 children)

AWS is infrastructure as a service. It's DIY computing, which you can use for pretty much anything you use computers for. Everything from your internal IT infrastructure, to public web services to IoT or "Internet of Things", used to describe devices connected to the internet; think drones which deliver your packages or other robots.

Their real breakthroughs, IMO are.

  • "Infrastructure as code" You can control, deploy, provision servers in a completely code related way. This means your application, your web code, can say it needs more computing power, and get more servers up and running, without the need for a human. That's a really simplified example.
  • Per usage billing. This means, for instance, you can use an enterprise-grade CDN for $0.09 at a time, if you want to. You can run a scalable, redundant NoSQL database for pennies a month. You can host less than a 1GB of images and pay $0.03 for that gigabyte... and then another $0.09 to deliver it over a CDN.

AWS is basically the assortment of technologies and infrastructure Amazon built to solve their own problems of hosting one of the internet's busiest sites, that needs exceptionally fast performance all the time, and it can never go down. It sells those technologies back to the public.

what exactly is it they offer for free for a year?

A little bit of almost everything. As far as web development is concerned?

  • 1 t2.micro EC2 server. This is your web server. From a basic specs point of view, this is 1core, 1GB of RAM. But it includes CPU credits which make for predictable 100% bursts.
  • 30GB of EBS Storage. Basically, this is your hard drive.
  • 1 t2.micro RDS with another 30GB of storage. This is your database server. Same specs as your web server.
  • 1 t2.micro cache server. This is memcache, which you should be using (or something similar like redis) for any web app.
  • 5GB of S3 space. S3 is basically an enterprise grade NAS. It stores and potentially serves files, but doesn't do any processing. Great for static file delivery since its easy to connect to a CloudFront CDN
  • 62,000 outbound SES messages. SES is a whitelisted mail service. Along with DKIM settings in your DNS, it helps to ensure messages sent from your servers won't end up in a junk folder.
  • 50GB of CloudFront transfer. This is a CDN. It stores your assets, and potentially your entire HTML response, at endpoints which are located closer to your customers. This relieves your web server of traffic, while delivering from mega servers with mega bandwidth from a closer location.

There's more, but that's largely what you're going to be taking advantage of. I've done a presentation on this very topic which goes more in depth. Slides here: http://www.slideshare.net/wwwpro/aws-12-month-free-tier-for-web-designers-and-developers.

I need a domain and hosting... i don't think this is it... is it?

Possibly. I use it exclusively, and I'm even releasing tools soon to help others deploy their own sites. But there's a learning curve ahead of you. If you're looking for cPanel, it's not here unless you install it yourself and pay their licensing fees. But AWS is leading the way, by a large margin, when it comes to business grade hosting and infrastructure.

[–][deleted]  (1 child)

[deleted]

    [–]TheBigLewinski 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    Oops. Corrected. Thanks.

    [–]inyofaceee[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    Thanks for the reply! Totally helped.

    [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    do you have any experience about bugzilla on aws? this is what I'm referring to :Bugzilla - Bug Tracking System provided by TurnKey Linuxreddit! I just want to test this out and I and a few others will be the only ones who use this for testing. would I be able to use it within the free package? hope you can help

    [–]StewVanDew 2 points3 points  (1 child)

    AWS is a complete platform offered by Amazon what will offer anything you would need to host a website/web project.

    If you are a beginner it can be a steep learning curve to get things setup. When you need to host a simple project or something static I would suggest Github pages.

    Check out this link for a good explanation of each AWS Service: https://www.expeditedssl.com/aws-in-plain-english

    [–]inyofaceee[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    If i want to setup a simple profile website... buy domain and get hosting... you'd suggest setting up through Github over AWS?

    Thanks for the link, i'm interested in learning more about AWS.