This appendix contains a snapshot of the many different resources available for using Amazon Web Services or developing applications based on the services. We can only bring you a small sampling of the resources available, because there are a great many and the list is growing.
Consider this listing an appetizer, something to whet your appetite and leave you hungry for more. The online resources we mention below will give you a starting point for discovering the broad range of AWS tools, utilities, libraries, and turnkey solutions available out there on the Web. They will also point you to the AWS forums, where you can ask questions and find advice on the technical aspects of Amazon’s services.
Amazon has encouraged a community to grow around their web services offerings by providing a large number of resources online. This strategy has worked well; there is a thriving developer community active in the forums to answer questions and discuss techniques for developing applications based on Amazon Web Services (AWS). There is also an ever-growing collection of sample code, libraries, and tools available for a range of languages and platforms. The vast majority of these resources are free.
To realize the greatest benefit from AWS, we recommend that you become involved in the forum discussions and take full advantage of the advice and examples available in the following AWS pages:
The starting point for learning about AWS, signing up for services, and exploring the resources available online.
Discussion forums for AWS as a whole and for the individual services. Here you can take advantage of a large community that includes Amazon staff and third-party developers to ask questions, search for solutions for common problems, and receive advice on using Amazon’s services.
http://aws.amazon.com/resources
The central location for technical documentation, articles, code samples, release notes, and the latest API documentation for all services.
http://solutions.amazonwebservices.com
A listing of third-party solutions built on AWS and available for use by businesses, consumers, and non-developers in general. If you are interested in using Amazon’s services but would prefer to find a turnkey solution instead of building your own, this is the place to look. If you develop a product or service based on AWS, you can publicize it here.
The latest news about AWS.
http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html
An online Javascript tool provided by Amazon for estimating the monthly bill for your AWS usage.
Links to the various AWS resources listed above, as well as “scratchpads” for generating REST requests for the S3, EC2, and SimpleDB services amongst others. These scratchpads allow you to generate web service requests from details you provide. They offer an easy way to create and perform ad-hoc requests, as well as providing useful examples of request construction for various services.
Amazon DevPay is a billing and account management service that helps developers to earn money for the applications they build using AWS. DevPay allows developers to set the prices they will charge customers to use their applications, based on a flexible range of pricing schemes including one-off fees and metered usage charges.
If you take advantage of DevPay, customers who wish to run your application will sign into the DevPay service, specify how they will pay, and be allocated an account identifier that will give them access to the application. From this point, DevPay will take responsibility for billing the customer for their usage of your application, and will forward the money collected to your Amazon Payments account.
In addition to tracking your customers’ application usage and billing them appropriately, DevPay provides management tools for developers to adjust their application’s pricing, and activity monitoring tools to track earnings.
At the time of writing the DevPay service was in beta release and was only available to AWS developers with U.S.-based credit card and banking accounts. It could perform billing and account management for applications based on only the S3 and EC2 services, though support for additional AWS services was planned.