Continuing on from my last post about Amazon Web Services, I shall now introduce you to the lesser known services they provide.
Simple Queue Service
“Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) offers a reliable, highly scalable, hosted queue for storing messages as they travel between computers. Amazon SQS makes it easy to build an automated workflow, working in close conjunction with the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and the other AWS infrastructure web services.”
As Amazon’s site says, SQS provides a way of queing messages that can then be processed later. Imagine that our pie shop has just developed a new website where people could order pies and be emailed when their pie was ready to be picked up. The site would add a message to the ‘to be made’ queue, this queue would be read by the automated pie making machine which would then make the pie and email the customer once its ready. A dedicated application could constantly monitor the queue and in keeping with our elastic pie making factory it could add more pie making machines if demand for pies grew beyond the current capacity.
Flexible Payments Service
“Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS) is the first payments service designed from the ground up specifically for developers. The set of web services APIs allows the movement of money between any two entities, humans or computers. It is built on top of Amazon’s reliable and scalable payment infrastructure.”
FPS allows you to easily set up and recieve payments from any customer with an existing Amazon account. It is simple, secure and very flexible allowing you to create complex payment models such as micro-transactions and recuring payments. Of course Amazon takes a small cut of the transaction amount but this can be paid by you or the customer.
Amazon Mechanical Turk
“Amazon Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence. The Mechanical Turk web service enables companies to programmatically access this marketplace and a diverse, on-demand workforce. Developers can leverage this service to build human intelligence directly into their applications.”
“With Amazon Mechanical Turk, it may seem to your customers that your application is somehow using advanced artificial intelligence to accomplish tasks, but in reality it is the “Artificial Artificial Intelligence” of the Mechanical Turk workforce that is helping you effectively achieve your business objectives.”
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service allows you to set up tasks that require human interaction and have these completed by a workforce for a small fee. For example, you may have 1000 photos of people eating pies and you would like to know what sort of cutlery is being used by the person in each photo. The Mechanical Turk service enables you to set up a batch job for which you pay real people for their processing power. You can make the terms for each task as complex as you like, you can also qualify your workforce if a particular set of skills is required or you’d like them to have correctly completed a specific percentage of previous tasks.More can be found about the origins of the name at Wikipedia.
Associates Web Service
“The Amazon Associates Web Service (formerly named the Amazon E-Commerce Service “ECS”) exposes Amazon’s product data through an easy-to-use web services interface that, when combined with the Amazon Associates Program, is a powerful combination for website owners, Web developers, and Amazon sellers to make money.”
Amazon’s Associates Web Service allows you to get information such as prices, customer reviews and images for products sold by Amazon and earn money for referrals back to Amazon. For example the owner of our pie shop could display product information for pie related cookbooks. For each cookbook clicked on and purchased our pie shop owner would earn some commission.
That’s about it for Amazon’s web services, I hope you’ve enjoyed this brief introduction. I’d be interested to hear from anyone who has actually been using AWS in their projects – what did you use it for and why?
