Amazon Web Services: A Year in Review

Web services can be helpful and those offered by Amazon are no exception. It allows the user more control over what is going on. But it does so in a non-threating environment that is easy to understand.

Amazon’s Web Services specifically offer an enriched experience that offers such things as Product Information, 3rd party seller info, plus a whole heck of a lot more. The final point of the article by Jeff Barr is that Amazon really out did themselves with a decent API. Way to go Amazon!

They started small and simple in 2002. There now in version 4 of their API and have created some really cool and powerful features.

He’s talking about what people wanted their data, and people were scripting/scraping their site (Erik/Rob are you listening). Third party developers have built things that they (Amazon) never ever dreamed of; by opening it up they stopped the data scraping. They built an infrastructure and then built web services/XML over HTTP on top of the infrastructure.