I've worked with AWS for many years in various capacities. I finally registered for an account myself when they made their Free Tier offering. The day after their announcement, I registered an account and spun up a server. It's an amazing deal--and it still is, now that some free tier baselines still applies after the account matures.

They've grown a lot over the years, with so many different services. The architecture is solid and the price-to-value ratio can't be beat. In terms of public cloud offerings, they're the one every competitor must contrast. To top it off, they have a lot of PaaS providers piggybacking off their architecture. EngineYard and Heroku are prime examples. This makes them hard to beat since any new provider will have to effectively compete against more branch companies in different fields. Services are overall very stable. Prices drop every year. They are the epitome of an economy of scale company.

Everyone has heard of Amazon EC2, the Elastic Compute Cloud. This is their primary offering. Their pricing gimmicks are actually worth considering--particularly Spot Instances and Reserve pricing (and the marketplace for Reserves). I almost never run instances with On-Demand pricing anymore. If I want a quick job, it'll be a Spot instance. If it needs to run a month or more, I grab a reserve (the marketplace is great for short term reserves). It also comes with a lot of ancillary services to back it up. VPC lets you effectively set up a network across servers that interact with each other. A VPC has its own network security groups, which when used in conjunction with the server-specific EC2 security groups, allows precise network access architecturing. There's EBS to allocate big drives and the new EFS as an expandable Network File System so instances can effectively share a storage device. Autoscaling and load balancing are also useful, especially when implemented in conjunction with Route 53 DNS and CloudFront.

And in terms of deployment to the server once it's running (or if you don't want to run a server at all), there are services for that too! OpsWorks is great if you like Chef. Then there's Code Commit to host your git repository. (Why not use GitHub instead? Because Code Commit allows unlimited repository sizes, is practically free, and will follow IAM restrictions! If it fits on GitHub, go for it, otherwise, Code Commit.) The more recent EC2 Container Service lets you use your Docker containers to squeeze more out of a server without having to manage Docker directly. That's a big win for micro-services developers like me.

Need a database for that app? There's the Relational Database Service that runs a managed MySQL and PostgreSQL (...and others whom shall not be named here). For your caching needs, ElastiCache supports both Redis and Memcached. And there's Cloud Search, which I have not used, but assume is a good text search indexing service. Lastly, a service I have not used but would like to, is the Machine Learning service that guides you through generating models to analyze your analytics/user data.

This sounds like a bad infomercial. (I am not getting paid for this in anyway.) It's a great platform. If you're thinking of getting into the cloud (why aren't you already?) these are the guys to try first.