AWS Overview

What is it?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud infrastructure provider. In simple terms, cloud infrastructure providers have a huge range of services that aim to have everything modern website needs in one place. For example, modern websites often need database servers, cache servers, a CDN, domain management, webservers, load balancers and other elements.

Why did we choose it?

AWS is very reliable, and some of its offerings are fairly priced. In addition, it has very well supported APIs, making it a stable choice. It is one of the main giants of the infrastructure world, the other being Microsoft Azure; Google Cloud is a smaller competitor, and there are many others.

What do we use it for?

A lot. It's hard to put that in a short paragraph here, so this AWS section is split into one page for each AWS service we make use of.

The full list of AWS services/sections we use is:

Lightsail (webservers)
ElastiCache for Redis (cache servers)
RDS (Relational Database Service, for database servers)
Route 53 (domain and DNS management)
System Manager (specifically just the parameter store section, used for storing system credentials the webservers need to access certain resources)
Lambda ('serverless' cloud computing)
SES (Simple Email Service, for sending emails programmatically)