Let's spend some time now and talk about Amazon Web Services, which will be the primary cloud-based tool that we use in the prototype applications that we developed for class. We're going to start with a basic overview of AWS. We'll look at the services that are provided. We'll talk a little bit about getting certified in using AWS and we'll talk importantly about the cost of some of these services once you get past the prototype level of use. Amazon Web Services is an incredible suite of tools. There is no question about that. The Gartner folks that keep track of industry trends state that Amazon Web Services is a safe choice because it has a wide feature set, certainly the most mature tool set. Amazon is known as a thought leader in providing services for cloud-based functionality. It can be a little hard to master how the system works, but it's fairly easy to start. There's good support for tutorials, It is a proprietary service, It does have a tendency to change as Amazon innovates and the cost can be prohibitive depending on what you're doing. Again, lots of different categories of services available in AWS. We're going to concentrate on Internet of things, but we'll end up potentially using database tools, voice to text services, other elements that are available. You do want to take a little bit of time and make yourself more aware of what's out in the AWS tool sets. What you'll find, if you look at the different services that are available, is there's just a dizzying array of different tools and different services that you can take advantage of. Again, for text to speech, speech to text, you've got things like Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, Recognition. There's different storage options for different types of databases, compute servers, Lambda for serverless processes. Again, in red there, the chunk that we're most interested in, the Internet of Things support for connecting devices to AWS. Again, this is only a subsection of what's available and it's also constantly changing, so you're going to want to take some time to see what AWS looks like today for the services that it might provide you. The other thing you want to do when you get a chance to look at AWS is start to take a look at some of the different tutorials that are available out there for working with the system. Even something like just making a virtual machine or making a serverless microservice with Lambda and with the API gateway. These are common operations for our applications that it would be good to take a look through some of the detailed information that's available for helping you pull these systems together. If we take a look at one of the standard books that talks about Amazon Web Services, Wittig and Wittig has reviews of using a lot of the tool sets to create applications that use virtual machines. Web application deployments, setting up security, setting up data storage, using relational databases, NoSQL databases, message queuing. SQS, by the way, is simple Q service, is one of the most important tools that you'll get to use when you use Amazon Web Services. We'll spend some time talking about it later, but it's a really great tool because you can send copies of messages that you're routing through AWS to SQS. Then you can go take a look at them, So when you're debugging an application, you've got an easy location that you can see if the messages are getting into the system the way you think. All of these tools are useful in different ways and it doesn't hurt to spend some quality time with a good book or with the examples to dig into these in more detail as opposed to those specific applications that we're going to be doing for class. If you get really interested in AWS, you can become a certified solutions architect. I'm not trying to sell you on this, but certainly having that AWS skill set is something that can lead to interesting work into some jobs that might require that level of expertise. It does take some work to understand all the different aspects of AWS and get to a point where you're comfortable enough to take these examinations. There's also a large number of different certifications that you could possibly look at around security networking, big data cloud applications, etc. You can think about whether any of these things necessarily might mean something to you. Certainly, you don't need to do these to do the IoT type examples that we're going to be using in class. Another thing to think about with AWS is the cost. This is a perfect example of there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Almost everything on AWS, once you get past a small free tier of services, costs money. As a student, you'll have some access to an AWS account and you'll see more information on how to sign up for that. But in some cases, when you want to get to certain services, you may be tempted to provide a credit card to get open access. Just be aware of the costs that can possibly come with simple things like starting up a VM instance and how that might be billed to you. One of the things that we tend to look at in the campus class is the AWS cost calculator where we'll actually go in and do an example system and see what some of the costs are. Because again, in general, it's not free. Although for IoT applications and a little bit that will be using it, it pretty much is. All right, let's move on.
