Amazon’s web services have a great reputation and are used by big companies to host their web apps. But man, are the services’ names confusing; and there’s a boatload of ’em, too. It’s a mess really; but good news, it’s been translated for us.
A blogpost at ExpeditedSSL lists the Amazon web services and puts them in context by comparing them to familiar services and what to use them for. For example, Cloudfront should have been called Amazon CDN because it’s like MaxCDN or Akamai (which speed up delivery of static files for websites).
I’m pretty much clueless about Amazon’s web services so this is a helpful reference. I hope you find it useful, too.