Until now, small developers did not have the capital to acquire massive compute resources and
ensure they had the capacity they needed to handle unexpected spikes in load. Amazon EC2 enables any
developer to leverage Amazon’s own benefits of massive scale with no up-front investment or
performance compromises. Developers are now free to innovate knowing that no matter how successful
their businesses become, it will be inexpensive and simple to ensure they have the compute capacity
they need to meet their business requirements.

The “Elastic” nature of the service allows developers to instantly scale to meet spikes in traffic
or demand. When computing requirements unexpectedly change (up or down), Amazon EC2 can instantly
respond, meaning that developers have the ability to control how many resources are in use at any
given point in time. In contrast, traditional hosting services generally provide a fixed number of
resources for a fixed amount of time, meaning that users have a limited ability to easily respond
when their usage is rapidly changing, unpredictable, or is known to experience large peaks at
various intervals.

No. You do not need an Elastic IP address for all your instances. By default, every instance comes
with a private IP address and an internet routable public IP address. The private address is
associated exclusively with the instance and is only returned to Amazon EC2 when the instance is
stopped or terminated. The public address is associated exclusively with the instance until it is
stopped, terminated or replaced with an Elastic IP address. These IP addresses should be adequate
for many applications where you do not need a long lived internet routable end point. Compute
clusters, web crawling, and backend services are all examples of applications that typically do not
require Elastic IP addresses.

Amazon S3 provides a simple web service interface that you can use to store and retrieve any amount
of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. Using this web service, you can easily build
applications that make use of Internet storage. Since Amazon S3 is highly scalable and you only pay
for what you use, you can start small and grow your application as you wish, with no compromise on
performance or reliability.

Amazon S3 is also designed to be highly flexible. Store any type and amount of data that you want;
read the same piece of data a million times or only for emergency disaster recovery; build a simple
FTP application, or a sophisticated web application such as the Amazon.com retail web site. Amazon
S3 frees developers to focus on innovation instead of figuring out how to store their data

Amazon RDS manages the work involved in setting up a relational database: from provisioning the
infrastructure capacity you request to installing the database software. Once your database is up
and running, Amazon RDS automates common administrative tasks such as performing backups and
patching the software that powers your database. With optional Multi-AZ deployments, Amazon RDS also
manages synchronous data replication across Availability Zones with automatic failover.

Since Amazon RDS provides native database access, you interact with the relational database
software as you normally would. This means you’re still responsible for managing the database
settings that are specific to your application. You’ll need to build the relational schema that best
fits your use case and are responsible for any performance tuning to optimize your database for your
application’s workflow.

Amazon S3 is secure by default. Upon creation, only the resource owners have access to Amazon S3
resources they create. Amazon S3 supports user authentication to control access to data. You can use
access control mechanisms such as bucket policies and Access Control Lists (ACLs) to selectively
grant permissions to users and groups of users. The Amazon S3 console highlights your publicly
accessible buckets, indicates the source of public accessibility, and also warns you if changes to
your bucket policies or bucket ACLs would make your bucket publicly accessible.

You can securely upload/download your data to Amazon S3 via SSL endpoints using the HTTPS protocol.
If you need extra security you can use the Server-Side Encryption (SSE) option to encrypt data
stored at rest. You can configure your Amazon S3 buckets to automatically encrypt objects before
storing them if the incoming storage requests do not have any encryption information. Alternatively,
you can use your own encryption libraries to encrypt data before storing it in Amazon S3.

• RDS for Amazon Aurora: No limit imposed by software
• RDS for MySQL: No limit imposed by software
• RDS for MariaDB: No limit imposed by software
• RDS for Oracle: 1 database per instance; no limit on number of schemas per database imposed by
  software
• RDS for SQL Server: 30 databases per instance
• RDS for PostgreSQL: No limit imposed by software