Prior to 2002, developers with a compelling business need for Amazon’s product data resorted to directly downloading and parsing the HTML, a process called scraping. Since the underlying site can change at any time, scraping is a tedious, fragile and error-prone process. With the introduction of standard data formats such as XML, the XSLT transformation language and the SOAP protocol for access to web services, the foundational pieces were in place for Amazon to provide developers with rich, robust, and structured access to the Amazon product catalogue and to other components of the Amazon technology platform.

In this session, Amazon Web Services Evangelist Jeff Barr reviews Amazon’s motivation for building AWS, describes the current set of offerings, including Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon E-Commerce Service, Alexa Web Information Service, and Alexa Web Search Platform. The session will also include several demonstrations of real-world applications.