Does Amazon have free API?

Can you use Amazon AWS for free?

There's more to it than just S3.

In June, I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at a local hackerspace. Part of the talk is a demo of what I do at Amazon Web Services, with some tips and tricks on how to get started. The talk is available for those who might be interested in starting a new project with Amazon, and I have broken it up into three parts.

The first two parts are available here: Part 1: An Introduction to Amazon Web Services. Part 2: An Introduction to Amazon WorkSpaces. Part 3: How to get started with your first EC2 and S3 project. These posts are meant to supplement my presentation at the hackerspace. They contain some information that the talk doesn't cover, and they show some of the more useful tricks I've learned over the years.

In this post I'm going to dive into one particular option you may have never heard about: Amazon WorkSpaces. What Is Amazon WorkSpaces? The primary concept behind WorkSpaces is that each user gets a virtual machine on Amazon's EC2 service. If you're doing web development, you already have access to these machines and your own machine. You just need to get the Amazon machine started and online. These are not physical, physical machines; they are virtualized. Each machine is basically a complete copy of a real operating system (with differences to work around the differences of an operating system running in a virtual machine).

The difference between Amazon WorkSpaces and the other services you're probably using are as follows: You don't need to manage the machine. You don't need to manage the connection to the machine, even when there's only one connection. You can easily destroy the machine remotely. This is important because, sometimes, things happen. The most common is that someone accidentally kills their machine.

This makes it easy to scale up or down your workflows. When you need more space, just fire up another machine.

Some additional notes: If you have any security issues, Amazon will have to log into your machine. The first 30 minutes of every session will be charged for. This might change if we offer a free trial.

How do I get the Amazon API?

Before you start, make sure you have: a valid AWS account and an Amazon S3 storage bucket.

Amazon Web Services have an interesting set of services for both developers and non-developers. I'm going to be using only the most basic tools, so let's quickly go through what I used to set up this application. If you're not familiar with Amazon, I recommend you start by reading the AWS documentation.

A simple AWS application is just that: a simple application. It consists of a client and a server. The client (in this case Android or iPhone) is going to make a request to the server, and the server will process the request, and return a response. Usually, we don't need to worry about where exactly the server is - we assume it's somewhere else on the internet. We can also assume that the server has more processing power than we do (the cloud, remember?)

To start, we'll create an S3 bucket, and generate some public access credentials to use for signing requests to the server. In order to get our public keys, log in to your Amazon Web Services dashboard. You should then see something like this in your dashboard:

The first thing we need to do is create a service. You can create an Amazon Web Services service either by using the AWS Dashboard, or by running the AWS Command Line Interface. If you want to use the dashboard, you can run the following command to generate a new service name: aws --generate-service-auth-code --cli-input-json file://path/to/service-file. The service name doesn't really matter - there are many, and we can switch between them later on. The service is basically a container for all your credentials, and we'll need to create one.

AWS Command Line Interface works by parsing JSON commands that you provide. Our file is called service-file. Here's an example of how it looks:

We need two things here: the ID of our service, and our secret key. If you haven't already, sign up for an AWS account. From there, navigate to My Account and log into your account.

Does Amazon have open APIs?

The short answer: No.

They have a data feed that you can hook into, but they don't provide any direct way to access their products directly.

The long answer: Most people would agree that having direct access to an API is generally a good thing. Having direct access to your data means you have more control over what happens with it, more control over how you use it, and a higher quality product as you can do things like add support for new product types or implement other features.

It's also often a prerequisite of the API, so developers may find it necessary to look at an API before they'll even consider working with a product. If you can't provide a full API, it's unlikely that you'll be able to gain the trust of the developer community who need it.

You may notice I've referred to APIs in a few sentences now. That's because Amazon has multiple data feeds that they give access to. Each data feed is named after the type of content it represents:

Actors - The main API feed for media products, containing metadata about an image or video. You could call these actors for example.

The main API feed for media products, containing metadata about an image or video. Music - The main API feed for media products, containing metadata about a song or album. You could call these songs for example.

The main API feed for media products, containing metadata about a song or album. Genres - The main API feed for media products, containing metadata about a movie or TV show. You could call these genres for example.

The main API feed for media products, containing metadata about a movie or TV show. TV - The main API feed for media products, containing metadata about a TV show or episode. You could call these seasons for example.

The data feeds are used by the majority of apps on the Kindle Fire and the Kindle Fire HDX. They're also used by the Netflix app on Android. There are also dozens of apps on Kindle that connect to the Actor API.

The most interesting API to me is the Music API. It contains all the information you could get about a song from the Amazon Cloud Player.