Gregor Richardson

Amazon Pay is an easy to use payment processor that allows you to leverage the Amazon payment infrastructure inside your e-commerce website or application. It is designed to reduce the steps and friction involved in the checkout process by letting customers checkout using the address and payment information stored in their existing Amazon account.

Amazon Rekognition is a pre-trained machine learning service which performs object identification within images and video. Rekognition is categorized as a part of the AWS Artificial Intelligence Services. Interaction with these services happens through their APIs, and they are ready-made for integration into applications without the need for expertise in the underlying machine learning concepts.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a system for queuing messages, designed to be the communication bridge between the internal components of a web application. SQS quickly and reliably processes messages created by one component in an application (a producer) and holds them for processing in other places (a consumer). This approach allows application architecture to be more distributed, as all components can feed into--and take from--a global message queue without needing to maintain their own independent resources.

Lambda’s Node.js runtimes support JavaScript’s standard implementation of Asynchronous function. This allows function calls to return a “promise”, which is a placeholder for an eventual response. The promise is received immediately, and normal code execution resumes without waiting for the final response. The benefit of this is speed, as non-dependent code can continue executing while a separate processing thread waits to resolve the promise into a full response.

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is a communication tool used to send alerts when specified events happen. It fills a small but important niche within the cloud application space, and that niche is event alerts.

SNS is geared towards internal notifications, rather than communication to end users. For end user communication, Amazon Pinpoint can be used, as it offers a similar but more expansive set of functionality with far more customer centric features, like customizable emails.