Web services are self-contained applications that can be published and invoked across the Web using XML-based protocols. Amazon.com Web Services offer the user applications that range from retrieving information about a set of Amazon.com products to adding an item to a shopping cart. You can access Amazon.com Web Services through an XML over HTTP or a SOAP interface. Both of these methods return structured data (product name, manufacturer, price, etc.) about top-selling products at Amazon.com based on parameters such as keyword search terms and browse tree nodes.

You can do all sorts of things with Amazon.com Web Services. For example, XML and SOAP allow you to retrieve product information directly from our servers on a daily basis and format the information any way you'd like for your own web site. If you don't want to parse the XML yourself, you can use our XSLT service to reference an external style sheet in your calls to our site, and we will pass back a document that follows the guidelines of that style sheet. Amazon.com Web Services also provides a platform that developers can use to design productivity applications for other Amazon.com customers, merchants, Associates, or Web site owners.

To find out more about the program or to download the free Amazon.com Web Services software development kit, please see http://www.amazon.com/webservices.

Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.

Find out more about S3.