Amazon is a leading Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform. This type of platform — in which servers, network services, and more are provided on-demand — is also known as cloud computing. AWS is used by companies both large and small to build scalable infrastructure as needed, without significant up-front costs. There are many types of services available within AWS, including servers, database, load balancing, storage, etc.

System health monitoring is a critical component of any infrastructure, and Amazon provides monitoring through the CloudWatch service. From http://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/:

Amazon CloudWatch provides monitoring for AWS cloud resources and the applications customers run on AWS. Developers and system administrators can use it to collect and track metrics, gain insight, and react immediately to keep their applications and businesses running smoothly. Amazon CloudWatch monitors AWS resources such as Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS DB instances, and can also monitor custom metrics generated by a customer’s applications and services. With Amazon CloudWatch, you gain system-wide visibility into resource utilization, application performance, and operational health.
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