Get to know Amazon! :D

Okay, so, Amazon is coming for placements! Woah! Many look forward to it! And are working hard towards it.

I thought I will put up a post about it. So, here's the deal. I heard there's gonna be a lot of stages in the selection process and a weird name was given to the word "stages". They called it "hurdles". No wonder.

Anyways, from the mail that we got, looks like we will surely have an aptitude test and a face to face interview. People would already be preparing for the aptitude test, or at least will know what to prepare and would start soon.

But what about the interview ? It's always a tricky thing. Always. So, one of the things that came to my mind was - What if they ask me about the company ? About their products ?

Of course every company expects students ( who attend the interviews ) to know about them and their products, and their value. And it kind of makes sense. Well, if you wanna join their company, you must have a better reason (to join them) than just money, because they are looking for such kind of minds and not just money minded freaks. And to prove that you have a better reason, is by telling how cool their products are and how the cool the company is, in terms of present and the past.

Most people read about the company's history and know the present status too. Some check out the annual turn around and all. I hardly remember all this, but sadly, the recruiters want you to kinda know the rough values of this too.

Apart from these, one of the cool things you should know about the company is their products! And as of Amazon is concerned, don't worry, you don't have to act as though you like their products to impress the recruiter... because when you get to know their products, you will literally love it!

Now, off to the products, the main topic of this post!! I will try to list the famous products first, and in the order of how they are famous in terms of a normal man and not an IT person.

You already know Amazon has a Online Shopping site, of course. It's very famous. We in India, use the word "Amazon" to mostly refer to their Online Shopping Store. They are known for their customer service and have beaten Flipkart many times in those aspects. [ Calm down Flipkart lovers. Sorry. Truth being spoken. Can't help it. ]

Next they are famous for their Amazon Kindle Reader. You must have seen a lot of this in Ads and stuff. The Kindle is cool. No more words. Just Google them out. There are different types with different features actually. Based on the price of course.

And then to support their Kindle Readers with Ebooks, they have a very big Online Book Store with Ebooks.

And then there's Amazon Music to listen to songs and Amazon Video ( like Netflix ) to stream Movies, TV Shows etc. There's something called Prime Music and Video actually. Amazon Prime is like some Pro membership package for Music, Videos, Books and even photo storage ( like Google Photos I guess). Check out their sites :

Amazon Music
Amazon Video
Amazon Prime

Then they have their own Tablets, called Fire Tablets. I own one. They are pretty decent. It runs on Fire OS. Don't confuse that with Firefox OS, which is different and was made by Mozilla. Fire OS is built exclusively for Amazon Fire Tablets and the OS is built on top of Android. And they have the OS has a play store too! Called Amazon Play Store. But doesn't have much Apps sadly. Though all Apps are just APKs. Remember ? Fire OS is built on top of Android. So, what works in Android should work here too, which is kinda logical and it is correct too, in this case. There's more to the Play Store stuff, relating to Google Play Store and all. Look it up yourself.

Now, the last one I wanna talk about is Amazon Web Services. Now, most of you reading this might be in a confused state. Some of you might have heard the name if you had attended the Amazon Echo product intro which an Amazon Official gave in our college. Anyways, if you go look into this Wikipedia Page of Amazon, it says that the company - " is an American electronic commerce and cloud computing company ". We know what the first is. It is kinda world famous. But the second ? Even the second is kinda world famous, just among developers and IT people though :P That's why it comes up as one of the main things in Amazon's Wiki Page.

Amazon Web Services is what they are referring to. It's called AWS.

AWS provides Cloud Computing Services. And their delivery model or service model is - IaaS - Infrastructure As A Service. There are some more delivery models like, SaaS and PaaS.

And there are so many services that they provide! Just now I was counting. There are at least more than 40 services I guess, but I was sleeping when I counted, so, never mind the count. But it's big fore sure. And each service is super cool. And lots and lots of companies use AWS. To know more about all this, you need to check about Cloud Computing first and then about SaaS, PaaS, and then IaaS. Since we are learning Grid and Cloud Computing as a course, learning this shouldn't be a problem and you won't regret it too :P just in case you are the kind of person who studies only if things are useful in exam.

That's all I wanted to say about the products and services of Amazon. Actually, I would say, try AWS for free if you are a developer. And the free period is for 12 months ! 1 year that is ! But it's worth it to try. :)