Amazon provides you a simple web service to use it for various purposes such as
storing data
in the form of files and folders on
Amazon S3
, and to upload structured data to
Amazon SimpleDB
. It also provides a SimpleDB service to
upload structured data
and
run query
on that data. It facilitates you with an efficient storage service of structured data in form of
domains
. Currently, almost every user who is surfing Internet, must have an account on any web server. Every web server provides a user name and a password to access the account. Using this id, you can store and retrieve your private data on that server.
Similarly, whenever you want to take advantage of accessing the facility of amazon SimpleDB service, you must have an account on Amazon. After
creating an account on amazon
, you will be able to do any operation on SimpleDB such as
create domain
,
run queries
, and
put attributes
.
To perform such operations on SimpleDB, Amazon provides an access key and a secret key, instead of using a username and a password.
AWS Access Key
This key is just like a username. A text string specifically identifies you to access your own account. Nevertheless, this key alone is insecure. To make your operations secure, Amazon also provides another key known as AWS Secret key.
AWS Secret Key
This key is just like a password. Before performing any operation, a user must provide these two keys as authentication keys. Technically, Amazon takes a “signature” as header information for authentication. This “signature” is nothing but an encrypted key, which is a combination of access key and secret key.
It may be possible that user, who has an S3/ SimpleDB account, can have one access key and more than one secret key, so that other users, to whom the owner wants to give, may access his or her account access permissions.
While connecting to Amazon SimpleDB by using SDB Explorer, you must furnish these two keys. After furnishing these two authentication keys, click on go button, to allow the system to check the authentication process, whether the keys are valid or not and later give appropriate message.
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