For the past few months, I have been working with Amazon web services and I find that it is very friendly for new users. I have been at this whole programming and analysis thing for a long time (40+ years) and I am old school, so with something like this, I am considered an experienced newbie.
I do enjoy learning new stuff and this AWS learning / working environment has been rewarding for me. The AWS journey started for me with S3 glacier storage that I used for long term backup of Blackboard courses at a university. It just seemed to fit for that application and is still used by the University I was working for at the time. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is storage for the internet. You can use Amazon S3 to store and retrieve any amount of data at any time, from anywhere on the web.
My latest experience with S3 is using it as a place for customers using SFTP to upload their weekly file for processing by other AWS services and for backup storage. I will discuss the other AWS services that work with their data files later. This upload is done by SFTP Gateway running on an EC2 instance which is a virtual server in the cloud. This solution enables your customer to upload their files by logging in with their own individual username and password. As with most anything else, they have the option of the process being manual or automated.