AWS own email domain and some generic questions - email

I'm getting started with Amazon Web Services and I have a few question I'm not sure about. As every (company) webpage I want to use an "office#companyname.com" email adress, but how is that done? I looked up at godaddy.com (for domain registration), the offer me an email adress like I want, but for 3 dollars per month.
Is this possible with AWS? Because at AWS you have just a complex domain which is not very userfriendly or serious.
Also I want to host my dynamic webpage on the amazon cloud, but I'm not sure if I'm doing that right. I've read many guides, and all I know is that I have to purchase a Elastic Compute Cloud, and a Simple Storage Service... and every guide is working with the basic linux package, why not Windows? Is it more expensive? I just want to host a mySQL Server for the dynamic webpage, which is reached over a normal domain.
And one last question, if I sign up for an AWS account it asks me for an email account. But I found it a little bit unserious to write there my free-webmailer-adress... How is it done the normal way?
Thanks in advance! Best regards, john.

You have a lot of non-specific non-technical questions, and you might be better served asking them on one of the Amazon forums (https://forums.aws.amazon.com/index.jspa?categoryID=1).
Based your implied lack of experience you might be better off starting with a shared hosting service like Godaddy. Amazon AWS adds a layer of technical complexity that you may not need for your situation...
That said, here are some general answers to you Amazon questions:
Amazon AWS provides generally comparable hosting services for both Windows and Linux.
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) will send bulk email, but it will not receive email. To do that within the Amazon ecosystem you would need to run your on mail server(s).

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TOTP radius server for Citrix XenApp

I'm looking for astandards-based TOTP (time-based one time password) authentication server to implement strong security for my Netscaler appliance.
I was not able to find a radius server with easy to use interface that supports Google Authenticator.
Grateful if you can suggest a solution!
Thanks
Not sure about how easy to use this solution is, but what Citrix suggests is OpenOTP. It supports Google Authenticator (in addition to others). It is free for 25 users, 50 users will cost you at least 1000EUR
Another solution is TOTPRadius, no pricing info is available, but it is the only one supporting self-registration if using Citrix StoreFront.
p.s. Sorry, forgot to add a disclaimer: I am affiliated with Token2
Update regarding OpenOTP: it is free for 40 users. Please ask RCDevs for actual pricing regarding more users.
Starting with 50 users you are entiteled to install the OpenOTP/WebADM Backend as an active/active cluster (2 servers).
The OpenOTP Token App supports additional features compared to Google Authenticator.
For fast evaluation, virtual appliances (for Oracle Virtual Box or VMware) are available under here.
Protectimus provides 2FA solution for strong protection against unauthorized account access within Citrix XenApp. It also has a status of Citrix Ready. You can contact sales team for actual pricing.
Disclaimer: I work for Protectimus

Are Database-as-a-Service providers like Modulus and Mongolab actually secure?

Recently, I have been looking at the security of the customer data for my product and found out that one major concern was using third-party services like Mongolab, Modulus, Heroku.
Are these products actually secure? I understand that you can only do so much to secure the services on the cloud where you get shared resources, but even from a cloud standpoint, do you guys feel comfortable using these services?
I was checking with mlab and as far as you can got is:
ssl for connection protection,
authentication -
but there is one question left: Is data at rest encrypted?
If you need to comply with data protection acts (PCI) - this could be still an issue, but for other purposes I have no issues with mLab service.
Any comments welcome!

Amazon web services issue. Should I pay for the web services? [closed]

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I'm new in iOS development, and I faced an issue with amazon.
I wanna gain information about amazon products with amazon web servises. I wanna enter the keyword and get information about proper products.
I looked at http://aws.amazon.com/mobile/ and saw that I should register. During the registration Amazon asked me about my Visa card information and then tried to withdraw 1 dollar.
The questions are:
Should I pay for amazon web services
Is it compulsory to register or I can just download Amazon sdk from http://aws.amazon.com/sdkforios/
Can you give some Amazon sdk code examples?
AWS is paid service. So, it's not a matter whether you should or not pay for using AWS. You MUST pay for the capacity you have used.
The pricing differs between the various services and is typically listed in http://aws.amazon.com/<service name>/pricing/. Here are couple of examples - EC2, S3.
Note that for some of the services there is a free tier for about a year, as long as you stay under certain amount of usage. So, while you WILL get a bill every month, that bill might be for $0.
More about the AWS Free Usage Tier.
You can download the client SDKs freely and write code against it. However, to actually run it against AWS, you will need AWS Access Key ID and Secret Access Key, so that AWS servers can authenticate the requests from your application (and incidentally also bil you properly for your usage).
You should start with the Getting Started with the AWS SDK for iOS and the AWS SDK for iOS FAQs. The SDK also contains bunch of sample apps into the <SDK install folder>/samples folder.
Update:
Ah, you want to search the Amazon catalog? That's different from AWS. AWS is intended to provide you access to computing resources (storage, CPU, load balancing, and so on) for your own services. For your scenario you need to use the Amazon Affiliate Program Product Advertising API.
While that API does share credentials with AWS (it uses the AWS Access Key ID and Secret Key), it most likely is free (but double check to be sure), as amazon will be making money on any product your users buy.
Also, the Product Advertising API does not have client SDKs (as far as I know), so you will have to deal with making the HTTP requests yourself. The API supports both REST and SOAP, so you can choose your own poison. There's also bunch of samples for both server and client apps, in PHP, C#, Java, Node.js, Ruby, and so on.
AWS is great! Its totally worth the price. So you can download the AWS iOS SDK and integrate it into your project; however, before it will work you need to signup. I would give you some examples but I don't fully understand what you're asking. The AWS iOS SDK has tons of code samples in it. If you want, you can comment on this post what you want to use AWS for and then I can help you come up with the code to achieve it :) I hope you have fun with iOS Development, its great :)
Good Luck!
Are you maybe confusing Amazon web services with a request API? You said:
I want to enter the keywork "iphone" and get some iphone products on amazon with its description and price
That is what an amazon web API would do (from this question, I understand there is maybe no such thing for Amazon?). AWS is a cloud service where you can run your programs and pay according to the resources you use. Think of that as a web host.
All in all, AWS is not directly related to Amazon content, if I understood correctly this is not what you want.
Yes of course you have to pay.
You can download it without registration, but you have to register to use it.
There is Documentation in AWS SDK for iOS.

Cloud service to store email activity and to pull reports

What is a good way to store and run some reports on email analytics? Imagine this is a pretty high volume of emails sent, open, click stats broken down to email categories. This info has to be stored at some DB and we need to be able to slice the data in different ways to extract some valuable business information.
One way to do this would be in-house, build a new database and log and track every action. And later on built reports on top of it.
However, this is a lot of work and I was wondering if there's some cloud service that we can use to do this. Azure and Amazon offer cloud DB storage, I guess we can use them, but that means a lot of setup work as well. Not sure if there's a 3rd party email analytics in the cloud service.
Any recommendations on best way to tackle this problem?
Indeed, tracking your email links and analyzing the relevant is a lot of work. I recomend you use a third party application to take care of it.
Most email-as-a-service providers offer prety goood analytics, including things like opens, clicks, by location, time, etc...
It really depends on the provider, but I think you should take a look at some of the best known ones such as Sendgrid, Postmarkapp or Mailjet

Exposed onsite vs IFD deployments for MS Dynamics CRM

I'm working for the first time on a MS Dynamics CRM 4.0 project. Our company has a high number of remote employees and even more remote consultants. As such it will be necessary to make the CRM solution available over the internet. As near as I can tell, I have three options:
Have everyone use a VPN to access an intranet site (typical onsite deployment). However, we have found that VPNs are far from trouble free and cause many support issues. We avoid them like the plague.
Use IFD to expose the CRM on the internet. I don't know much about this except that the URL will be different than the onsite URL, which could cause some headaches (see below).
Expose the CRM site by opening the site to the internet, using SSL to encrypt traffic. We currently do this with our MS sharepoint sites. I'm not sure how secure this would be (one of the reasons for this question).
I'd like to avoid using both the onsite intranet deployment and the IFD together for a couple of reasons. One of the requests for the solution is use email to notify users that they've been assigned a task, and include the URL to the task within the email. For this reason. If both deployments are used, then I'll need to include two URLs and the user would need to know which to use. Which leads to the second reason, the main users of the solution split time between being in the office and being remote. Thus they would need to access the solution two different ways, and know when to use which. Bad.
So, what are the advantages/disadvantages of any of these methods? Any other options? Is there any issue using IFD from within the intranet? Security issues?
UPDATE:
Be sure to read the comments of the accepted answer, as they further explore the ramifications of the various options.
That is the best, you have all the security, and a low maintenance deployment. Also if you are developing custom code (ASPx pages) you will have only one deployment type to support. If your users are already using a VPN Client, this should be the best solution.
This is the Microsoft way to do it. Except for the URL duplication. This solution is used in companies where clients do not want to have a VPN client, or where VPN clients can't pass thru firewalls. Also this solution is almost required if your outlook clients are using "Connect to exchange thru the web". Because in this case all the clients can open Outlook without VPN, CRM should be exposed without VPN, and the IFD deployment is handled natively by the Outlook client. Note that this is SSL enabled (required). EDIT : It's not required, but a best practice, even if the implementation guide says "You must define a URL for the Microsoft Dynamics CRM IFD by using the following format: https://".
This this the worst of all the worlds, you have to maintain the deployment manually, and you will have all the headache of using a deployment as we were using it in CRM 3.0 (NTLM, Kerberos etc). I do not recommend this.
You can use an IFD deployment thru the intranet, but there is some buggy behavior. The external DSN should be configured on the internal DNS server, so that internal client can access the internal server. And because IFD is SSL enabled, you are encrypting internal traffic...
Hope this help!