While Nodejitsu and Heroku can be considered developer-level service providers because they are PaaS, Amazon Web Services (and Microsoft Azure) will be considered enterprise-level services because they are more IaaS. The sheer volume of options and services available with AWS and Azure is staggering. These are definitely top-tier services and hosting an application like ours is kind of like using a bazooka to kill a fly!

AWS does provide its own NoSQL database, called DynamoDB, but for our purposes, we want to continue working with MongoDB and use Mongoose in our app. To do this, we can use a third-party MongoDB provider. If you recall, when we originally set up Nodejitsu, one of the MongoDB providers listed was MongoLab. MongoLab provides MongoDB-as-a-Service, which means we can use its service to host our MongoDB database, but use all of the power of AWS to host our Node.js application (this is not unlike what's already happening with Nodejitsu and Heroku; they just streamline the process a little better). Remember that AWS is an IaaS provider, so you can also just create another server instance and install MongoDB on it yourself and use that as your data source. However, that's slightly beyond the scope of this chapter.