Google APIs are application programming interfaces developed by Google which allow communication with Google Services and their integration to other services.
nginx [engine x] is a HTTP server and mail proxy server written by Igor Sysoev.
Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service.
Mandrill is a scalable and affordable email infrastructure service, with all the marketing-friendly analytics tools you've come to expect
UTF-8 (8-bit UCS/Unicode Transformation Format) is a variable-length character encoding for Unicode. It is the preferred encoding for web pages.
A canonical link element is an HTML element that helps webmasters prevent duplicate content issues by specifying the "canonical", or "preferred".