Introduction To Amazon Web Services: What Is Amazon Web Services (AWS)?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is an excellent cloud service that provides you the services like Storage, computing, databases, security, etc. and you can access those services from any corner of the globe.

What is AWS?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is very much secure and reliable. AWS is one of the most demanded cloud services because of the best quality of services and benefits. Along with this, as support is quite important, it provides a nice support system.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the leading cloud service providers in the market now that provides the best quality cloud solutions across countries with more than 200 cloud services.

The key services that Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides are as below

Compute
Storage
Database
Security
DevOps
Big Data
Monitoring
Networking
IoT
Messaging, etc.

A glance at History Of AWS

Well, let’s discuss a glance at the history of Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS services were launched in the year of 2002 and then in the year of 2006, most of the cloud products were launched. By the year 2019, AWS released more than 100 cloud services approximately.

Benefits of Amazon Web Services (AWS)

There are several benefits that AWS provides us. Now, let us discuss a few key benefits of Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Best Pricing Structure (Pay as You Go Model)

The pricing structure of AWS is based on the pay-as-you-go model meaning you need to pay only for the duration and volume of resources you are using. Which is very much convenient for all organizations starting from startups to big scale. Basically, you are getting charged per-minute basis. If you are using a resource for 15 minutes, you just need to pay exactly for 15 minutes not more than that.

Companies can able to save a lot of amount with the help of this Pay as you go model.

Security

As security is a very important factor. AWS makes sure to provide high security for your data as well as your infrastructure.

It provides a shared security model which is a great feature. As per the shared security model, consumers and AWS at the Data Center end can control the security.

AWS strictly monitors all its data centers across the globe to make sure all are highly secure and well maintained with physical security.

It also makes sure to encrypt your data as well as it uses firewalls on each entry point of the network to ensure end-to-end security.

With the help of the Amazon IAM service, AWS can able to identify who is accessing your resources and when the user is accessing the resource, etc.

Scalability

AWS ensures that your applications can easily scale up and down based on your requirement without any issues.

Flexibility

You are flexible enough to use multiple database options, OS languages, IaaS, PaaS, and even serverless computing. You can easily perform everything from development to production deployment. When you are getting more than 200 services from AWS, you are flexible enough to perform so many activities.

PaaS Offerings

AWS provides the best Paas Offerings for its services so that you do not need to worry about managing and configuring the platforms. Basically, AWS takes care of all these Platform configurations and management, you do not need to take any headaches. Makes the Developer’s life easy. Developers will only concentrate on the development activities; they do not have to worry about the Platform management part.

API and SDK support

AWS supports many APIs and SDK which helps the developers to achieve many difficult functionalities easily. With the help of the APIs, you can have controls on the resources programmatically.

Easy To Use

AWS is very much easy to use. Basically, Developers can easily develop, and deploy different applications on this platform, even though it is quite easy for the Developers to perform the migration activity for any of the applications.

Global Availability

AWS is available worldwide. AWS has more than 80 availability zones across more than 25 geographical regions.

Popular Customers Using AWS

There are many popular customers who those are using Amazon Web Services (AWS) for a long time. A few of the key customers are as below.

BMW
Netflix
Samsung
ESPN
MI
Johnson & Johnson
Adobe
Hitachi
Intuit
McDonald’s

Key Services Provided by AWS

As we have already discussed, Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides us more than 200 services. We will discuss a few key services that are provided by AWS.

AWS Storage Services

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides different AWS storage services. Below are few key storage services that are provided by AWS.

Amazon S3

Amazon S3 is one of the simple cloud storage service models that can be used to store or retrieve data from anywhere and can be utilized for online data backup.

Amazon S3 storage service model helps you provide a web services interface that helps the developers to perform many operations easily.

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)

Another storage option is mainly used by the Amazon EC2 instances. The EBS volumes are mainly used for database storage, file storage, block storage, etc.

Amazon Glacier

I can tell that Amazon Glacier is one of the best storage options because you can get of secure storage at a low cost. It is more convenient for storing long-term backup data and archiving data.

AWS Database Services

AWS provides different types of databases like Relational, key-value, Document, In-memory, Graph, time series, etc. Below are a few key database service flavors provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Amazon RDS

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a very simple, easy-to-set up cost-efficient relational database service. It helps you to easily scale a relational database in the cloud. Amazon RDS provides you with different database engines like SQL Server, Oracle DB, MySQL, Amazon Aurora, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, etc.

Amazon Redshift

This is another very powerful AWS database service that helps to run complex queries and the good thing is you will get results or outputs very quickly. Here you can analyze your data using SQL and some other business intelligence tools.

DynamoDB

DynamoDB is basically a NoSQL database that is very fast, and durable and the most interesting fact is, it also provides you with the best built-in security with backup and restore features.

Compute Services

There are many computing services that are provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). Let’s discuss a few key computing services that are provided by AWS.

AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda is one of the computing services provided by AWS, which is serverless that is mainly helps you to execute the code for your applications.

AWS EC2

This is another category of AWS compute service which is basically a web service that automatically scales the compute resources whenever required and also helps the developers to rent virtual machines.

Also helps the developers by providing different resources like Storage, memory, CPU, etc based on their application needs.

Networking and Content Delivery Services

There are many networking and content delivery services that are provided by AWS. Below are a few key services that we are going to discuss here one by one.

Private virtual cloud (VPC)

VPC makes the developer’s job easy and helps to deploy AWS resources to a private virtual cloud. Not only that, with the help of VPC, you can able to control the cloud environment with the help of controlling network gateways, IP address range, route table configuration, etc.

Amazon CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront is well integrated with AWS and works very seamlessly with different AWS services like Amazon s3, Amazon EC2, AWS Shield, etc. Basically, it is a CDN service that helps you deliver different videos, data, and APIs to users globally with high speed.

Amazon API Gateway

This is also an excellent service from AWS that helps the developers to create, maintain, and monitor the API in the AWS management console. This also handles many concurrent API calls that include traffic management, monitoring, access control, etc.

Amazon Route 53

It is a DNS web service provided by AWS that helps the developers translate the text domain name to the numeric IP addresses. (For example, www.xyz.com to 182.0.3.1).

It very seamlessly works with EC2 instances, Elastic load balancers, Amazon S3 buckets, etc.

Elastic Load Balancing

Elastic Load Balancing always performs a great job. It helps to handle the incoming application traffic by distributing the incoming traffic across multiple target resources like containers, and Amazon EC2 instances.

Elastic Load Balancing provides you with three load balancers and those are Application Load Balancer, Network Load Balancer, and Classic Load Balancer.

Developers Tools Provided By AWS

To make the developer’s life easier, and to perform a proper development standard, AWS provides you with a set of developer tools. Let us discuss here a few key developer tools that are provided by AWS.

Amazon CodeGuru

Amazon Code Guru is one of the excellent developers’ tools provided by AWS that provides the developers with the best suggestion to improve the quality of the code and helps you to review the code during the development phase of your application.

It also monitors the performance of the application in production.

AWS CodeStar

AWS Codestar is another developer’s tool provided by AWS that helps you to quickly develop, build and deploy different applications on AWS.

It also helps you to configure your entire continuous delivery toolchain in a minute and most importantly it helps, your complete team to work together easily.

AWS Command Line Interface

This CLI is one of the great tools to manage your AWS services. With the help of this tool, you can able to control multiple AWS services from the command line.

AWS CodeDeploy

AWS CodeDeploy is another tool that helps you to smoothly perform software deployments to different AWS services like AWS Lambda, Amazon EC2, etc. You can use this to automate the software deployment process.

AWS CodeCommit

AWS CodeCommit is a source control service that hosts Git-based repositories that helps you to store anything from your source code to binaries and it works smoothly with your existing Git tools if you have already. An important thing is, it is very much secure.

Management and Governance Tools Provided By AWS

AWS also provides many management and governance tools. Here we will discuss a few key tools for management and governance that are provided by AWS.

AWS Service Catalog

AWS service catalog is an excellent tool that helps different organizations for creating and managing different catalogs of IT services that are approved for use on the AWS platform.

AWS CloudFormation

This is another cool tool to model a set of related AWS and third-party resources and also helps to manage them throughout their life cycles.

AWS Config

This tool helps to record, audit, and evaluate the configurations of different AWS resources. With the help of this tool, you can able to know the relationship with the different resources so that you can able to judge the dependencies between the resources before making any changes.

AWS CloudTrail

AWS cloud trail service helps you to enable compliance, governance, and risk auditing for your AWS account. You can able to monitor and log your AWS account activity continuously with the help of AWS CloudTrail.

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Wrapping Up

In this article, we have discussed Introduction To Amazon Web Services: What is Amazon Web Services (AWS)?, A glance at the History Of AWS, Benefits of Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Popular Customers Using AWS, and along with this, we have also discussed Key Services Provided by AWS, Developer Tools Provided By AWS, Management and Governance Tools Provided By AWS. Hope you have enjoyed this article !!!.

Rajkishore

I am Rajkishore, and I have over 14 years of experience in Microsoft Azure and AWS, with good experience in Azure Functions, Storage, Virtual Machine, Logic Apps, PowerShell Commands, CLI Commands, Machine Learning, AI, Azure Cognitive Services, DevOps, etc. Not only that, I do have good real-time experience in designing and developing cloud-native data integrations on Azure or AWS, etc. I hope you will learn from these practical Azure tutorials. Read more.