AWS (Amazon Web Services) A Beginner’s Guide

AWS is the acronym for Amazon Web Services. It is a cloud computing platform launched by Amazon. It uses distributed IT infrastructure to provide different IT resources (on demand). It provides different services such as infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and packaged software as a service (SaaS). Amazon launched AWS, a cloud computing platform to allow the different organizations to take advantage of reliable IT infrastructure. When it comes to cloud computing platforms, Amazon Web Services (AWS) lead the league and holds the largest share in the cloud computing sector. Launched in early to mid-2000’s by Amazon.com, AWS was one of the first providers of a pay-as-you-go cloud computing model and has preserved its status as the market leader to this day. Amazon Web Services is the world’s most trending and best-suited cloud platform, offering more than 175 fully-featured services. From the fastest-growing startups to the largest enterprises, leading government agencies, and there are millions of customers using the AWS platform to handle their data perfectly and grow their business without any hassle. AWS is segregated into 25 global regions having multiple availability zones along with its server. These divided regions allow users to choose geographical limits for their services. AWS holds 32% of the global cloud market share and has a considerable server capacity. It offers flexible AWS pricing, which means a user has to pay money for the hours he/she rented it.

There are no second thoughts that AWS is big deal. How big? Let us understand it this way.

·         One in three sites you visit on the internet uses AWS services. 

·         In 2019, Amazon Web Services raked in more than $35 billion in revenue. If AWS were its own company, that would be enough to rank 359th on fortune magazine’s Global 500 list.

·         With that being said here is a 10,000-foot overview of AWS.  Let us know more about it.

AWS is made up of many different cloud computing products and services. The highly profitable division of Amazon provides servers, storage, networking, remote computing, email, mobile development, and security. AWS can be broken into three main products: EC2, Amazon’s virtual machine service, Glacier, a low-cost cloud storage service, and S3, Amazon’s storage system. AWS is so large and present in the computing world that it's far outpaced its competitors. As of the first quarter of 2021, one independent analyst reports AWS has over a third of the market at 32.4%, with Azure following behind at 20%, and Google Cloud at 9%.

In its most basic form, AWS is a cloud computing platform, offering customers the chance to outsource their data storage requirements to Amazon instead of having to invest in their own servers. Its servers are organised according to specific regions and subdivided into discrete ‘availability zones’ (AZs.) AWS’s London region, for example, serves the UK using three distinct AZs, each housing a cluster of data centers that, while physically separate from other zones, are nonetheless connected with each other. This system, AWS argues, affords the cloud giant greater levels of redundancy in its product portfolio (it is also a model that is used by Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud). The AWS system can be divided into three buckets: EC2, the platform’s virtual machine service; Glacier, a cloud storage service accessible to everyone; and S3, Amazon’s official storage system. Each of these services can be further tailored to the customer’s needs, with options including database storage, hybrid cloud and networking solutions, and AI-powered analytics services capable of automatically parsing through the reams of data stored in AWS’ servers. In 2016, Netflix pushed Amazon Web Services to its limits when it decided to move all of its IT operations and services to the cloud platform. Since then, however, AWS has since expanded its capacity and now covers almost all of Netflix’s storage needs.

The beginning – How it all started?

The origins of AWS are kind of unintentional. Way back around the year 2000, Amazon was still just a scrappy e-commerce company that found itself struggling to grow under all the technical debt that it accumulated since its startup days. Very much out of necessity, Amazon made the strategic technology decision to start building reusable modules for its internal development groups. This allowed those groups to create new features faster because they weren’t always reinventing the same things over and over. As time went on, the collection of internal services grew, and people inside the company started to realize that maybe there was a potential business opportunity there. First launched in 2004 and then re-launched in 2006 with three public pay-as-you-go services, Amazon Web Services set sail into the uncharted waters of what we now call cloud computing. After it launched in 2006, for the next few years, AWS enjoyed a relatively quiet competitive landscape, allowing it to build a dramatic headstart over contemporary competitors like Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. AWS has been the dominant cloud provider for a while and is the clear market-share leader at present. However, in the past few years, that market share has been eroding slightly, largely going to Microsoft Azure. But competition is a good thing, and AWS has momentum, market-share profitability, and some really smart people on its side. The innovation and customer focus are greater than ever.

The AWS timeline:

·         2002: AWS services launched

·         2004: SQS was launched

·         2006- Launched its cloud products

·         2012: Holds first customer event

·         2015: Reveals revenues achieved of $4.6 billion

·         2016: Surpassed $10 billion revenue target

·         2016: Release snowball and snowmobile

·         2019: Offers nearly 175 services

The services offered by Amazon Web Services

AWS has more than 175 services to offer its clients which are much more than the services provided by other cloud service providers.  Let us have a look at 7 major services provided by AWS.

Compute: Services under the computing domain in AWS include the high-end servers that are used to host a website, process backend data, etc. Compute service is required for running any organization. The computer is required for hosting a complete web app to executing a function in a serverless environment. It offers a comprehensive portfolio for computing services like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2); provides virtual servers or instances for computing. It is auto-scalable as per the requirement. Amazon Elastic Container Service is a high-performance container service that supports Docker containers. AWS Lambda offers serverless computing to run applications.

Database: In this domain, AWS provides services that can help you monitor and manage your databases in the AWS infrastructure for better productivity. database can be used to store structured data. AWS provides a wide range of database services to support related and unrelated databases. In addition, it offers a service to handle all application-specific use cases. Amazon Relational Database Service provides a fully managed database service that includes Oracle, SQL, MySQL, etc. Amazon Aurora offers a high-performance, fully managed relational database service. Amazon Timestream provides a fully managed time-series database. Amazon DynamoDB provides database services for the NoSQL database. Along with these databases, AWS offers many other database services to support almost every type of requirement.

Security and Identity Compliance: This domain deals with user rights and authenticity. Services under this domain will help you manage what access should be given to which person in your organization or team. With the below-given services, a user can give needed access to the employees and secure his/her data.

Management Tools: Using these tools, you can manage all of your AWS resources on AWS infrastructure. There are some of the services given below that users can use to control and secure their data from getting into unauthorized hands.

Network and Content Delivery: AWS offers the highest network availability amongst all cloud service providers to increase throughput with on-time content delivery and reduced network latency.

Migration: This domain deals with the transferring of data to and from the AWS infrastructure. There is a service called snowball used when you need to transfer your considerable data to the AWS infrastructure physically. For this, you will receive a physical device sent by AWS to your location, and you have to upload your data on it and send it back to the AWS office.

Storage: AWS offers storage plenty of choices to users for backing up information, archiving, and disaster recovery. Let us have a look at the list of the main services available under the storage domain on the AWS Cloud.

Highlights of Amazon Web Services

Let’s have a look at the advantages of Amazon Web Services.

Flexibility: We can get more time for core business tasks due to the instant availability of new features and services in AWS.It provides effortless hosting of legacy applications. AWS does not require learning new technologies and migration of applications to the AWS provides the advanced computing and efficient storage.AWS also offers a choice that whether we want to run the applications and services together or not. We can also choose to run a part of the IT infrastructure in AWS and the remaining part in data centres.

Cost-effectiveness: AWS requires no upfront investment, long-term commitment, and minimum expense when compared to traditional IT infrastructure that requires a huge investment.

Scalability / Elasticity: Through AWS, autoscaling and elastic load balancing techniques are automatically scaled up or down, when demand increases or decreases respectively. AWS techniques are ideal for handling unpredictable or very high loads. Due to this reason, organizations enjoy the benefits of reduced cost and increased user satisfaction.

Security: AWS provides end-to-end security and privacy to customers. AWS has a virtual infrastructure that offers optimum availability while managing full privacy and isolation of their operations. Customers can expect high-level of physical security because of Amazon's several years of experience in designing, developing, and maintaining large-scale IT operation centers.

AWS ensures the three aspects of security, i.e., Confidentiality, integrity, and availability of user's data.

Profuse Services and Technology: AWS offers such a wide variety of services that almost any use-case fits right in. Services range from the basic storage and compute all the way to the more specialized niche services like streaming media, robotics, and even quantum computing. They even have a service that lets you control your fleet of space satellites, should you have a need for that. In addition to the usual disaster recovery and remote data center use cases, organizations are increasingly leveraging AWS as an investment in machine learning and data analytics to help them make sense out of all their data. Many organizations have gone all-in, moving their entire IT operations into AWS and have realized great gains in agility, efficiency, and reliability. Now, obviously, we’ve just scratched the surface here and if you’d like to dig in a little deeper into that next layer, we have some great resources.

Future of AWS

In 2021, Amazon Web Services revamped its data analytics services, announced new hardware specs for its virtual machines, and entered the field of enterprise robotics. It also introduced a 5G service and enhanced its overall operating speed. AWS is also highly likely to continue its investment in AI as a secondary tool to aid applications and workflows, create more personalized services for customers, increase customer engagement and even detect fraud. Products of this ilk that have been recently released or announced include Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Lookout for Vision, AWS Panorama, Amazon Textract, Amazon Lex and Amazon Personalize. Amazon’s plans to expand its Internet of Things (IoT) product portfolio are also likely to draw on the resources of AWS. Hints toward its overall strategy were provided in June 2022 with Amazon’s release of ExpressLink, a service intended to make it quicker and easier for IoT modules to connect to the cloud. Profits are also predicted to rise for AWS in the near-term. Based on the doubling of its revenues from $35bn in 2019 to $62bn in 2021, Amazon Web Services should see revenues reaching USD 101bn by next year, in what would be a colossal achievement for the company. Increased attention from regulators on antitrust concerns in the cloud computing sector, however, might prevent AWS from breaking any records, with UK and EU ombudsmen having both recently launched investigations into hyperscale cloud providers. Only time will tell, however, as to whether this will ultimately impact AWS’ market share.