What is AWS?

 AWS or Amazon Web Services is a cloud platform of Amazon that offers computing power, database storage, content delivery, and any other functionality that a basic cloud platform offers. It helps businesses to grow using different databases such as SQL, MySQL, Oracle, and SQL servers to store the information. Servers are rented out so that Amazon takes care of the security and maintenance of the servers and helps the business. 

It also offers migration, networking, development tools, and management to its clients. It is used by many companies, and its revenue is higher than any other large company.

What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing refers to a service hosted on the internet, and you can access the service remotely using the internet. The availability of a service like data storage, servers, or any computing resource over the internet is cloud computing. You don’t manage it personally, and it’s more like renting a resource.

Simply put, Cloud computing is the use of remote computing resources to store, manage and process data rather than a local server or personal computer.

Due to its huge success lot of people trying their hands-on cloud computing. There are a lot of players out there who are providing cloud services as listed,

• Google Cloud platform
• Amazon web service
• Microsoft Azure
• Digital ocean
• IBM Cloud
• VMWARE
• Rackspace
• Terredmark
• Joyent

What is AWS?

It’s a platform where Amazon offers its cloud services like a database, servers, computing machines, file storage, etc., where you can rent them and pay for them according to your usage.

According to various sources, Amazon Web Services is a secure cloud services platform offering computing power, database storage, content delivery, and other functionality to help businesses scale and grow.

How does AWS make working so easy?

In the olden days, if you want to deploy an application you have to buy a server, and servers are not cheap pals. You need to invest a lot of money in it and a lot of time to setup up it. You also need to put up an infrastructure to maintain your server. If it went down, then you need to troubleshoot it and your business will be down for that time. Since websites have different peak times for traffic, we need to buy more servers to scale up or down. We have to manage everything manually. But with AWS, you don’t need to buy a server; you rent it and deploy and pay only for what you use. No more expensive server. Amazon will manage it for you. If the server goes down, Amazon will spawn up a new instance for your application. With this you don’t need to maintain an infrastructure for your servers; all you need is to concentrate on your business goals.

Top AWS Companies

• Netflix – A Online video streaming company
• NASA – Agency for aerospace research
• Expedia – Online travel company
• Slack – A professional messaging platform
• Samsung – A mobile company, apps developed by Samsung are deployed using AWS.
• Nokia – A mobile company
• Adobe – Multimedia software company
• Airbnb – Rental service for local stays

Advantages of AWS

In this section, we will compare three giants in cloud computing. According to a recent report, the following cloud players are ranked as the top three cloud providers.

• Amazon web service
• Microsoft Azure
• Google cloud platform

Why AWS is on top of the other two?

The biggest factor for AWS’s success is because it offers more services compared to Azure and Google cloud. It continues to grow exponentially and supports recent technologies. The scope of operation that can be done on AWS is massive. It is more mature than the other two. Amazon’s biggest weakness is cost structure; it is very confusing for enterprises. Amazon supports all-level enterprises (from small to large).

Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure are late to market than AWS, and also, they offer fewer services than AWS. One of the biggest factors for the success of Azure is the Windows operating system is widely used. So, it makes sense to use Azure for Windows-based application servers. Google has really well-managed cost structure. It’s easy to get started with Google cloud than the other two.

What can you do with AWS?

AWS is not a single service; it offers a broad set of cloud-based products. Let’s see them one by one.

List of services provided,

• Compute
• Storage
• Databases
• Analytics
• Networking and Content delivery
• Mobile
• Security, Identity, and Compliance
• Migration
• Developer tools
• Management tools

1. Compute

You can deploy your application in computing. Compute is referring to computing powers. Some popular services in computing are Amazon.

• EC2 for virtual machines
• Elastic Beanstalk for automated deployments
• Lambda to run functions without a server
• Elastic load balances to balance the request handling capacity
• Autoscaling to scale up or down according to the real-time requirements.

2. Storage

Amazon provides a file system as a service. With storage, you can store and access data on the internet based on demand. It is stored on a cloud computer. This gives you anywhere and anytime access to your files. Storage usually holds information that is used by applications. This is one of the main components as database, warehouse, backup; serving is based on some form of storage. Some popular services are

• Simple storage service (S3) just like a file system to store files, folders, documents, images, songs, etc.
• Elastic File System for EC2 instances
• Glacier for storing the file for a long time at a low cost (Mainly used for archival service)

3. Databases

AWS offers a wide range of database services, From relational databases to NoSQL databases. We can also easily migrate our data to AWS by using a Database migration service.

• Relational database service (RDBS) supports commonly used databases like MySQL, Oracle database, MS SQL Server, PostgreSQL SQL, and Amazon Aurora.
• Redshift is close relative to PGSQL.
• Elasticache supports in-memory cache services like Memcached and Redis.
• DynamoDB is a highly scalable NoSQL database with very low latency.

Note: Please understand the difference between database and storage. Storage is a service based on the file system where you can store executables. But a database cannot include executable files.

4. Analytics

You can get insights into the data you have. You can also create visualizations on the data you analyzed. Some set of services like

• Athena for running SQL queries on the S3 bucket.
• Quick Sight for business insights and data visualizations.
• Glue to create Extract Transform Load (ETL) systems.
• Kinesis for performing Real-time analysis on streaming content
• Elastic search and Cloud Search for creating a managed search engine

5. Networking and Content delivery

The main network-based services on AWS are Virtual private clouds which enable you to launch resource in the isolated network, direct connect let you establish a dedicated connection to connect with AWS, and Route 53 let you use a highly scalable Domain Naming System. For content delivery, we use CloudFront which is a caging service that allows us to cage the content to a location near the user. So, we reduce the latency for delivering the content.

6. Mobile

The set of services that lets you develop mobile apps or helps in developing mobile apps. You can use do analysis with the user data using these services.

• The mobile hub for add, configure and design features for mobile apps.
• With a device farm, you can test your mobile app on hundreds of devices.
• Cognito for single sign-on integration with mobile apps.
• Mobile Analytics for mobile data analysis

7. Security, Identity, and Compliance

For managing permission, access restrictions, Security management, Threat detection, we can use different services in this domain.

• Identity and Access Management (IAM) allows you to create, manage and give different access to different users.
• Inspector to search vulnerabilities on our virtual machines
• Web Application Firewall (WAF) to protect from common attacks like XSS, SQL Injection, etc.
• Key Management Service (KMS) for managing encrypted keys. You can create and control keys you used to encrypt data.
• Guard Duty for detecting threats intelligently to protect AWS accounts.

8. Migration

You don’t need to worry about migrating data on AWS. You can get data or put data on AWS using their migration services. Also, you can migrate data from one database to another database.

• Database Migration Service (DMS) for migrating data from a database to a database.
• Server Migration Service (SMS) for migrating on-site servers quickly
• Snowball can upload your data to S3, Pack and send the hard disk to AWS

9. Developer tools

Developer tools are used for managing software development life cycles. You can use these sets of services to create, build and deploy software applications.

• Code-Star service for creating, managing, and working with software projects
• Code-Commit is version control software like git
• Code-Build is for building your code-base
• Code-Deploy for automating the deployment of application
• Code-Pipeline allows you to keep your eyes on building, testing, and deploying the applications.

10. Management tools

• Cloud-Watch can be used to monitor resource utilization
• Cloud-Trail logs all changes and API calls made to Amazon web services
• Cloud-Formation is used to convert infrastructure into the cloud, so it will be like a template. You can create a production-ready environment in minutes.
• A trusted advisor gives you recommendations on how to do cost optimization and secure your environment.

Why should we use it?

The benefit of using AWS is

• Flexibility
• Easy-to-Use
• Secure
• Reliable
• Cost-Effective

The need for cloud computing is the basis of understanding any cloud provider. The main need for cloud computing is cost saving. Yes, with cloud computing, you can reduce hardware and software cost. You don’t need to maintain a server. Day-to-day issues with the server may be hectic if the company grows faster. All licenses or renewals are taken care of by cloud providers. With cloud computing, you can access your data and server anywhere, anytime. You don’t need to put extra care into securing your customer’s data. It will also be taken care of by cloud providers; your data will always be in good hands.

Who is the right audience for learning this technology?

This is purely based on your background, there are particularly three roles for AWS skills. They are

• AWS Sysops
• AWS Architect
• AWS Development

If you are from an admin background, you can choose to learn some set of skills to become an AWS Sysops. It’s just like managing deployment, pipelines, and build processes. You may need expertise in IAM, VPC, Route53, ELB, etc.

If you are from a developer background you can go with a set of skills that supports SaaS-based applications. You may need expertise in the blockchain, Artificial intelligence, VR or AR, auto-scaling, load-balancing, etc.

For AWS architects, you need more experience working on the AWS platform. It’s like building a good infrastructure for an application that may require to meet specific needs. You can also be a junior cloud architect if you have good knowledge of the AWS platform.

How will this technology help you in career growth?

It’s not a coincidence that all tech gains jumping into cloud computing like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Alibaba. They have seen tremendous demand and scope in the market for cloud services. In upcoming years most of the apps and websites will be deployed on cloud-based service and will use cloud-based service for internal operations. If you start learning cloud technologies from now, it will help you to go up in your career.

Now, why AWS? Although there is a war going on between different cloud providers, King Amazon stays on top by owing 47.1% of shares in the public cloud sector. On the other hand, Azure has dominance in enterprise applications. Choose wisely according to your requirements.

Conclusion

Everything is turning into a cloud; we sync our contacts, photos, documents, etc., to a cloud. We are not storing our movies or video on our local storage or personal computer; we are streaming them today on Amazon or YouTube. We already started using cloud products without realizing them.

Cloud products are in our daily life, and AWS helps us to create, deploy and manage our applications. Most the companies are started using cloud services nowadays. So, to stay ahead on the road, we need to acquire those skills.