INTRODUCTION TO AWS

Harsh Upparwal
7 min readJan 1, 2021

“I don’t think any of us had the audacity to predict it would grow as big or as fast as it has.”

-Andy Jassy, AWS CEO

With the advent of cloud computing, AWS is the major stakeholder.

Used by millions, Amazon Web Service (AWS) is a broadly adopted cloud service from Amazon, that offers IT services by packing them up into building blocks and providing them to the users. These services or building blocks are designed to work with each other, and result in applications that are sophisticated, flexible, reliable and highly scalable.

Organizations around the globe are using AWS to grow and to scale. cloud computing is setting down deep roots and the solution available from Amazon Web Services are quickening its development.

Few companies that are housing their IT environment in AWS are,

Adobe, is providing multi-terabyte operating environment to its customers by integrating their systems with AWS cloud.

Airbnb maintains their infrastructure by using nearly all the services available in AWS.

Autodesk, uses services like Amazon RDS and amazon S3 for deploying their ML tools rather than spending time trying to deploy and manage the infrastructure.

BWM is using AWS for dynamically updating the map information for drivers.

Netflix had gone ‘all-in’, closing the last of its major data centers and moving all of its IT operations to AWS.

Spotify houses more than 30 million of licensed songs using AWS to store all that data.

And the list goes on..

HISTORY

Origin of AWS as a developer tool can be followed right back to 2002, when a beta version named Amazon.com Web Service was released which had offered SOAP and XML interfaces for the Amazon product catalogue.

It was 2003, when an idea emerged of combining infrastructure services and development tool into a pseudo-working framework for the web. By segregating different parts of infrastructure (compute, storage and database) as components to the operating system and having a developer-friendly tool to manage them, it was conceivable to think about infrastructure to be automated with web services that can call for additional resources.

It was at that point, without even fully articulating it, that Amazon started to formulate the idea of what AWS could be, and they began to wonder if they had an additional business providing infrastructure services to developers.

In 2004, the Amazon’s first public acknowledgement of AWS arose in a blog post, hinting at the developments to come.

In 2006, AWS was first to showcase market with a modern cloud infrastructure service with release of simple storage service in march followed by amazon simple queue service in July and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud in August.

The company carefully laid the groundwork for what might become of AWS, you need to feel that they saw something that no one else did, an idea that they believed could be gigantic. As it turned out, what they saw was nothing less than the future of computing. The success of AWS has created a multibillion-dollar cloud market that Amazon still clearly leads.

In April 2010, Amazon further expanded its reach by setting up a ‘region’ in Singapore with local data centers. This was the first Asia-Pacific AWS region, giving better transfer speed and lower latency for their Asian client base.

This expansion continued in 2011 with the Asia-Pacific Northeast region in Tokyo, Japan and 2012 with Asia-Pacific Southeast in Sydney, Australia. AWS currently has more than 70 availability zones around the world, spread across the US, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.

Toward the end of 2018, they even declared plans for data centers in Cape Town, South Africa, placing them in all of the world’s continents expect for Antarctica!

AWS SERVICES

These are among the most commonly used services from AWS:

Amazon EC2 — Providing secure compute capacity in the cloud, EC2 is resettable based on the user’s requirements. For instance, in a scenario in which web traffic varies, this service can expand its environment, behind the scenes, to three instances when required and then shrink to just one resource when load decreases.

Amazon S3 — With the sheer amount of data collected by organizations, data storage is in high demand. Amazon Web Services offers several solutions. Using S3 you can store and retrieve data from anywhere (websites, mobile apps, IoT sensors and the like). It offers data management flexibility, durability and security for internet storage.

Amazon Elastic Beanstalk — Made with a number of programming languages, this service helps scale and deploy web applications. Simply upload the code and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment from capacity provisioning to load balancing to auto-scaling to application health monitoring.

Amazon Lambda — Lambda allows companies to run code with no need for provisioning and managing servers. It scales automatically from a few requests per day to thousands per second. Companies only pay for the compute times used; there is no charge when the code is not running.

WHY AWS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s largest cloud computing platform, boasting over a million customers and $10 billion in annual revenue. And despite the recent growth of cloud-based competitors such as Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, AWS still commands nearly 30% of the current market share, more than its three biggest competitors combined.

Companies report a vital set of purposes behind choosing Amazon Web Services as well as depending on it for crucial part of their IT infrastructure:

§ Location

AWS has become the worldwide leader in cloud computing. It currently has 77 availability zones inside 24 geographical regions covering over 245 countries. There are likewise 12 greater availability zones underway, alongside 5 additional regions including India with an already existing region in Mumbai, a new one is planned for Hyderabad. So, whatever your geographic preference, AWS has you covered.

§ Automated multi region backups

AWS offers various backup strategies including AMIs and EBS snapshots. Furthermore, the decentralized nature and worldwide reach of AWS makes it simple and affordable to store critical data in multiple geographic locations. So, if your production environment is taken offline because of a natural or manmade disaster, the backup data won’t be affected.

§ Security & Reliability

Amazon Web Services is much more secure than a company hosting its own website or storage. AWS currently has dozens of data centers across the globe which are continuously monitored and strictly maintained.

While AWS is an extremely useful platform for backups and disaster recovery, it is also extremely reliable. AWS has been “far better at keeping its public cloud service running than either Microsoft or Google.” It also found that 40 percent of the platform’s total downtime during the same time period was tied to a single outage.

§ Flexibility & scalability

Since AWS’s cost is modified based on the customers’ usage and small businesses can see the obvious benefits of using Amazon for their computing needs. In fact, AWS is great for building a business from the bottom as it provides all the tools necessary for companies to start up with the cloud. The customers will never need to spend time thinking about whether or not they need to re-examine their computing usage. This extremely flexible system is now the hallmark of AWS, and is one of the main reasons to choose AWS. For existing companies, Amazon provides low-cost migration services so that your existing infrastructure can be seamlessly moved over to AWS.

§ Cost

Perhaps the most encouraging Amazon Web Services advantages incorporates its pay-as-you-go pricing model. There’s no upfront cost to build a storage system and no need to estimate usage. AWS customers use what they need and their expenses are scaled automatically and accordingly.

When an AWS account is created, the access to over 60 services is given for free depending on the type of product a business decides to use.

Amazon free-tier plan

As of 2020, AWS comprises more than 175 products and services providing everything businesses need to work seamlessly in the cloud. These services include computing, storage, networking, database, analytics, application services, deployment, management, mobile, developer tools, and tools for the Internet of Things. The most popular include Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Connect, and AWS Lambda.

Best of all, they’re constantly developing new services and feature to keep their customers at the forefront of cloud computing.

THE BOTTOM LINE!

Amazon Web Services is a gold mine for Amazon. The services are shaking up the computing world in the same way that Amazon is changing America’s retail space. By pricing its cloud products extremely cheaply, AWS is an ideal solution that can offer extensive cost savings, maximum uptime, and continuous support — a great return on investment, indeed to everyone from the newest start-up to a Fortune 500 company.

I hope that you find it an illuminating and bracing, read.

THANK YOU!!

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