What Is AWS (Amazon Web Services)? A Complete Guide

Let’s look at what is AWS and explain AWS infrastructure. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is an extensive, developing cloud computing platform given by Amazon that encompasses a variety of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and packaged software as a service (SaaS) contributions. 

The services of AWS can deliver a company’s tools such as database storage, compute strength, and content delivery assistance. AWS was inaugurated in 2006 from the inner infrastructure that Amazon.com created to deal with its online retail operations. 

It was one of the first companies to initiate a pay-as-you-go cloud computing model that measures to empower users with storage, computing, or throughput as required. There are groups like educational institutions, government agencies, and private organizations, etc that can use the services of AWS. Now we know what is AWS so let’s have a glimpse on how it works.

How Does AWS Work?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is segregated into different services like each can be configured in various ways based on the user’s wishes. Users should be proficient to watch configuration options and individual server maps for an AWS service.

More than 100 services include the Amazon Web Services portfolio, comprising those for databases, compute, infrastructure management, security, and application development.

Services Provided by AWS

Various services are given below:

1. Availability

Amazon Web Services (AWS) delivers services from dozens of data departments circulate across availability zones (AZs) in regions across the world. An AZ is a location that comprises multiple physical information centers. A region is a compilation of AZs in geographic proximity connected by low-latency network nexus.

A company will select one or multiple availability zones for a mixture of reasons, such as submission and proximity to end consumers. For instance, an AWS customer can spin up virtual machines (VMs) and reproduce data in several AZs to accomplish a highly responsible infrastructure. That is reluctant to fail individual servers or a whole information center.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a service that gives virtual servers, called EC2 illustrations utilized for computing ability. The EC2 service proposes dozens of instance types with varying capabilities and sizes, modified to certain workload types and applications, such as memory-intensive and accelerated-computing employment. AWS also furnishes an Auto Scaling tool to dynamically scale the ability to conserve instance health and achievement.

2. Storage

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) delivers scalable object storage for information or data backup, collection, and analytics. A company can save money with S3 through its Infrequent Access storage tier or by utilizing Amazon Glacier for long-term cold storage.

Amazon Elastic Block Store gives block-level storage quantities for persistent information storage when utilizing EC2 instances. Amazon Elastic File System proposals managed cloud-based file storage. Moreover, a firm can depart data to the cloud via storage transport devices, such as AWS Snowball and Snowmobile, or AWS Storage Gateway to facilitate on-premises apps to enter cloud data.

3. Databases, Data Management

The Amazon Relational Database Service comprises alternatives for SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, and a proprietary high-performance database called Amazon Aurora. It furnishes a relational database management system for AWS users. AWS also delivers managed NoSQL databases through Amazon DynamoDB.

An Amazon Web Services (AWS) consumer can utilize Amazon ElastiCache and DynamoDB Accelerator as in-memory and real-time data stores for applications. Amazon Redshift proposes a data warehouse, which creates it simpler for data analysts to perform business intelligence (BI) responsibilities.

4. Migration, Hybrid Cloud

AWS contains multiple tools and services constructed to assist users to migrate applications, servers, databases, and data onto its public cloud. The AWS Migration Hub gives a location to regulate and organize migrations from on-premises to the cloud. Once in the cloud, EC2 Systems Manager enables an IT team to configure on-premises servers and AWS instances.

Amazon also possesses partnerships with several technology vendors that facilitate hybrid cloud deployments. A product of another partnership, Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Amazon EC2 expanding its administering system to the AWS cloud.

5. Networking

An Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) provides executive control over a virtual network to utilize a secluded section of the AWS cloud. AWS automatically requires modern resources within a VPC for extra protection. 

The admins can equalize network traffic with the Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) service, which comprises the Application Load Balancer and Network Load Balancer. AWS also gives a domain name system known as Amazon Route 53 that routes end customers to applications. An IT expert can organize an attached connection from an on-premises information center to the AWS cloud via AWS Direct Connect.

6. Developer Tools

A creator or developer can take advantage of AWS command-line tools and software development kits (SDKs) to deploy and organize requests and services. This involves :

• The Command Line Interface of AWS, which is Amazon’s proprietary code interface
• A developer can operate AWS Tools for Powershell to govern cloud services from Windows environments
• Creators can use AWS Serverless Application Model to emulate an AWS environment to examine Lambda functions.

AWS SDKs are accessible for a diversity of platforms and programming languages, containing Python, Ruby, Android, Java, PHP, Node.js, C++, and iOS.

Amazon API Gateway facilitates a development team to build, manage, and monitor custom application program interfaces (APIs) that allow applications to access data or functionality from back-end services. API Gateway operates thousands of concurrent API calls at once. Furthermore, AWS delivers a packaged media transcoding service like Amazon Elastic Transcoder and a service that pictures workflows for microservices-based requests- AWS Step Functions.

A development team or group can also establish a consecutive integration and continuous delivery channels with services like:

• AWS CodePipeline
• AWS CodeBuild
• AWS CodeDeploy
• AWS CodeStar

A developer can further store code in Git repositories with AWS CodeCommit and analyze the operation of microservices-based applications with AWS X-Ray.

7. Big Data Management and Analytics

Amazon Web Services (AWS) contains a diversity of huge data analytics and application services.

Let’s see what this includes:

• Amazon Elastic MapReduce, which gives a Hadoop framework to process big amounts of data
• Amazon Kinesis, which furnishes numerous tools to process and analyze streaming data
• AWS Glue, which is a service that deals with selection, transform, and load jobs
• Amazon Elasticsearch Service facilitates a team to perform application monitoring, log analysis, and other tasks with the open-source Elasticsearch tool
• Amazon Athena for S3, which enables analysts to query data
• Amazon QuickSight, which assists analysts to visualize data

8. Artificial Intelligence

AWS proposes a range of AI model development and delivery platforms, as well as packaged AI-based applications.

The Amazon AI suite of tools incorporate:

• Amazon Lex for text and voice chatbot technology
• Amazon Polly for text-to-speech translation; and
• Amazon Rekognition for image and facial analysis

AWS also delivers technology for developers to create smart apps that depend on machine learning technology and complex algorithms. With AWS Deep Learning Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), developers can build and instruct custom AI models with packets of graphics processing units (GPUs) or compute-optimized instances. 

AWS also encompasses deep learning development frameworks for MXNet and TensorFlow. On the customer side, AWS technologies strengthen the Alexa Voice Services, and a creator can use the Alexa Skills Kit to create voice-based apps for Echo devices.

As we have learned what is AWS, services provided by AWS and all the brief about AWS now after reading above, AWS has attained many organizations, gaining its focus on technologies it wants to expand and incorporate. 

Recently AWS’s acquisitions haven’t reduced on huger well-established firms. Rather in organizations that could reinforce and overall improve the cloud vendor’s existing offerings. These acquisitions do not add to AWS, but instead, strengthen its core services. 

For instance, AWS has obtained TSO Logic, Sqrrl, and CloudEndure. TSO Logic is a cloud migration company that gives analytics, facilitating customers to view the state of their existing data centre and model migration to the cloud.

Also Read- AWS Lambda Cold Start Problem