Amazon Web Services-AWS

What is AWS?

Amazon Web Services(AWS) is an Amazon.com subsidiary which offers cloud-computing services at very affordable rates, therefore making its customer base strong from small-scale companies like Pinterest (which has just 5 employees) to big enterprises like D-Link. AWS launched in 2006 from the internal infrastructure that Amazon.com built to handle its online retail operations. AWS was one of the first companies to introduce a pay-as-you-go cloud computing model that scales to provide users with compute, storage or throughput as needed.

AWS offers many different tools and solutions for enterprises and software developers that can be used in data centers in up to 190 countries. Groups such as government agencies, education institutions, nonprofits and private organizations can use AWS services.

What is Cloud Computing?

It is the use of remote servers on the internet to store, manage and process data rather than a local server or personal computer.

There are basically 3 categories in cloud computing:

SaaS (Software as a Service)
It allows companies to use the software without having to purchase them, which reduces the expenditure of the company drastically since they are already installed on the cloud server they can be quickly deployed and therefore saves time.
PaaS (Platform as a Service)
It allows developers to build applications, collaborate on projects without having to purchase or maintain infrastructure.
IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)
It allows companies to rent servers, storage space, etc. from a cloud provider.

AWS Pricing

• AWS follows a pay per use model, meaning you only pay for what you use. For example, if you are using 10GB of space on S3 on AWS, you would be paying only for that 10GB, traditionally you have to buy an ‘x’ amount of storage say 20GB in advance, and even if you are using 10GB in the purchased space, you will be billed for the whole 20GB.
  You can get started with AWS for free, AWS runs a free usage tier in which you can use the AWS services in a very basic manner for free.

AWS Certification

Now, what next after you know all these AWS services?
AWS certifications are much sought after credentials in today’s IT world. You can plan for getting certified, and choose from a number of certifications offered by Amazon. The most in-demand certification is for the Associate Solution Architect.

To include every customer need under the sun, Amazon has further categorized services under each domain. Let’s discuss each one of them.

Compute

1. AWS EC2

It is a web service which provides re-sizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make the web-scale computing easier for developers. To know more about the service you can refer to our AWS EC2 blog.

2. AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Elastic Beanstalk lets you quickly deploy and manage applications in AWS without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.

3. AWS Elastic Load Balancing

ELB automatically manages the workload on your instances and distributes them to other instances in case of an instance failure.

4. AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda is used to execute backend code without worrying about the underlying architecture, you just upload the code and it runs, it’s that simple!

5. AWS Autoscaling

The Autoscaling feature is used to scale up and down automatically as and when required.

Storage and Content Delivery

1. S3 AWS

S3 stands for simple storage service, it is used for storing data in the form of objects in the AWS Cloud.

2. Amazon CloudFront

CloudFront is a content delivery network which is used to cache data to an edge location which reduces latency.

3. Amazon EBS

Amazon Elastic Block Storage is a storage service wherein each block of storage acts like a separate hard drive.

4. Amazon Glacier

Glacier is an archiving service offered by Amazon, which offers low-cost data archiving.

5. AWS Import/Export Snowball

It offers physical transfer of data between user’s location and AWS data centers, the device which is used to transfer the data is called Snowball.

6. AWS Storage Gateway

It is used to provide seamless integration with data security features between your on-premise software appliance and AWS Cloud.

Database

1. Amazon Aurora

It is a relational database engine that combines the speed and reliability of high-end commercial databases and the cost-effectiveness and simplicity of open-source databases.

2. Amazon RDS

Amazon RDS is a managed relational database service which does routine database tasks in 6 familiar databases like Amazon Aurora, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and PostgreSQL.

3. Amazon DynamoDB

It is a fully managed No-SQL database service. It is known for extremely low latencies and scalability.

4. Amazon ElastiCache

It is a web service that makes it easy to set up, manage and scale a distributed cache-in environment in the cloud.

5. Amazon Redshift

Amazon Redshift is a fully managed petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud.

Networking

1. VPC AWS

Amazon VPC lets you launch AWS resources in a virtual network that you define. It closely resembles a traditional network that you’d operate in your data center.

2. AWS Direct Connect

It helps you establish a private connection between your premises and AWS, therefore giving better network performance and throughput than an Internet-based connection.

3. Amazon Route 53

Route 53 is a highly scalable and highly available Domain Name System by Amazon AWS. The name is in reference to the TCP and UDP’s port 53 where DNS requests are addressed.

Management Tools

1. Amazon CloudWatch

It is a monitoring tool by AWS which is used to keep a track on the AWS resources and the applications you run on Amazon AWS.

2. AWS CloudFormation

It is a service which helps you set up and model your Amazon AWS resources so that you can spend less time managing these resources and more time focusing on the development.

3. AWS CloudTrail

AWS CloudTrail is a logging service which records the API calls to your Amazon AWS account and delivers them to you.

4. AWS Command Line Tool

It is an all in one tool to manage all your AWS services, by downloading and configuring only one tool you can manage all the AWS services through the command line.

5. AWS OpsWorks

It is a configuration management tool that helps configure and operate applications of all size and shapes using Chef.

6. Trusted Advisor

Trusted Advisor is a customized cloud monitoring tool, that analyzes your AWS environment and gives insights on the expense, performance improvement, security gaps, and reliability.

Security and Identity

1. AWS Identity and Access Management(IAM)

It is an AWS service that helps you control access to your AWS resources for your users.

2. AWS Key Management Service

It is a managed service that helps you create and control encryption keys which are used to encrypt your data, and uses Hardware Security Modules to protect the security of your keys.

3. Amazon SES

It is a cost-effective emailing service which is built on the scalable and reliable infrastructure of Amazon.com

4. Amazon SNS

It is a web service offered by AWS that manages the delivery of messages to subscribed endpoints or clients.

5. Amazon SQS

It is a fast, reliable and scalable message queuing service, it can be used to transmit any volume of data at any level of throughput, without losing any messages or without the use of any other service.