Amazon Web Services
The AWS platform was launched in July 2002. In its early stages, the platform consisted of only a few disparate tools and services. Then in late 2003, the AWS concept was publicly reformulated when Chris Pinkham and Benjamin Black presented a paper describing a vision for Amazon’s retail computing infrastructure that was completely standardized, completely automated, and would rely extensively on web services for services such as storage and would draw on internal work already underway. Since then it has been updated many times and has become publicly known and used for a variety of businesses, governments and individuals. In my last blog I briefly discussed SaaS and what exactly Software as a Service really is. Today I will be discussing what AWS is and how it can benefit individual users and businesses alike.
So what is Amazon Web Services(AWS)?
Web Services (AWS) is a cloud computing business unit of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered pay-as-you-go basis. In short, these cloud computing web services provide a set of primitive abstract technical infrastructure and distributed computing building blocks and tools. Now this can range from virtual machines, cloud storage, virtual networks etc. In 2017, AWS comprised more than 90 services spanning a wide range including computing, storage, networking, database, analytics, application services, deployment, management, mobile, developer tools, etc.
Virtual Machines
One of these these services AWS provides is a cluster of virtual machines at the user(s) disposal called Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. AWS’s version of virtual computers emulate most of the attributes of a real computer including, hardware central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs) for processing, local memory/Random Access Memory(RAM), hard-drive(HD)/solid-state drive(SSD) storage, a choice of operating systems, networking, and pre-loaded application software such as web servers, databases, customer relationship management(CRM), etc.
A user can create, launch, and terminate server-instances as needed, paying by the second for active servers — hence the term “elastic”. EC2 provides users with control over the geographical location of instances that allows for latency optimization and high levels of redundancy.
Cloud Storage
Another service that AWS provides is Amazon Simple Storage Service, which allows users to have at their disposal a virtual cluster of computers, available all the time, through the Internet. Amazon S3, as it is formally known, can be employed to store any type of object which allows for uses like storage for Internet applications, backup and recovery, disaster recovery, data archives, data lakes for analytics, and hybrid cloud storage.
Although AWS does not publicly provide the details of S3’s technical design, Amazon S3 manages data with an object storage architecture which aims to provide scalability, high availability, and low latency with 99.999999999% durability and between 99.95% to 99.99% availability (roughly 45min out of the month it is down).
Virtual Networks
Another Very import Service that Amazon provides is mainly for businesses; this service is Amazon Virtual Private Cloud. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) enables you to launch AWS resources into a virtual network that you’ve defined. This virtual network closely resembles a traditional network that you’d operate in your own data center, with the benefits of using the scalable infrastructure of AWS.
Unlike traditional EC2 instances which are allocated internal and external IP numbers by Amazon, the customer can assign IP numbers of their choosing from one or more subnets. By giving the user the option of selecting which AWS resources are public facing and which are not, VPC provides much more granular control over security. For Amazon it is “an endorsement of the hybrid approach, but it’s also meant to combat the growing interest in private clouds”.
Wrap-Up
Though there are many more services that AWS provides, there is a lot of benefit that can be seen in these three examples. AWS is a huge provider for many companies and individuals around the world and continues to grow each year. I hope this helped to give you a basic understanding of what AWS is and what it can do for you or your company.
