Understanding AWS in 6 Minutes.
Here, you will understand Cloud Provisioning, Amazon Web Services, its benefits over other cloud providers, and the most used AWS services such as EC2, S3, VPC, and so on, used in the environment.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- What is AWS?
- 5 reasons to choose AWS
- Top AWS Services
- Conclusion
INTRODUCTION
Cloud Architects, Cloud Network Engineers, Cloud Developers, Cloud DevOps Engineers, and Cloud Security Engineers are the major Cloud-based career paths that rely most on Cloud Platforms. One might ask, what are Cloud Platforms?
Cloud platforms, according to Cloudbolt are third-party providers delivering computing resources over the internet. There are four main cloud platforms, namely: private, public, hybrid, and multi-clouds platforms.
Furthermore, there are numerous cloud service providers some of which are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM, Alibaba Cloud, RedHat, Heroku, and so on.
I aim to help you understand the most used cloud service provider Amazon Web Services, and in the course of this article, you will understand the reasons I choose AWS.
WHAT IS AWS?
Simply put, Amazon Web Services (AWS) a subsidiary of Amazon, is a global cloud platform that offers reliable, scalable, cost-effective, and easy ways to manage your services on the internet.
AWS offers a combination of different services such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). It is also a cloud storage platform with various cloud storage options such as the ‘Simple Storage Service’- S3, and the ‘Elastic Block Store’ — EBS.
5 REASONS TO CHOOSE AWS?
I have been using it for my provisioning, which means I recommend it to anyone. Also, according to research by Synergy Research Group, it shows AWS is the leading cloud infrastructure service provider as shown in the chart below:
Billing
AWS offers a pay-as-you-go pricing model, which also comes with discounts on various services. Also, users get a per-hour billing rate on services or instances that are very transparent.
Free-tier Service
AWS offers customers free usage of services for a period of time, this helps users get hands-on experience, and understand the services better. With this, companies and newbies take advantage of AWS resources to figure out how best to use different services.
Tested and Trusted
Amazon’s AWS is built to be the most secure, reliable, and flexible cloud provider among others. Its infrastructure is designed to protect sensitive information, programmable access to data, and steady monitoring of the activities of the account and cloud environment.
Easy sign-up process
Unlike most cloud providers, signing up on AWS is easy, no need to sign any agreements, just simply sign up with an email-id, add your credit card and you are good to go.
Largest Partner Network
AWS has the largest and most dynamic community of users of different levels, from experts to newbies and industries of every size, from startups to public-sector organizations. This makes it easier to easily access different information and offers faster solutions to different problems on AWS.
TOP AWS SERVICES
Now that we understand the reasons AWS is ahead of most cloud-providing platforms, I will go further to share the top 10 most used services, and briefly discuss what they are about helping you get started:
1. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Amazon EC2 helps you forget the expensive physical servers. It helps you create secure and resizable virtual machines in minutes, with your preferred specifications such as operating systems, ports, etc.
2. Amazon Relational Database Services (RDS)
Amazon RDS are services used to make easy database setups in less than minutes on the cloud. They can be managed and scaled with ease, and tedious tasks such as provisioning, backups, and patching can be automated for costs effectively assigned to fit your budget.
RDS supports several database engines such as SQL, PostgreSQL and MariaDB, and so on.
3. Amazon Simple Storage Services (S3)
This service gives a solution for storing our data in the cloud using highly secure, scalable, available, and flexible architecture.
They have an availability of 99.9999999999% and are very affordable for backing up platforms such as websites, applications, and more.
4. Amazon Cloudwatch
This is one of my favorite tools on AWS, it is a monitoring and observability service for tracking numerous activities performed on the console.
They are used to detect abnormal behavior in your AWS environment, troubleshoot bugs, set alerts, automate actions, and so on. As the name implied, they are used by DevOps engineers, developers, site reliability engineers, and IT managers to “watch” the activities of the AWS environment, in which they are working.
5. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
As the name implies, this is a secure, private cloud isolated within a public cloud. Users can use run, store, and host data and so on as they could in the cloud, but the difference is that the private cloud is hosted by a public cloud provider.
With VPC, you have total control over your cloud environment with numerous options of your choice, such as creating your own subnets, route tables, network access points, and choosing your IP address range.
6. Amazon Cloudfront
AWS Cloudfront is a content delivery network platform that works with other Amazon services to speed up the distribution of your static and dynamic web content to users. They deliver content through a worldwide network of data centers called edge locations.
7. Amazon Lambda
AWS Lambda is a serverless service used to virtually run code for any application or backend service without owning or managing servers. All a user has to do is upload the code, Lambda does the rest, providing accurate software scaling and high availability.
8. Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)
Amazon EBS is a highly-scalable, high-performance block storage solution used within an EC2 cloud service. This simply means that the data is kept on the AWS EBS servers even when the EC2 instance has been shut down. The EBS is different from the EC2 instance, which provides temporary storage on the physical host servers.
While the EC2 is useful for temporary data such as caches, buffers, and so on, EBS is used for data that needs to be available persistently, regardless of the operating life of the EC2 instance.
9. Amazon Route 53
Amazon’s Route 53, is a DNS service that helps developers and businesses route end users to internet applications in a reliable and cost-effective way. This DNS service provided by Route 53 has 100% availability. AWS Route 53 works with other AWS services to map domain names to load balancers, EC2 instances, S3 buckets, Cloudfront, and so on. They improve reliability with traffic flow, and can also be used with non-AWS resources.
10. Amazon Elastic Load Balancer (ELB)
Load balancers are known services for automatically distributing incoming traffic across targets, such as EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses, two or more availability zones. Load balancers monitor the health of it registered targets, and route traffic only to health targets.
We have 3 types of Load balancers in AWS, Application Load Balancers (ALB), Network Load Balancers (NLB), and Classic Load Balancers (CLB). Application Load Balancers are used to route HTTP/HTTPS or layer 7 traffic, While Network and Classic Load Balancers are used to route TCP or Layer 4 traffic.
CONCLUSION
AWS is a hosting provider with multiple services to enable you to run and manage your applications on the cloud, it is the world’s most comprehensive and widely adopted platform, with over 200 fully featured services from global data centers. It spans 99 availability zones and 31 geographic regions.
Multiple AWS accounts can be managed by a service called AWS organizations, and the best way to learn about AWS, its tools, and its resource is by studying its documentation thoroughly.
Now we have come to the end of this article, I hope it was helpful, do well to leave a Clap, and please leave a Comment on any thoughts, questions, or suggestions, as this would help me improve my learning journey. Until then, thank you.
