What is AWS and What can you do with it

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I am starting a series on AWS in which I will be discussing AWS from the beginning. This is the first article as the part of that series.

Whether you are looking to learn about AWS for your career or for your interest, I believe you will find this article helpful.

Let’s get Started!

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a secure cloud services platform, offering compute power, database storage, content delivery and other functionality to help businesses scale and grow.

In simple words AWS allows you to do the following things-

1. Running web and application servers in the cloud to host dynamic websites.
2. Securely store all your files on the cloud so you can access them from anywhere.
3. Using managed databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle or SQL Server to store information.
4. Deliver static and dynamic files quickly around the world using a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
5. Send bulk email to your customers and much more!

Now that you know what you can do with AWS, lets have an overview of various AWS services.

This article was last updated on 1st May 2022.

Basic Terminologies

1. Region — A region is a geographical area around the world where AWS’s data centers are located. Each region consists of 2 (or more) availability zones.
2. Availability Zone — It is simply a group of one or more data centers.
3. Edge Location — They are CDN (Content Delivery Network) endpoints for CloudFront. Cached data is stored here to reduce latency to the end users.
4. Local Zone — Allows you to deploy AWS services, like compute and storage services, closer to your end-users for low-latency requirements.
5. Wavelength — It embeds AWS compute and storage services within 5G networks hence allowing developers to build applications that deliver single-digit millisecond latencies to mobile devices and end-users.
6. Outposts — It brings AWS services and infrastructure to virtually any on-premises or edge location helping you build a consistent hybrid experience.

Compute

1. EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) — These are just the virtual machines in the cloud on which you have the OS level control. You can run whatever you want in them.
2. LightSail — If you don’t have any prior experience with AWS this is for you. It automatically deploys and manages compute, storage and networking capabilities required to run your applications.
3. ECS (Elastic Container Service) — It is a highly scalable container service to allows you to run Docker containers in the cloud.
4. EKS (Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes) — Allows you to use Kubernetes on AWS without installing and managing your own Kubernetes control plane.
5. Fargate — It is a serverless compute engine that allows you to run containers on AWS without managing servers.
6. Lambda — AWS’s serverless technology that allows you to run functions in the cloud. It’s a huge cost saver as you pay only when your functions execute.
7. Batch — It enables you to easily and efficiently run batch computing workloads of any scale on AWS using Amazon EC2 and EC2 spot fleet.
8. Elastic Beanstalk — Allows automated deployment and provisioning of resources like a highly scalable production website. It provides you much more control over your infra as compared to App runner.
9. App Runner—It is a fully managed service that makes it easy for you to quickly deploy containerized web applications and APIs at scale. Under the hood it builds an ECS cluster and uses Fargate to execute the containers.
10. AWS Auto Scaling — Allows you to automatically scale your compute resources up and down based on CloudWatch metrics.

Storage

1. S3 (Simple Storage Service) — Storage service of AWS in which we can store objects like files, folders, images, documents, songs, etc. It cannot be used to install software, games or Operating System.
2. EFS (Elastic File System) — Provides file storage for use with your EC2 instances. It uses NFSv4 protocol and can be used concurrently by thousands of instances.
3. Glacier — It is an extremely low-cost archival service to store files for a long time like a few years or even decades.
4. Storage Gateway — It is a virtual machine that you install on your on-premise servers. Your on-premise data can be backed up to AWS providing more durability.
5. DRS (Elastic Disaster Recovery) — It replicates your on-premises or cloud-based applications to minimize downtime and data loss in case of a disaster.
6. AWS Backup — A fully managed service that makes it easy to centralize and automate data protection across AWS services, in the cloud, or on premises.
7. EBS (Elastic Block Storage) — It is a scalable, high-performance block storage service for EC2 instances. In simple words, it is the HDDs or SSDs attached to your EC2 instances. One EBS volume can only be attached to a single EC2 instance.

Databases

1. RDS (Relational Database Service) — Allows you to run relational databases like MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle or SQL Server. These databases are fully managed by AWS like installing antivirus and patches.
2. DynamoDB — It is a highly scalable, high-performance NoSQL database. It provides single-digit millisecond latency at any scale.
3. Elasticache — Allows you to run fully managed Memcached and Redis on AWS. It is a way of caching data inside the cloud. It can be used to take load off of your database by caching most frequent queries.
4. Neptune — It is a fast, reliable and scalable graph database service.
5. RedShift — It is AWS’s data warehousing solution that can be used to run complex OLAP queries and much more.
6. DocumentDB — A scalable fully managed NoSQL database service for operating mission-critical MongoDB workloads.
7. Keyspaces — A managed Apache Cassandra-compatible database service.
8. Timestream — A fully managed time series database that makes it easy to store and analyze trillions of time series data points per day.
9. QLDB (Amazon Ledger Database Services) — A fully managed ledger database that provides a transparent, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable transaction log.

Migration & Transfer

1. DMS (Database Migration Service) — It can be used to migrate on-site databases to AWS. It also allows you to migrate from one type of database to another. Eg -from Oracle to MySQL.
2. SMS (Server Migration Service) — It allows you to migrate on-site servers to AWS easily and quickly.
3. Snowball — It is a briefcase sized appliance that can be used to send terabytes of data inside and outside of AWS.
4. Snow Family — It comprises of AWS Snowcone, AWS Snowball, and AWS Snowmobile. It offers a number of physical devices and capacity points, most with built-in computing capabilities. These can help physically transport exabytes of data into and out of AWS.
5. DataSync — It automates and accelerates moving data between on premises and AWS Storage services. It can be used to migrate, archive, or protect data.
6. Transfer Family — A fully managed service that can be used to transfer files into and out of S3 storage or EFS file systems over SFTP, FTPS, and FTP protocol.

Networking & Content Delivery

1. VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) — It is simply a data center in the cloud in which you deploy all your resources. It allows you to better isolate your resources and secure them.
2. CloudFront -It is AWS’s Content Delivery Network (CDN) that consists of Edge locations that cache resources.
3. Route53 — It is AWS’s highly available DNS (Domain Name System) service. You can register domain names through it.
4. Direct Connect — Using it you can connect your data center to an Availability zone using a high speed dedicated line.
5. API Gateway — Allows you to create, store and manage APIs at scale.
6. Shield — A managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service to safeguard applications running on AWS.
7. WAF (Web Application Firewall) — It protects your web apps or APIs against common web exploits and bots that may affect availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources.
8. PrivateLink — It provides private connectivity between VPCs, AWS services, and your on-premises networks, without exposing your traffic to the public internet.

Developer Tools

1. CodeStar — It is a cloud-based service for creating, managing, and working with software development projects on AWS. You can quickly develop, build, and deploy applications on AWS with an AWS CodeStar project.
2. CodeCommit — It is AWS’s version control service that allows you to store your code and other assets privately in the cloud.
3. CodeBuild — It automates the process of building your code.
4. CodeDeploy — It is a way of deploying your code in EC2 instances automatically.
5. CodePipeline — Allows you to keep track of different steps in your deployment like building, testing, authentication, and deployment on development and production environments.
6. Cloud9 —It is an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for writing, running, and debugging code in the cloud.
7. X-Ray — It makes it easy for developers to analyze the behavior of their distributed applications by providing request tracing, exception collection, and profiling capabilities.
8. CodeGuru — It provides intelligent recommendations to improve code quality and identify an application’s most expensive lines of code.
9. Fault Injection Simulator — A service for running fault injection experiments on AWS that makes it easier to improve an application’s performance, observability, and resiliency.

Management and Governance Services

1. CloudWatch — It can be used to monitor AWS environments like CPU utilization of EC2 and RDS instances and trigger alarms based on different metrics.
2. CloudFormation — It is a way of turning infrastructure into the cloud. You can use templates to provision a whole production environment in minutes.
3. CloudTrail — A way of auditing AWS resources. It logs all changes and API calls made to AWS.
4. OpsWorks — It helps in automating Chef deployments on AWS.
5. Config — It monitors your environment and notifies you when you break certain configurations.
6. Service Catalog — For larger enterprises, helps to authorize which services will be used and which won’t be.
7. Trusted Advisor — Gives you recommendations on how to do cost optimizations, and secure your environment.
8. Systems Manager — Allows you to group your resources, so you can quickly gain insights, identify issues and act on them.
9. Managed Services—It provides ongoing management of your AWS infrastructure so you can focus on your applications.
10. Managed Grafana — It is a managed Grafana service that provides you scalable, secure, and highly available data visualization for your operational metrics.
11. Managed service for Prometheus — It is a managed Prometheus service that provides you highly available, secure, and managed monitoring for your containers.
12. Well-Architected Tool — It is based on the AWS Well-Architected Framework and helps you review the state of your applications and workloads for architectural best practices and guidance.
13. Budgets — It helps you to set budgets for your AWS services and much more.

Analytics

1. Athena — Allows you to run SQL queries on your S3 bucket to find files.
2. EMR (Elastic Map Reduce) — It is used for big data processing like Hadoop, Apache Spark, and Splunk, etc.
3. CloudSearch — It can be used to create a fully managed search engine for your website.
4. Kinesis — A way of streaming and analyzing real-time data at massive scale. It can handle TBs of data per hour.
5. Data Pipeline — Allows you to move data from one place to another. Eg: from S3 to DynamoDB or vice versa.
6. QuickSight —A business analytics tool that allows you to create visualizations in a rich dashboard for data in AWS. Eg: for S3, DynamoDB, etc.
7. Glue — It is a fully managed ETL (extract, transform, and load) service that makes it simple and cost-effective to categorize your data, clean it, enrich it, and move it reliably between various data stores.
8. MSK (Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka) — As the name suggests it makes it easy to ingest and process streaming data in real time with fully managed Apache Kafka.
9. OpenSearch (previously Elasticsearch) — A managed Opensearch service that makes it easy for you to perform real-time application monitoring, website search, and more.

Security, Identity, and Compliance

1. IAM (Identity and Access Management) — Allows you to manage users, assign policies, create groups to manage multiple users.
2. Inspector — It is an agent that you install on our virtual machines, which then reports any security vulnerabilities.
3. Certificate Manager — It gives free SSL certificates for your domains that are managed by Route53.
4. Directory Service — A way of using your company’s account to log in to AWS.
5. WAF (Web Application Firewall) — Gives you application-level protection and blocks SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks.
6. CloudHSM — It helps you meet corporate, contractual, and regulatory compliance requirements for data security by using dedicated Hardware Security Module (HSM) appliances within the AWS Cloud.
7. Cloud Directory — It enables you to build flexible, cloud-native directories for organizing hierarchies of data along multiple dimensions.
8. KMS (Key Management Service) — It is a managed service that makes it easy for you to create and control the encryption keys used to encrypt your data.
9. Organizations — It allows you to create groups of AWS accounts that you can use to more easily manage security and automation settings.
10. Shield — A managed DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) protection service that safeguards web applications running on AWS.
11. Artifact — It is the place where you can get all your compliance certifications.
12. Macie — A data visibility security service that helps classify and protect your sensitive and business-critical content.
13. GuardDuty —Provides intelligent threat detection to protect your AWS accounts and workloads.
14. Audit Manager — It helps you continuously audit your AWS infra across multiple compliance and industry standards.

Application Integration Services

1. Step Functions — A way of visualizing what’s going inside your application and what different microservices it is using.
2. SWF (Simple Workflow Service) — A way of coordinating both automated tasks and human-led tasks.
3. SNS (Simple Notification Service) — Can be used to send you notifications in the form of email and SMS regarding your AWS services. It is a push-based service.
4. SQS (Simple Queue Service) — The first service offered by AWS. It can be used to decouple your applications. It is a pull-based service.
5. Elastic Transcoder — Changes a video’s format and resolution to support different devices like tablets, smartphones, and laptops of different resolutions.
6. EventBridge — It is a serverless event bus service that makes it easier to build event-driven applications at scale.
7. MQ — A managed message broker service for Apache ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ.
8. Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA) — A managed orchestration service for Apache Airflow that makes it easier to set up and operate end-to-end pipelines in the cloud at scale.

Frontend and Mobile Services

1. Mobile Hub — Allows you to add, configure and design features for mobile apps. It is a console for mobile app development.
2. Cognito — Allows your users to signup using social identity providers.
3. Device Farm — Enables you to improve quality of apps by quickly testing on hundreds of mobile devices.
4. AWS AppSync —It is an enterprise level, fully managed GraphQL service with real-time data synchronization and offline programming features.
5. Mobile Analytics — Allows to simply and cost effectively analyze mobile data.
6. Location service — Allows you to add location functionality, such as maps, point of interest, geocoding, routing, tracking, and geofencing, to your applications without sacrificing data security and user privacy.
7. Amplify — It is a set of purpose-built tools and features that enables frontend web and mobile developers to quickly and easily build full-stack applications on AWS.

Business Productivity

1. Alexa for Business — It lets you empower your organization with voice, using Alexa. Allows you to build custom voice skills for your organization.
2. Chime — Can be used for online meeting and video conferencing.
3. WorkDocs — Helps to store documents in the cloud.
4. WorkMail — Allows you to send and receive business emails.
5. Honeycode — A no-code solution to build mobile and web apps for teams.

Desktop & App Streaming

1. WorkSpaces — It is a VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure). Allows you to use remote desktops in the cloud
2. AppStream 2.0 — A way of streaming desktop applications to your users in the web browser. Eg: Using MS Word in Google Chrome.

Artificial Intelligence

1. Lex — Allows you to quickly build chatbots.
2. Polly — AWS’s text-to-speech service. You can create audio versions of your notes using it.
3. Machine learning — You just have to give your dataset and target variable and AWS will take care of training your model.
4. Rekognition — AWS’s face recognition service. Allows you to recognize faces and object in images and videos.
5. SageMaker — Helps you to build, train and deploy machine learning models at any scale.
6. Comprehend — It is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) service that uses machine learning to find insights and relationships in text. It can be used for sentiment analysis.
7. Transcribe — It is the opposite of Polly. It is AWS’s speech-to-text service that provides that provides high-quality and affordable transcriptions.
8. Translate — It is like Google Translate and allows you to translate text in one language to another.
9. Lookout for Vision — It uses computer vision to spot defects in manufactured products at scale.
10. Panorama — It is a collection of machine learning devices and SDK that brings Computer Vision to on-premises Internet Protocol (IP) cameras.
11. Textract — It can be used to extract text, handwriting, and data from scanned documents.
12. Kendra — It is an easy-to-use enterprise search service that allows you to add search capabilities to your applications to make it easier for end users to discover information.
13. Personalize — Allows you to add real-time personalized recommendations to your applications like the intelligent recommendations you see on Amazon’s retail website.
14. Amazon Forecast — It uses statistical and machine learning algorithms to deliver highly accurate time-series forecasts. Time-series forecasting is useful in multiple fields like retail, finance, logistics, and healthcare.
15. Lookout for Metrics — It automatically detects and diagnose anomalies in business and operational data, such as a sudden dip in sales revenue or customer acquisition rates.

AR & VR (Augmented Reality & Virtual Reality)

1. Sumerian — It is a set of tools for creating high-quality virtual reality (VR) experiences on the web. You can quickly create interactive 3D scenes and publish it as a website for users to access.

Customer Engagement

1. Amazon Connect — Allows you to create a customer care center in the cloud.
2. Pinpoint — It is like Google analytics for mobile applications. It helps you to understand users and engage with them.
3. SES (Simple Email Service) — Allows you to send bulk emails to your customers at an extremely low price.

Game Development

1. GameLift — It is a service managed by AWS that can used to host dedicated game servers. It seamlessly scales without taking your game offline.
2. Lumberyard — A free, cross-platform, 3D game engine that allows you to create high-quality games, connect your games to the compute and storage of the AWS cloud.

Internet of Things

1. IoT Core— It is a managed cloud platform that lets connected devices — cars, light bulbs, sensor grids, and more — easily and securely interact with cloud applications and other devices.
2. IoT Device Management — Allows you to manage your IoT devices at any scale.
3. IoT Analytics — Can be used to perform analysis on data collected by your IoT devices.
4. Greengrass — Lets your IoT devices to process the locally generated data while advantage of AWS services.
5. Amazon FreeRTOS — It is a real-time operating system for microcontrollers that makes it easy to securely connect IoT devices locally or to the cloud.
6. IoT device Defender — It helps you to secure your fleet of IoT devices by continuously auditing your IoT configurations.
7. IoT Events — It makes it easy to detect and respond to events from IoT sensors and applications.
8. IoT Sitewise — It simplifies collecting, organizing, and analyzing industrial equipment data.

Now, that was a whole lot to cover but if you read it, Kudos!

Having an overview of these services helps you to understand the power of cloud computing.

The next articles in the series will go in-depth of core AWS services. See you next time!