TECH STACK OF AMAZON WEB SERVICES

6 min readAug 17, 2020

Even those new to IT have probably heard that everyone is “moving to the cloud.” This transition from standard infrastructure is thanks in large part to Amazon Web Services.

Currently, AWS offers “over 90 fully featured services for computing, storage, networking, analytics, application services, deployment, identity and access management, directory services, security. All of these services offer powerful, cloud based, pay-as-you-go alternatives compared to their legacy counterparts.”

To help you better understand the scale at which AWS is capable of running, keep in mind that there are currently over 1 million enterprise customers worldwide who run the AWS marketplace software 70 million hours per month, according to DMR.

What is AWS?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Cloud IaaS) platform that provides computing power, data storage, and other IT solutions and utilities for organizations. Launched in 2006, AWS has become one of the most popular cloud platforms available.

Through the use of AWS, Amazon has made it possible for organizations to eliminate the need to build and maintain private, on premise infrastructures. Instead, users only pay for what they need, creating a more scalable model without the management overhead of hosting the same architecture on site.

In terms of security, AWS is said to be more secure than a company hosting its own website or data. With data centers across the globe that are continuously monitored and strictly maintained, customers are ensured that a disaster striking one region doesn’t cause a permanent data loss worldwide.

How does AWS work?

EC2 is a web service that provides resizable computing capacity that you use to build and host your software systems.

It’s primarily designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers and allows customers to obtain and configure capacity easily. One of the primary benefits of EC2 is the ability to capitalize on the auto scaling capabilities the cloud presents to us.

Applications can be scaled up or down based on demand by taking advantage of Amazon’s compute and storage resources when and where you need them.

This means that with AWS, EC2 can automatically scale the number of VMs you have running during high-traffic times to handle demands as they increase or decrease.

Based on this model, AWS has expanded its offerings, while following a similar model to EC2, and allow organizations to constantly make changes to their business ecosystem by adding and subtracting services, and/or expanding and reducing their current services.

The AWS marketplace integrates with your current IT infrastructure and works along with many tools such as SAP, SharePoint, and Hadoop, among others.

What sets AWS apart?

As mentioned, AWS has over 90 services and among those are Amazon VPC, Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, Amazon Route 53, AWS Lambda, Amazon ECS, and at the core, Amazon EC2.

Essentially, AWS has made it possible for companies to affordably to shift their entire data center to the cloud, meaning there is no longer a need to build data centers onsite.

Compared to Microsoft Azure, “AWS’s main offering is its EC2 instances, which can be customized to a large degree, while Azure’s compute offering is focused on Virtual Machines.

AWS bills by the hour, Azure bills by the minute. Perhaps one of the most important things to consider is that although comparable, AWS can often be seen as the cheaper option.”

Put simply, some of the main advantages of AWS are:

Minimize overhead for investment, maintenance, and management
Provide resources that are reliable, and always globally available
Increase productivity by providing the right tools
Ensure security with modern cloud security standards
Improve scalability

What is AWS used for?

Based on what’s been discussed, we can break the usage of AWS down into 13 broad categories which its services fall into. Those include:

Compute
Storage
Data management
Migration
Networking
Development tools and application services

Management and monitoring
Security
Analytics
Artificial intelligence
Mobile development
Notifications
Productivity SaaS business offerings

WORKING WITH STACKS :

A stack is a collection of AWS resources that you can manage as a single unit. In other words, you can create, update, or delete a collection of resources by creating, updating, or deleting stacks.

A stack, for instance, can include all the resources required to run a web application, such as a web server, a database, and networking rules. If you no longer require that web application, you can simply delete the stack, and all of its related resources are deleted.

AWS Cloud Formation ensures all stack resources are created or deleted as appropriate. Because AWS Cloud Formation treats the stack resources as a single unit, they must all be created or deleted successfully for the stack to be created or deleted.

You can work with stacks by using the AWS Cloud Formation console , API ,or AWS CLI.

TECH STACK OF AWS :

Application and Data :

AWS provides on-demand access to scalable web and application servers, storage, databases, content delivery, cache, search, and other application services that make it easier to build and run apps that deliver a great customer experience.

When data is shared on AWS, anyone can analyze it and build services on top of it using a broad range of compute and data analytics products, including Amazon EC2, Amazon Athena, AWS Lambda, and Amazon EMR.

The Registry of Open Data on AWS makes it easy to find datasets made publicly available through AWS services. Browse available data and learn how to register your own datasets.

Utilities :

With the emergence of renewable energy sources, and the digitization, decentralization and computerization of energy, the AWS cloud provides the tools for power and utilities companies to navigate new business models, deliver energy more reliably, and implement a smarter, more distributed grid.

AWS gives power and utilities companies the foundation to focus on delivering the best customer experience, to achieve operational and cost efficiencies while meeting demand securely and reliably, the flexibility to evolve their business model and innovate in a rapidly changing industry, and the critical business insights to transform the industry.

DevOps:

DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes.

This speed enables organizations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market.

Business Tools:

Amazon is a managed, secure Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution. You can use Amazon Work Spaces to provision either Windows or Linux desktops in just a few minutes and quickly scale to provide thousands of desktops to workers across the globe.