What is Amazon Web Services?
If you are new to Cloud Computing and would like to understand what exactly AWS is and what kinds of services does AWS provides us and how can we use them to solve the problems. Please read article and provide your feedback.
In 2006, Amazon launched its own IT Infrastructure Services called Amazon Web Services. AWS is a cloud platform where you can create, build, and deploy applications. The different AWS services can be accessed over the Internet and it provides premium support plans to help companies run their business applications and workloads on the cloud.
Amazon Web Services also has the biggest market share in the cloud industry and has the most extensive global cloud infrastructure in the world.
AWS Global Infrastructure
The Cloud Infrastructure of AWS is built around:
Regions : A Region provides multiple, physically separated, and isolated Availability Zones which are connected with low latency, high throughput, and highly redundant networking. eg: Us-east1.
So, it is important to know that some services will not share data across regions and they are available to the region you configured.
Also it is good to select region while deploying applications where you want your application to serve from to improve latency.
Availability Zones : Each Availability Zone consist of one or more discrete data centers, each with redundant power, networking, and connectivity, housed in separate facilities. These are also referred as (AZ).
Local Region is a single datacenter designed to complement an existing AWS Region.
Local Zone places AWS compute, storage, database, and other select services close to large populations, industry, and IT centers where no AWS region exists today.
Edge Locations where end users access services located at AWS.
Why to choose AWS instead of making use of on premise data center:
Operational Excellence : Run and monitor systems to deliver business value and to continually improve supporting processes and procedures.
Security : Protect information, systems, and assets while delivering business value through risk assessments and mitigation strategies.
Reliability : Recover the system from infrastructure or service disruptions, dynamically acquire computing resources to meet demand, and mitigate disruptions such as misconfigurations or transient network issues.
Performance Efficiency : Use computing resources efficiently to meet system requirements, and to maintain that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve.
Cost Optimization : Avoid or eliminate unneeded cost or suboptimal resources.
Essential AWS Services
Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) is a web service that lets you rent scalable and resizable virtual machines in the Cloud. You can control inbound traffic to an EC2 instance by using a Security Group.
AWS Lambda is a Serverless computing service that lets you run functions/code without having to manage servers. AWS Lambda supports Java, Go, PowerShell, Node.js, C# etc..
Elastic Kubernetes Services (EKS) is a fully managed Kubernetes service that lets you orchestrate and manage containerized applications. Control plane upgrades can be done automatically or manually, while worker nodes upgrades.
Simple Storage Service (S3) is a distributed object storage service. S3 stores data as an object and can’t be used as a boot volume for instances. unlimited objects can be stored in an S3 bucket.
Elastic Block Storage (EBS) is a persistent block storage service that can be used as a boot volume and storage for a virtual machine. EBS volumes are replicated within an Availability Zone.
Elastic File System (EFS) is a fully managed Network File System (NFS) for Linux. EFS is a regional service which allows concurrent connections for instances across availability zones.
Relational Database Service (RDS) — is a managed relational database service that has support for multiple database engines like MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and SQL Server.
DynamoDB is a serverless NoSQL database service that supports key-value and document data structures. Networking.
Virtual Private Cloud — is a virtual network environment where you can run AWS resources. The minimum size of subnet that can be created in a VPC for IPv4 is /28 or 14 IP addresses.
CloudFront is a content delivery network that can be used to improve an application’s performance by utilizing the AWS global infrastructure to deliver data across the globe.
Route 53 — is a highly available Domain Name System (DNS) service. You can either buy a new domain or import a pre-existing domain on Route 53.
Identity Access Management (IAM) — is an identity and access management service that allows you to create, manage, and control users and access to AWS resources and services.
Key Management System (KMS) — is a fully managed centralized key management system. KMS is used to handle the encryption and decryption of your data. You can either create a Customer Master Key (CMK) using KMS.
AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) is a service that helps protect applications against common attacks, cross-site scripting at a network level by controlling the traffic that reaches your application.
There are many other services which are available, And It is good to have hands on experience on these services as they are pretty simple to use and each service has its own benefits towards application development.
