Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Plain English
Amazon released a web service creatively named “Amazon Web Service”, often affectionately known as AWS, back in 2006. It has been continuously developed since with additional capabilities added as it evolved.
It’s described as ‘the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform’ which actually offers over 175 features.
However, we found AWS to be the world’s most confusing cloud platform with a mountain of acronyms or jargon, so we decided to dissect the language they’ve used throughout their platform. We’ve picked out just a few obscurely named services and explained their functions in a simpler, short manner.
Website Hosting Services
If you’re setting up a web app, then these definitions will be a helping hand to help better understanding the services that Amazon are providing to you…
- SES — A transactional email system enabling you to send emails from your application with the advantage of coming from trusted sources so your legitimate emails and newsletters are less likely to be marked as spam
- Elastic Transcoder — A service providing the ability to convert finished videos into multiple formats suitable for use across multiple devices such as mobile optimised video
- WAF — This is just a firewall protecting applications, allowing you to filter and block requests against common attack methods such as SQL Injection attacks and application-specific attacks
- Amazon EC2 / Elastic Compute Cloud — This provides scalable computing capacity. It eliminates your need to invest in hardware upfront, so you can develop and deploy applications faster
- Lightsail — A budget option for simple server requirements, this application is a Virtual Server, similar to Amazon EC2 instances but with limited functionality. It’s most suitable for infrastructure requiring a single server that is not resource-intensive
- S3 — A scalable storage service which provides a place to store files for public or private usage. A great option for serving downloadable content on your site such as PDF documents or large files
- Aurora — A scalable Database service offering MySQL and PostgreSQL which is ideal for datasets that grow rapidly. Storage can scale up to 64TB without the need for restarting. As well as this, the function provides fault-tolerant replication for reliability and point-in-time data recovery in the event of a disaster
- RDS — The overall Amazon Database service comprising all the individual database service offered by Amazon. Offering a range of SQL services including Amazon Aurora, Microsoft SQL and Oracle Database
- ROUTE53 — This should’ve been more simply called a Domain Name System (DNS) Manager because essentially you are buying a new domain and pointing it at a server somewhere
“By the end of 2020, it’s predicted that over 90% of enterprises will use multiple cloud services and platforms.” — Alex Bordei, VP of Product at Bigstep
AWS Management Service
With 2020 already here and the increasing adoption of multiple public cloud platforms among businesses, as well as office workloads, IT departments are facing battles with their management of multi-cloud environments. This is put down to the constant need to up-skill and invest in resources to manage different clouds.
Amazon has come up with some management tools to ease your stress so 2020 doesn’t seem so daunting
- CloudTrail A service providing a logging solution to your AWS estate. Enabling you to record account activity such as changes to services. This allows you to comply with whatever governance and compliance systems you have in place.
- ConFig Simply put it inspects your resources on AWS. It’s an application that will help you greatly if you have a large AWS set up as it monitors and tracks what is happening/changing on your platform
- OpsWork OpsWork is a service providing managed Puppet and Chef configuration management services. These are tools which enable you to automatically configure your servers and manage changes to them
- CloudFormation — This is a service allowing you to create repeatable infrastructure. Rather than manually provisioning a server CloudFormation allows you to create a configuration file detailing all the required services you want which you can then spin up with the click of a button
