Amazon, the preeminent cloud vendor, broke new ground by establishing the first cloud computing service, Amazon EC2, in 2008. AWS offers more solutions and features than any other provider and has free tiers with access to the AWS Console, where users can centrally control their ministrations.
Designed around ease of use for various skill sets, AWS is tailored for those unaccustomed to software development utilities. Web applications can be deployed in minutes with AWS facilities, without provisioning servers or writing additional code.
Amazon hosts global data centers with a vast network ensuring reduced latency worldwide. AWS’ replication capacity allows you to duplicate services regionally, helping you recover quickly and avoid costly downtime.
AWS services
Let's explore the different domains in which AWS offers services:
Compute It is used to process data on the cloud by making use of powerful processors that serve multiple instances at a time.
Storage and Content Delivery The storage as the name suggests, is used to store data in the cloud, this data can be stored anywhere but content delivery, on the other hand, is used to cache data nearer to the user to provide low latency.
Database The database domain is used to provide reliable relational and non-relational database instances managed by AWS.
Networking It includes services that provide a variety of networking features such as security, faster access, etc.
Management Tools It includes services that can be used to manage and monitor your AWS instances.
Security and Identity It includes services for user authentication or limiting access to a certain set of audiences on your AWS resources.
Application Services It includes simple services like notifications, emailing and queuing.
To include every customer need under the sun, Amazon has further categorized services under each domain. Let’s discuss each one of them.
Compute
- AWS EC2
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) offers the broadest and deepest compute platform, with over 750 instances and a choice of the latest processor, storage, networking, operating system, and purchase model to help you best match the needs of your workload. We are the first major cloud provider that supports Intel, AMD, and Arm processors, the only cloud with on-demand EC2 Mac instances, and the only cloud with 400 Gbps Ethernet networking. We offer the best price performance for machine learning training, as well as the lowest cost per inference instances in the cloud. More SAP, high performance computing (HPC), ML, and Windows workloads run on AWS than any other cloud..
2. AWS Elastic Beanstalk
AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an orchestration service offered by Amazon Web Services for deploying applications that orchestrate various AWS services, including EC2, S3, Simple Notification Service, CloudWatch, autoscaling, and Elastic Load Balancers.
3. AWS Elastic Load Balancing
ELB automatically manages the workload on your instances and distributes them to other instances in case of an instance failure.
4. AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda is a compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the compute resources, making it the fastest way to turn an idea into a modern, production, server-less application.
5. AWS Autoscaling
The Autoscaling feature is used to scale up and down automatically as and when required.
Storage and Content Delivery
- S3 AWS
S3 stands for simple storage service, it is used for storing data in the form of objects in the AWS Cloud.
2. Amazon CloudFront
CloudFront is a content delivery network that is used to cache data to an edge location which reduces latency.
3. Amazon EBS
Amazon Elastic Block Storage is a storage service wherein each block of storage acts like a separate hard drive.
4. Amazon Glacier
Glacier is an archiving service offered by Amazon, which offers low-cost data archiving.
5. AWS Import/Export Snowball
It offers physical transfer of data between user’s location and AWS data centers, the device which is used to transfer the data is called Snowball.
6. AWS Storage Gateway
It is used to provide seamless integration with data security features between your on-premise software appliance and AWS Cloud.
Database
- Amazon Aurora
It is a relational database engine that combines the speed and reliability of high-end commercial databases and the cost-effectiveness and simplicity of open-source databases.
2. Amazon RDS
Amazon RDS is a managed relational database service which does routine database tasks in 6 familiar databases like Amazon Aurora, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and PostgreSQL.
3. Amazon DynamoDB
It is a fully managed No-SQL database service. It is known for extremely low latencies and scalability.
4. Amazon ElastiCache
It is a web service that makes it easy to set up, manage and scale a distributed cache-in environment in the cloud.
5. Amazon Redshift
Amazon Redshift is a fully managed petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud.
Networking
- VPC AWS
Amazon VPC lets you launch AWS resources in a virtual network that you define. It closely resembles a traditional network that you’d operate in your data center.
2. AWS Direct Connect
It helps you establish a private connection between your premises and AWS, therefore giving better network performance and throughput than an Internet-based connection.
3. Amazon Route 53
Route 53 is a highly scalable and highly available Domain Name System by Amazon AWS. The name is about the TCP and UDP’s port 53 where DNS requests are addressed.
Management Tools
1. Amazon CloudWatch
It is a monitoring tool by AWS that is used to keep track of the AWS resources and the applications you run on Amazon AWS.
2. AWS CloudFormation
It is a service that helps you set up and model your Amazon AWS resources so that you can spend less time managing these resources and more time focusing on the development.
3. AWS CloudTrail
AWS CloudTrail is a logging service that records the API calls to your Amazon AWS account and delivers them to you.
4. AWS Command Line Tool
It is an all-in-one tool to manage all your AWS services, by downloading and configuring only one tool you can manage all the AWS services through the command line.
5. AWS OpsWorks
It is a configuration management tool that helps configure and operate applications of all size and shapes using Chef.
6. Trusted Advisor
Trusted Advisor is a customized cloud monitoring tool, that analyzes your AWS environment and gives insights on the expense, performance improvement, security gaps, and reliability.
Security and Identity
- AWS Identity and Access Management(IAM)
It is an AWS service that helps you control access to your AWS resources for your users.
2. AWS Key Management Service
It is a managed service that helps you create and control encryption keys which are used to encrypt your data, and uses Hardware Security Modules to protect the security of your keys.
3. Amazon SES
It is a cost-effective emailing service which is built on the scalable and reliable infrastructure of Amazon.com
4. Amazon SNS
It is a web service offered by AWS that manages the delivery of messages to subscribed endpoints or clients.
5. Amazon SQS
It is a fast, reliable and scalable message queuing service, it can be used to transmit any volume of data at any level of throughput, without losing any messages or without the use of any other service.
AWS Pricing
AWS follows a pay-per-use model, meaning you only pay for what you use. For example, if you are using 10GB of space on S3 on AWS, you would be paying only for that 10GB, traditionally you have to buy an ‘x’ amount of storage say 20GB in advance, and even if you are using 10GB in the purchased space, you will be billed for the whole 20GB.
You can get started with AWS for free, AWS runs a free usage tier in which you can use the AWS services in a very basic manner for free.