AWS overview

Amazon Web Services: An Overview

Cloud com­put­ing has grown dra­mat­i­cal­ly in recent years, with an increas­ing num­ber of orga­ni­za­tions aban­don­ing phys­i­cal data cen­ters in favor of the cloud. Ama­zon Web Ser­vices (AWS) is the first name that comes to mind when we talk about cloud com­put­ing. Ama­zon Web Ser­vices (AWS) is the IT industry’s cloud com­put­ing trend­set­ter. Ama­zon Web Ser­vices is a holis­tic cloud com­put­ing plat­form that is con­stant­ly evolv­ing. It offers a mix of infra­struc­ture as a ser­vice (IaaS), plat­form as a ser­vice (PaaS), and pack­aged soft­ware as a ser­vice (SaaS). AWS ser­vices can pro­vide a com­pa­ny with tech­nolo­gies like com­pute pow­er, data­base stor­age, and con­tent deliv­ery ser­vices. AWS was among the first com­pa­nies to offer a pay-as-you-go cloud com­put­ing mod­el, which scales to deliv­er users with com­put­ing, stor­age, or band­width as need­ed. AWS pro­vides a wide range of tools and resources for busi­ness­es and soft­ware com­pa­nies that can be used in data cen­ters in over 190 coun­tries. AWS ser­vices are avail­able to gov­ern­ment agen­cies, aca­d­e­m­ic insti­tu­tions, non­prof­its, and pri­vate organizations.

His­to­ry #

The Ama­zon Web Ser­vices plat­form was ini­tial­ly debuted in 2002 with only a few ser­vices. AWS was re-envi­sioned in 2003 to opti­mize, auto­mate, and focus on web ser­vices Amazon’s com­pute infra­struc­ture. This re-imag­in­ing includ­ed the idea of sell­ing vir­tu­al serv­er access as a ser­vice plat­form. In 2004, the first avail­able to pub­lic AWS ser­vice (Ama­zon SQS) was ini­ti­at­ed from the inter­nal infra­struc­ture built by ​“Ama​zon​.com” to man­age its online retail oper­a­tional activ­i­ties. AWS was rein­vent­ed in 2006 with three ser­vices, which include Ama­zon S3 cloud stor­age, SQS, and EC2, estab­lish­ing AWS as a suite of online fun­da­men­tal ser­vices. S3 and EC2 were intro­duced in Europe in 2009, and the Elas­tic Block Store and Ama­zon Cloud­Front were unveiled and inte­grat­ed into AWS. AWS began offer­ing accred­i­ta­tion in AWS ser­vices in 2013, and an autoscal­ing ser­vice was released in 2018. Over time, AWS has incor­po­rat­ed a pletho­ra of ser­vices that have con­tributed to its sta­tus as a low-cost infra­struc­ture plat­form that is read­i­ly acces­si­ble and cus­tomiz­able. Ama­zon Web Ser­vices (AWS) is with­out a ques­tion the most ful­ly devel­oped cloud ser­vice provider and the pre­vail­ing mar­ket leader in the cloud indus­try, with a 60 per­cent mar­ket share as of 2020, and now has atten­tion on the cloud, with data cen­ters locat­ed all over the world, includ­ing the Unit­ed States, Aus­tralia, Europe, Japan, and Brazil.

Func­tion­al­i­ty of Ama­zon Web Ser­vices (AWS) #

AWS is sep­a­rat­ed into dif­fer­ent ser­vices; each can be con­fig­ured in dif­fer­ent ways based on the user’s needs. Users should be able to see con­fig­u­ra­tion options and indi­vid­ual serv­er maps for an AWS service.

Avail­abil­i­ty #

Ama­zon Web Ser­vices pro­vides ser­vices from dozens of data cen­ters spread across avail­abil­i­ty zone in regions across the world. Every loca­tion zone con­tains mul­ti­ple phys­i­cal data cen­ters in geo­graph­ic prox­im­i­ty con­nect­ed by low-laten­cy net­work links. AWS is divid­ed into dif­fer­ent ser­vices, each of which can be cus­tomized dif­fer­ent­ly depend­ing on the require­ments of the user. For an AWS ser­vice, users should be able to see cus­tomiza­tion options as well as spe­cif­ic serv­er maps. 

Acces­si­bil­i­ty #

Ama­zon Web Ser­vices offers ser­vices from dozens of data cen­ters locat­ed in var­i­ous avail­abil­i­ty zones around the world. Each loca­tion zone con­tains mul­ti­ple phys­i­cal data cen­ters that are geo­graph­i­cal­ly close to one anoth­er and are linked by low-laten­cy net­work links. A com­pa­ny will select one or more avail­abil­i­ty zones for a myr­i­ad of pur­pos­es, includ­ing con­for­mance and rela­tion to end-users. Ama­zon Elas­tic Com­pute Cloud (EC2) is a ser­vice that offers EC2 instances, which are vir­tu­al servers for com­put­ing capac­i­ty. The EC2 ser­vice pro­vides dozens of instance types with wide­ly dif­fer­ent capac­i­ties and sizes, each best suit­ed to a par­tic­u­lar work­load type or application. 

Keep­ing Things Safe #

Ama­zon Sim­ple Stor­age Ser­vice (S3) is a scal­able object stor­age ser­vice used for data back­up, com­pi­la­tion, and ana­lyt­ics. To pre­serve data and files inte­grat­ed, an IT pro­fes­sion­al encrypts them as S3 objects inside S3 buck­ets (can con­tain over 5gigabyte of data). A com­pa­ny can save finan­cial resources by using Ama­zon S3’s Pro­longed Access stor­age tier or Ama­zon Glac­i­er for long cold stor­age. Ama­zon Elas­tic Block Store pro­vides block-lev­el stor­age vol­umes for per­sis­tent data stor­age when using EC2 instances. Ama­zon Elas­tic File Sys­tem offers man­aged cloud-based file stor­age. A com­pa­ny also could trans­fer data to the cloud using stor­age trans­port tech­nolo­gies like AWS Snow­ball and Snow­mo­bile, or use AWS Stor­age Gate­way to grant on-premis­es apps access to cloud data.

Data­bas­es and infor­ma­tion man­age­ment #

The Ama­zon Rela­tion­al Data­base Ser­vice offers an inter­ac­tion­al data­base con­trol sys­tem for AWS users, with offer­ings for Ora­cle, SQL Serv­er, Post­greSQL, MySQL, Mari­aDB, and an open-source high inter­pre­ta­tion data­base called Ama­zon Auro­ra. AWS also pro­vides con­trolled NoSQL data­bas­es via Ama­zon DynamoDB. Ama­zon Red­shift pro­vides a data stor­age facil­i­ty, which allows data ana­lysts to exe­cute busi­ness intel­li­gence tasks with ease. 

Cloud migra­tion, hybrid cloud #

AWS offers a vari­ety of tools and ser­vices to help users migrate their appli­ca­tions, data­bas­es, servers, and data to its pub­lic cloud. The AWS Migra­tion Hub serves as a sin­gle point of con­tact for con­trol­ling and mon­i­tor­ing on-premis­es to cloud migrations. 

When in the cloud, EC2 Sys­tems Man­ag­er facil­i­tates an IT team in mod­i­fy­ing on-premis­es servers and AWS instances. To facil­i­tate hybrid cloud oper­a­tional activ­i­ties, Ama­zon has estab­lished part­ner­ships with sev­er­al tech­nol­o­gy ven­dors. VMware Cloud on AWS is a ser­vice that brings VMware’s soft­ware-defined data cen­ter tech­nol­o­gy to the AWS cloud.

Syn­er­gy #

An Ama­zon Vir­tu­al Pri­vate Cloud (Ama­zon VPC) pro­vides admin­is­tra­tor own­er­ship over a vir­tu­al net­work that uses a con­fined com­po­nent of the Ama­zon Web Ser­vices (AWS) cloud. For added secu­ri­ty, AWS instan­ta­neous­ly cre­ates new resources with­in a VPC.

The Elas­tic Load Bal­anc­ing (ELB) ser­vice, which encom­pass­es the Appli­ca­tion Load Bal­ancer and Net­work Load Bal­ancer, allows admin­is­tra­tors to sta­bi­lize net­work con­ges­tion AWS also offers a domain name sys­tem known as Ama­zon Route 53, which directs end users to appli­ca­tions. A spe­cial­ized con­nec­tion from an on-premis­es data cen­ter to the AWS cloud can be estab­lished by an IT pro­fes­sion­al using AWS Direct Connect.

Devel­op­er tools #

To inte­grate appli­ca­tions and ser­vices, a devel­op­er can make use of AWS com­mand-line tools and soft­ware devel­op­ment kits (SDKs). This com­pris­es Amazon’s pro­pri­etary code inter­face, the AWS Com­mand Line Inter­face. To man­age cloud ser­vices from Win­dows envi­ron­ments, a devel­op­er can use AWS Tools for Powershell. 

To assess Lamb­da func­tions, devel­op­ers can use the AWS Server­less Appli­ca­tion Mod­el to visu­al­ize an AWS envi­ron­ment. AWS SDKs are read­i­ly acces­si­ble for a range of dif­fer­ent plat­forms and pro­gram­ming lan­guages, such as Java, PHP, Python, Node.js, Ruby, C++, Android, and iOS. Ama­zon API Gate­way encour­ages a devel­op­ment team to gen­er­ate, man­age, and super­vise cus­tom appli­ca­tion pro­gram inter­faces. (APIs) that lets appli­ca­tions access data or func­tion­al­i­ty from back-end services. 

API Gate­way han­dles thou­sands of syn­chro­nous API calls at the same time. AWS also offers a brand­ed media transcod­ing ser­vice called Ama­zon Elas­tic Transcoder, as well as a ser­vice called AWS Step Func­tions that high­lights work­flows for microser­vices-based appli­ca­tions. A devel­op­ment team can also use AWS Code­Pipeline, AWS Code­Build, AWS Cod­eDe­ploy, and AWS CodeStar to devel­op con­cur­rent engi­neer­ing and con­tin­u­ous deploy­ment pipelines. 

A devel­op­er can also use AWS Code­Com­mit to con­tain code in Gitrepos­i­to­ries and AWS X‑Ray to assess the effec­tive­ness of microser­vices-based applications.

Big data man­age­ment and ana­lyt­ics #

AWS offers a wide range of big data ana­lyt­ics and appli­ca­tion ser­vices. This includes the following:

  • Ama­zon Elas­tic MapRe­duce, which pro­vides a Hadoop frame­work for large-scale data processing.
  • Ama­zon Kine­sis, which offers sev­er­al tools for pro­cess­ing and ana­lyz­ing stream­ing data.
  • AWS Glue, which is a ser­vice for extract­ing, trans­form­ing, and load­ing jobs.
  • With the open-source Elas­tic search tool, Ama­zon Elas­tic search Ser­vice essen­tial­ly allows a team to exe­cute appli­ca­tion mon­i­tor­ing, log eval­u­a­tion, and oth­er tasks.
  • Ama­zon Athena for S3, which enables data ana­lysts to review their data.
  • Ama­zon Quick­Sight is a data visu­al­iza­tion tool for analysts.

Mobile devel­op­ment #

The AWS Mobile Hub aims at pro­vid­ing a suite of tools and ser­vices for mobile app devel­op­ers, such as the AWS Mobile SDK, which includes code sam­ples and libraries.

A mobile app devel­op­er could also use Ama­zon Cog­i­to to han­dle app user access and Ama­zon Pin­point to upload push noti­fi­ca­tions to app end users and then exam­ine the effi­cien­cy of those communications.

Mes­sages and noti­fi­ca­tions #

AWS mes­sag­ing ser­vices enable users and appli­ca­tions to com­mu­ni­cate with one anoth­er. Ama­zon Sim­ple Queue Ser­vice (SQS) is a reg­u­lat­ed mes­sage queue that car­ries, stores, and receives mes­sages between dis­bursed appli­ca­tion com­po­nents to guar­an­tee that the com­po­nents of an appli­ca­tion work as designed. 

Ama­zon Sim­ple Noti­fi­ca­tion Ser­vice (SNS) allows a com­pa­ny to send publish/​subscribe mes­sages to end­points such as end-users or ser­vices. SNS encom­pass­es a mobile mes­sag­ing option that facil­i­tates push noti­fi­ca­tions to mobile devices. Ama­zon Sim­ple Email Ser­vice (SES) allows IT, pro­fes­sion­als and mar­keters, to trans­mit and receive emails.

AR & VR (Aug­ment­ed real­i­ty and vir­tu­al real­i­ty) #

Via its Ama­zon Sumer­ian ser­vice, AWS pro­vides aug­ment­ed real­i­ty (AR) as well as vir­tu­al real­i­ty (VR) devel­op­ment tools. Ama­zon Sumer­ian enables users to build AR and VR appli­ca­tions with­out hav­ing to know how to con­fig­ure or gen­er­ate 3D graph­ics. Users can also use the ser­vice to assess and pub­lish appli­ca­tions in-brows­er. Ama­zon Sumer­ian can be used in the fol­low­ing applications

  • 3D web applications
  • E‑commerce & sales applications
  • Mar­ket­ing • Online education
  • Man­u­fac­tur­ing
  • Train­ing simulations
  • Gam­ing

Game devel­op­ment #

AWS can also be used to devel­op games. AWS ser­vices are used by large game devel­op­ment com­pa­nies such as Ubisoft for their games. AWS can offer ser­vices for every stage of a game’s lifecycle.

AWS pro­vides back-end ser­vices, ana­lyt­ics, and devel­op­er tools to devel­op­ers. Back-end ser­vices assist in con­struct­ing, imple­ment­ing, or scal­ing a developer’s plat­form, while devel­op­er tools also help in the cre­ation of their game. Ana­lyt­ics may aid devel­op­ers in bet­ter under­stand­ing their cus­tomers and how they play the game. AWS servers are also used by devel­op­ers to store data or host game data.

Vir­tu­al­iza­tion tech­nolo­gies were already avail­able and ready to use. The real turn­ing point for Ama­zon was supe­ri­or engi­neer­ing design and man­age­ment. They enact­ed the tech­nol­o­gy for their ear­ly adopters but designed and man­u­fac­tured it with an eye toward the future and what oth­er cus­tomers might want and need as their ser­vice-ori­ent­ed archi­tec­ture expand­ed and developed. 

In con­clu­sion find­ing good soft­ware engi­neer­ing with good mar­ket self-aware­ness and project man­age­ment over a long peri­od to pro­duce and strength­en, sim­i­lar to AWS, must be more remark­able than a huge tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ment like machine learn­ing, obvi­ous­ly because it appears to be so rare and dif­fi­cult to manage.