Amazon has become a household name today. Yes, we are talking about the eCommerce giant which has been selling a wide range of products through online orders. As Amazon continues to get widespread adoption, its profits are soaring with every passing year. But, do you know where a huge chunk of Amazon’s profit comes from? Well, it’s by a subsidiary of Amazon known as Amazon Web Services or AWS. Basically, AWS offers a suite of cloud services that make up this on-demand computing platform.
The entire concept of AWS is built on top of the cloud computing principle, i.e., offering the IT infrastructure and other services over the internet. Gone are the days when companies had to face a lot of issues when bringing in any new software – huge upfront costs, installation delays, maintenance costs, scalability, limited access, and upgradation. Thanks to AWS, companies no longer need to install any platform or software on-premise, they can access it over the internet just as simple as opening a website in a browser. All the infrastructure, platforms, and software are offered as cloud services to the companies, and that too on a pay-as-you-go basis. It means companies need to pay only for the services they use and have the option to cancel their subscription at any point in time.
Read on to find out ‘What is AWS?’ exactly and why you should think about a career in this domain.
An Introduction to AWS
As described on the official website, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly accepted cloud platform. It offers more than 200 fully-featured cloud services from data centers present across the globe. Companies can explore a range of cloud services offered by AWS – from compute, database, storage, networking, hosting to advanced technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence, data lakes, augmented reality, and analytics.
There is the deepest functionality within these services. For instance, when using the database service of AWS, you will find a wide variety of databases that are purpose-built for different kinds of applications so that you can choose the right tool for the task and get the best cost and performance. Such features make it faster, more cost-effective, and easier for companies to move their existing applications to the cloud and build nearly anything they like to.
AWS offers cloud services from several data centers spread across Availability Zones (AZs) in regions worldwide. By Availability Zone, we refer to a location that consists of multiple data centers. Similarly, a region refers to a collection of Availability Zones in geographic proximity connected by low-latency network links. Currently, AWS has 81 Availability Zones within 25 geographic regions globally. Moreover, it has plans to create 27 more AZs and 9 more AWS Regions. Businesses have the option to choose from multiple AZs based on their unique needs.
Here are some of the core products that AWS offers.
- Amazon EC2
It is a service that allows users to run various application programs in the computing environment. It makes web-scale cloud computing easier for developers and its web service interface allows them to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction.
- Elastic Load Balancing
Elastic Load Balancing or ELB is known to distribute incoming application traffic across multiple targets and virtual appliances automatically in one or more AZs. it allows you to deliver applications with automatic scaling and high availability. Moreover, you can secure your applications with integrated certificate management, SSL/TLS decryption, and user-authentication.
- Amazon VPC
Amazon VPC is the networking layer for Amazon EC2 and enables users to launch AWS resources into a virtual network that they have defined. This virtual network is quite similar to a traditional network that one operates in their own data center, along with the advantages of using the scalable infrastructure of AWS.
- Amazon Route 53
Amazon Route 53 is basically a Domain Name System or DNS that is scalable and highly available. It is widely used by developers as a cost effective and reliable way of routing end users to Internet applications by translating URLs into the numeric IP addresses that are used by computers to connect to each other.
- Auto Scaling
AWS Auto Scaling is designed to monitor your applications and adjust capacity automatically to maintain predictable, steady performance at minimal cost. Companies can use AWS Auto Scaling to set up application scaling easily for multiple resources across various services in a short amount of time.
- Amazon ECS
ECS is an acronym for Elastic Container Service, and Amazon ECS is a container management service that is fast and highly scalable and makes it easy to run, stop, and manage containers on a cluster. It allows users to launch and stop their container-based applications by using simple API calls.
- AWS Lambda
Another popular AWS feature, Lambda is a serverless, event-driven compute service that allows users to run code for virtually any type of application or backend service without managing or provisioning servers.
AWS is dominating the cloud market from the beginning and giving a tough competition to its rivals Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. If you are serious about a career in cloud computing, then start learning about AWS. Professionals skilled in AWS are highly valued and in-demand across companies. So start learning AWS today!
