Amazon Web Services can be described as an evolving cloud computing platform that is provided by Amazon. It has a combination of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), package software as service (SaaS), and platform as a service (Paas). It also offers tools such as content delivery services, computer power, and database storage. It was released in 2006 from Amazon.com’s internal infrastructure which was built for online retail operations. AWS introduced a pay-as-you-go cloud computing model which enabled users to compute and store data. It offers a variety of solutions and tools for software developers, and enterprises such as government agencies, nonprofit and private organizations, and educational institutions. AWS has data centers in almost 190 countries.
How does AWS work?
AWS offers different services which can be configured to meet a user’s needs. Users can see the configuration options and server maps for an Amazon Web Service. The Amazon Web Services portfolio is comprised of more than 100 services in account of the following; databases, compute, application development, security, and infrastructure management. The services in the category are; Compute, data management, migration, hybrid cloud, storage databases, networking, security, governance, analytics, monitoring, management, and mobile development.
Availability.
AWS provides services to different users from data centers spread across availability zones in various regions of the world. Availability zone (AZ) is a location containing multiple physical data centers. A region can be described as a collection of AZs in an area connected by low latency network links. A business can decide to choose one or different AZs based on various reasons e.g. its proximity to end customers and compliance. Service such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides virtual servers called EC2 instances for compute capacity. EC2 offers various instance types with varying sizes and capacities. And these instance types are specifically tailored to individual workload types and applications, such as accelerated computing jobs and memory intensive. Another service provided by AWS is the Auto Scaling tool, which dynamically scales capacity to maintain instance performance and health.
Storage.
Amazon Simple Storage Service offers scalable object storage in different situations such as analytics, collection, and data backup. Data is stored in files as S3 objects, and ranges in capacity up to 5 gigabytes. Hence an enterprise can save cash by adopting S3 through its Infrequent Access storage tier. Block-level storage volumes are provided by Amazon Elastic Block Store for persistent data storage when using EC2 instances. Managed cloud-based file storage is offered by Amazon Elastic File System. Through storage transport devices like AWS Snowball and Snowmobile, or AWS Storage Gateway a business can migrate data to the cloud.
Databases, and data management.
A relational database management system for AWS users is provided by the Amazon Relational Database Service. The Amazon Relational Database Services has options for SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Amazon Aurora. Managed NoSQL databases via Amazon DynamoDB is another service offered by AWS. For in-memory and real-time data caches AWS customers can use Amazon ElastiCache and DynamoDB Accelerator. A data warehouse is offered by Amazon Redshift as it enables data analysts to undertake business intelligence tasks easier.
Migration, hybrid cloud.
There are various tools and services offered by AWS to assist users in migrating applications, servers, databases, and data onto its public cloud. Migrations from on-premises to the cloud are provided by AWS Migration Hub which provides a location to manage and monitor the process. EC2 Systems Manager enables the IT, team, to configure on-premises servers and AWS instances in the cloud. Several technology vendors have partnered with Amazon to ease hybrid cloud deployments. Software-defined data center technology is brought by VMware Cloud on AWS. This is from VMware to AWS cloud. Red Hat’s operating system is also incorporated on AWS cloud as a result of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Amazon EC2. There are other various services offered by Amazon Web Services.
