AWS Fundamentals: A Guide for Everyone
1. Introduction to AWS
Amazon Web Services, AWS, is the leading cloud computing platform providing 170+ services to its users worldwide. In the past few years, AWS has grown exponentially, maintaining a consistent lead over its competitors such as Microsoft Azure. AWS products and services are widely used by many tech giants and big organizations including ESPN, BBC, Adobe, Disney, Netflix, Twitter, Samsung, Facebook, and the list goes on.
Its affordable lucrative services provide extremely secure cloud computing services including an interconnected suite of cost-effective features that help businesses to scale and grow. Whether it’s storage and backup, hosting services, scaling services for applications, or even high computing power for gaming, AWS has got it all covered.
2. What is so different about AWS?
AWS has been among the most popular and trusted cloud computing solutions over the past years. The reason is its versatility and the ease of use it provides to its customers. Apart from that, there are tons of other reasons out there that advocate why one should go for AWS over other cloud computing options. Some of these reasons are listed below:
- Cloud computing solutions by AWS have a wide range that spreads from web hosting, application hosting, and media sharing to social networking, storage recovery, and database management.
- It provides scalable and durable services at a cost-effective and pocket-friendly price.
- With AWS, users can use the programming models and databases that already exist and with which they are already familiar.
- Many AWS services offer hybrid abilities and work with integration with AWS services like Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS).
3. Services offered by AWS
AWS is highly versatile and has a wide range of services in its arsenal. It provides its cloud-based services in various fields to empower businesses. These fields include storage, databases, computing, networking, and security services. In this article, we are going to discuss some of these services in detail.
AWS Compute Services
- EC2(Elastic Compute Cloud): EC2 is a web-based service that offers scalable and resizable computing services. It allows you to rent virtual machines with arguably the fastest processors.
- AWS Lambda: AWS Lambda allows you to run your code in the cloud. The payment will be made just for the time the code takes for execution.
- Elastic Beanstalk: Elastic Beanstalk is another computing service that offers automated deployment of resources like a website.
AWS Storage Services
- Amazon Glacier: Amazon glacier is a durable cloud storage service by Amazon that comes with a storage size of 10GB.
- Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS): EBS is a block-level cloud storage service that is used with Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS.
- AWS Storage Gateway: With a 100GB storage size, AWS Storage Gateway offers a connection between on-premises applications with cloud storage.
AWS Database Services
- Amazon DynamoDB: Amazon DynamoDB is a fast and pocket-friendly NoSQL cloud database service that can handle up to 20 million requests per month.
- Amazon RDS: Amazon RDS supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle BYOL, and MariaDB with initial database storage of 20GB.
- Amazon ElastiCache: Amazon ElastiCache mostly deals with the cache. The in-memory cache can be deployed, operated, or scaled in the cloud.
Final Verdict: Is AWS the Future of Cloud Computing?
- AWS is surely the future of Amazon. It currently holds more than 60% of the cloud computing market share, and the numbers will only rise from here.
- The leading services provided by AWS are also the main reason that has far outpaced all its competitors.
- One of the major reasons which make AWS so reliable is its experience in the cloud industry. AWS’s launch dates back to 2006 when people were only analyzing the potential of the cloud services.
- The flexibility of on-demand services, cost-effective solutions, and a wide range of products for every need, are the grounds that make Amazon Web Services the future of cloud computing.