What is AWS?: Introduction to Amazon Web Services

AWS needs no formal introduction, given its immense popularity. The leading cloud provider in the marketplace is Amazon Web Services. It provides over 170 AWS services to the developers so they can access them from anywhere at the time of need. 

AWS has customers in over 190 countries worldwide, including 5000 ed-tech institutions and 2000 government organizations. Many companies like ESPN, Adobe, Twitter, Netflix, Facebook, BBC, etc., use AWS services. 

For example, Adobe creates and updates software without depending upon the IT teams. It uses its services by offering multi-terabyte operating environments for its clients. By deploying its services with Amazon services, Adobe integrated and operated its software in a simple manner.

Now, before getting started with what AWS is, let us first give you a brief description of what cloud computing is.

What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing is the delivery of online services (such as servers, databases, software) to users. With the help of cloud computing, storing data on local machines is not required. It helps you access data from a remote server. Moreover, it is also used to store and access data from anywhere across the world.

In this tutorial, you will learn the following topics:

• What is AWS?
• History of AWS
• AWS Services

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What is AWS?

Amazon web service is an online platform that provides scalable and cost-effective cloud computing solutions.

AWS is a broadly adopted cloud platform that offers several on-demand operations like compute power, database storage, content delivery, etc., to help corporates scale and grow.

History of AWS

• In the year 2002 - AWS services were launched
• In the year 2006- AWS cloud products were launched
• In the year 2012 - AWS had its first customer event
• In the year 2015- AWS achieved $4.6 billion
• In the year 2016- Surpassed the $10 billion revenue target
• In the year 2016- AWS snowball and AWS snowmobile were launched
• In the year 2019- Released approximately 100 cloud services

Moving forward, we will learn more about AWS services.

AWS Services

Amazon has many services for cloud applications. Let us list down a few key services of the AWS ecosystem and a brief description of how developers use them in their business.

Amazon has a list of services:

• Compute service
• Storage
• Database
• Networking and delivery of content
• Security tools
• Developer tools
• Management tools

Compute Service

These services help developers build, deploy, and scale an application in the cloud platform.

AWS EC2

• It is a web service that allows developers to rent virtual machines and automatically scales the compute capacity when required.
• It offers various instance types to developers so that they can choose required resources such as CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity based on their application requirements.

AWS Lambda

• It is a serverless compute service. It is also responsible for executing code for applications.
• It helps you execute a program without the hassle of managing servers.

Storage

AWS provides web data storage service for archiving data. Also, its primary advantage is disaster data recovery with high durability.

Amazon S3

• It is an open cloud-based storage service that is utilized for online data backup.
• Amazon S3 provides storage through a web services interface and is designed for developers where web-scale computing can be easier for them.

This is how the AWS S3 bucket looks:

Amazon EBS

• It provides a high availability storage volume for persistent data. It is mainly used by Amazon EC2 instances.
• EBS volumes are used explicitly for primary storage such as file storage, databases storage, and block-level storage.

Database

AWS database domain service offers cost-efficient, highly secure, and scalable database instances in the cloud.

DynamoDB

• It is a flexible NoSQL database service that offers fast and reliable performance with no scalability issues.
• It is a multi-region and durable database with instant built-in security, backup and restores features.

This is how a DynamoDB table looks like:

RDS

• It is a managed distributed relational database cloud service that helps developers to operate and scale a database in a simple manner.
• We launched it to simplify the setup, operation, and scaling process for developers while accessing a relational database. 

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Networking and Delivery of Content

It offers a highly secure cloud platform and connects your physical network to your private VN with a high transfer speed.

VPC

• It helps a developer to deploy AWS resources, such as Amazon EC2 instances into a private virtual cloud.
• It gives you control over the complete cloud network environment, including the section of your IP address range, subnets, route table configuration, and network gateways.
• With this, developers can both IPv4 and IPv6 at a time for your resources in a highly secure environment.

Route 53

• It is a web service with a highly available Domain Name System (DNS) that helps users to route software by translating the text into an IP address.
• We launched it for developers to provide them a cost-effective method of routing end users to cloud applications. 

This is how Route 53 looks like:

Developer Tools

It helps a user build, deploy, and run an application source code automatically. It also updates the server and instance on the workload.

CodeStar

It is a service designed to manage application development in a single place. Here, developers can quickly develop, build and deploy applications on AWS

Code Build

• This removes the hassle of managing physical servers and helps developers build and test code with continuous scaling.
• In simple words, it compiles your code, executes unit tests, and gives output artifacts that are ready to deploy.

Security, Identity & Compliance

It helps in monitoring a safe environment for your AWS resources by providing limited access to specific users.

IAM

• Identity Access Management is a framework that helps in maintaining access to AWS services in a secure way.
• The service gives you Shared access to your AWS account and Secure access to AWS services that run on the AWS EC2 application.

KMS

• It enables users to create and manage the encryption keys that are used for encrypting data.
• The service includes a key generation method where digital sign within your applications becomes easier.

Management Tools

Using this service, an individual can optimize costs, minimize risks, and automate all the resources running efficiently on the AWS infrastructure.

Cloud Watch

• It is a monitoring tool for AWS resources and customer applications running on the AWS platform.
• The service helps you gather and access all your operational data in the form of logs from a single interface.

Cloud Formation

• This service helps you in monitoring all your AWS resources in one place so that you can spend minimum time managing those resources and maximum time developing applications.
• It allows developers to manage their cloud infrastructure either in a text file or a template.

With this, we are ending on this AWS services article. 

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Conclusion

In this introductory article, we discussed what cloud computing is, what AWS and its history are, and we also went through all the AWS services in detail. 

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Do you have any questions for us? Please feel free to leave them in the comments section of this article; our experts will get back to you as soon as possible.