Amazon Web Services

What is Amazon Web Services ?

Amazon Web Service is a comprehensive, evolving cloud computing platform provided by Amazon.com. In simplest terms, cloud computing means storing and accessing data and programs over the internet instead of your computers hard disk. AWS was launched in 2006 and first they have provided online services for websites and client-side applications. AWS is located in 16 geographical regions in the world, such as US east, US west, Brazil, EU, Asia pacific etc.

AWS Products and Services

This is an overview about the products and services which are provided by AWS. So, let's start from the Compute category.

Amazon EC2 server is the most popular and the important server in the compute category. EC2 is not really a cloud service. It is acting as a bridge between the virtual servers and cloud servers. But it is a really good service for beginners. Auto scaling is another good service which is provided by AWS. Auto scaling is a feature of EC2. In auto scaling we can create a group of servers. Then the number of servers will be change according to the user load. As an example if the user load is high auto scaling will increase the number of servers to avoid the traffic. If the user load is low then the number of servers will be decreasing. Auto scaling will decrease the wastage of servers. Amazon Lambda is using for the applications which are infrequently run and which has very low usage. So the server is build only for few millisecond. Lambda is also reduce the wastage and this will be a really popular service in the future.  

Next category is the Storage category. 

Amazon S3 is an important simple storage service. In this service we can store any number of objects like video files, pictures, database backups etc. There's no limit for the number of objects. But all the objects should be less than 5TB. It is an infinitely scalable and user has to pay only for the storage that they have used. Durability and availability of S3 service is 99.99%. That means the data loss on s3 is zero. Amazon EBS can use as a hard disk for EC2 instances. But they work really faster and 20 times relilable than hard disks. And can have sizes from 1GB to 16TB. Amazon Glacier is using for long term storage. It is highly durable like s3 and the specialty is the cost is very low. It is 1/5 the cost of s3 service.

Next category is the Database categoty. 

Amazon RDS is the most commonly used database service because it is using for relational databases. This service provides features like backups, software patching, managing replicas which are hard to do manually. Amazon DynamoDB is using to manage nosql databases. Amazon ElastiCache is a managed service for the in memory cache. Amazon RedShift is a warehouse service which is provided by aws.

Next category is the Networking category. 

Amazon VPC is the virtual private cloud where users have more control over ip addresses, routing, firewalls etc. In this service customers have more security because it is not connected to the internet. AWS Direct Connect make easy to establish a dedicated network connection to aws. Elastic Load Balancer is using to distribute the network traffic across all the EC2 instances. 

Next category is Management tools.

Amazon CloudWatch is a management tool where customers can use to monitor their instances. It is sending notifications when a server is down or if anything happened. It will show the utilization of the resources so the users can take actions or do some planing. AWS CloudTrail is a service can audit the users of our servers and track their actions and deliver a log file. That file contains the identity of the API callers, time of the API call and the source ip address of the API caller etc.In AWS CloudFormation users can create a template of their server architecture and reuse it or can can use a template which is provided by AWS. This is an easy way to manage the architecture of the servers.

Next category is Security and identity.

AWS Identity Access Management will do the access controlling to the AWS services and resources. Imagine a company can have a one aws account. Under that account we can set a user group and control their access like what can a developer do and what they can do.

These are the basic services that are provided by Amazon Web services and there are lot more other services as well. I will write more on AWS later. Keep in touch...:)