Amazon Web Services (AWS) - All you Need To Know

There are many great ways to host your projects these days: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Heroku, and Digital Ocean and much more.

When you are starting your project, deciding which one to use can be challenging. It’s critical to choose the right one, as making a decision without proper knowledge about technology will negatively affect your project and afterwards changing your hosting can be a difficult task and could drop your reputation. we will explain the value proposition of Amazon Web Services (AWS ) and its features.

Amazon Web Service (AWS):-

AWS is a cloud computing platform that offers computing power to the user for accessing on demand services like content delivery, database storage, virtual cloud server and other functionality to help businesses scale and grow.  It works on “pay-as-you-go” model that means – you don’t need to pay upfront for services it offers. You pay for only how much service (mostly bandwidth) you consumed – at the end of billing cycle. Millions of customers are currently leveraging AWS cloud products and solutions to build sophisticated applications with increased flexibility, scalability and reliability.

Key Services and Solutions Offer at Amazon Web Service(AWS):-

Compute EC2 

It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers. This is the 'elastic compute' cloud virtual machine instance which can be 'rented' and configured by the characteristic of the workload from mobile phone to large scale cluster systems. Dedicated hardware is assigned for High Instance usage.

Cloud Watch monitoring 

This service will auto-scale your environment based on performance monitoring and will add more instances such as Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) volumes, Elastic Load Balancers, and Amazon RDS databases based on demand.

The application automatically provides metrics for CPU utilization, latency, and request counts, users can also stipulate additional metrics to be monitored, such as such as memory usage, transaction volumes or error rates.

Workspace 

This is a fully managed desktop environment using the G2 graphics instance supporting desktop products like Windows on Nvidia GRID GK104 Kepler GPU's.

Simple Storage 

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is a highly scalable, high-speed, low-cost, web-based cloud storage service platform used by the likes of DropBox, Shazam and of course Amazon's retail business. Objects held within S3 are copied around the availability zones to reduce delays and improve caching. It is designed for taking online backup and archiving of data and application programs.

Elastic Block Store 

Amazon Elastic Block Store provides persistent block level storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances. Replicated across availability zones.

Glacier

Amazon Glacier is an extremely low-cost storage service that provides secure, durable, and flexible storage for data backup and archival. Pricing is based on a number of requests (metered) Can take 3-5 hours to retrieve objects. Amazon Glacier enables customers to offload the administrative burdens of operating and scaling storage to AWS, so that they don’t have to worry about capacity planning, hardware provisioning, data replication, hardware failure detection and repair, or time-consuming hardware migrations.

AWS Public Data Sets 

These are free to use data sets hosted on a Hadoop platform they include data sets like: NASA NEX, Human Genome, Census Data and PubChem.

Kinesis 

Kinesis is a managed service that scales elastically for real-time processing of streaming big data and is used in conjunction with EC2 instances.

Benefits of Amazon Web Services:-

Easy to use

AWS is designed to allow application providers, ISVs, and vendors to quickly and securely host your applications – whether an existing application or a new SaaS-based application. You can use the AWS Management Console or well-documented web services APIs to access AWS’s application hosting platform.

Flexible

AWS enables you to select the operating system, programming language, web application platform, database, and other services and infrastructure you need. With AWS, you receive a virtual environment that lets you load the software and services your application requires. Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) enable you to spin-up clones in multiple regions for different environments within few minutes, eliminating the need to repeat the set-up steps every time. You can leverage auto-scaling to build a self-managing infrastructure aligned closely to the actual need based on traffic/resources utilization.

Cost-Effective

Think of infinite space for your backup & archival needs, ability to launch new servers, up-scale/downscale a server, CDN integration, transcoding media files, unlimited bandwidth and many more highly scalable services/features available to you while you pay based on your actual usage only for the compute power, storage, and other resources you use, with no long-term contracts or up-front commitments.

Reliable

With AWS, you take advantage of a scalable, reliable, and secure global computing infrastructure, the virtual backbone of Amazon.com’s multi-billion dollar online business that has been honed for over a decade.

Scalable and high-performance

The sheer amount of scalability which AWS provides its users completely obliterates any argument for going with standard web hosting. AWS is so huge that there is always more storage, bandwidth, and computational power available if needed. the billing depends on a number of resources you use. if you are expecting more traffic than normal, your application can scale up or down based on demand. if you are expecting traffic to go down, you can scale down with the same.

Secure

AWS utilizes an end-to-end approach to secure and harden our infrastructure, including physical, operational, and software measures.

• Data centres that are staffed 24×7 by trained security guards and access is authorized strictly on privilege basis

• Multiple geographic regions and Availability Zones allows AWS to remain resilient in the face of most failure modes, including natural disasters or system failures

• Ability to configure built-in firewall rules

• Leveraging Identity & Access Management (IAM) & CloudTrail to keep track of activities performed by users

• Few other highlights include private subnets, Multi-factor authentication (MFA), Isolate GovCloud& encrypted data storage.

Conclusion

Amazon Web Services is one of the leading names in web hosting company in the world. For the average business though, companies likely to choose a hybrid approach, where they choose to run tightly coupled development in house and simply use AWS for everything else. The point is we have a choice, and AWS will almost certainly solve at least some of your challenges.