Fascinating Facts about Amazon Web Services that will Change your Mind

Why everyone is excited about Amazon Web Services?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has become the World’s most used Cloud Computing platform as it is a comprehensive and evolving platform. It has become a significant component of the e-commerce giant’s business portfolio. And it is majorly popular for its availability zones. AWS made a record $14.8 billion in net sales in the second quarter of 2021. Besides, it has steadily grown to the 30% range in the past few quarters.  Numerous organizations are taking the advantage of AWS as it enables them to accomplish their business goals. It provides services to industry titans like Netflix Reddit, Dropbox, and so on.

What is AWS

Amazon Web Services is a cloud service provider from Amazon which offers over 200 fully featured services from data centers globally. These computing services are accessible over the internet. And it provides many benefits such as storage, servers, remote computing, networking, mobile development, and security. AWS allows application providers, ISVs, and vendors to quickly and securely host their applications.

Amazon Web Services grew quickly into a company and today it has become the market leader. It has emerged as a dominant cloud computing service provider due to its first-mover advantage. It allows you to have control over your resources.

History of Amazon Web Services

AWS came into existence out of a need to grow Amazon’s internal IT Infrastructure. It was first started in 2002 with very few services. In 2003 AWS started focussing its compute architecture on more standardized and automated web services. Gradually the idea of selling access to virtual servers as a service platform was shaping. In 2004, Amazon SQS was offered as the first publically available AWS service.

AWS introduced three new services: Amazon S3 cloud storage, SQS, And EC2 in 2006. This phase marked the start of AWS online core services. Later in 2009 the Elastic Block Store and Amazon CloudFront were adopted. 

Subsequently, in 2013, AWS started giving certifications for its services, and later in 2018, it started its autoscaling solution.

AWS has become a low-cost, highly available, and scalable cloud platform as from time to time it added many beneficial services. AWS is now mainly focused on the cloud, with data centers spread across the United States, Australia, Brazil, Europe, and Japan.

How AWS Works?

AWS categorically divides into different services and each of which is configured in different ways according to the user’s needs. AWS is spread globally in what is called regions. And the regions 25 in all, are spread across six continents. Furthermore, each region consists of numerous availability zones.  AWS has 81 availability zones where its servers are located. Basically, these are the physical data centers.

AWS has also invented its own privately owned hardware to make its network faster and more robust. AWS provides an on-demand cloud computing service with the facility of a pay-as-you-use method. Thus, AWS has flexible pricing options. It enables you to build customized applications. Moreover, AWS tools and services boost the application’s efficiency, irrespective of the business size.

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Key Services of Amazon Web Services that you need to Know

Firstly, let’s look at the key services under the categories, and thereafter we will deal with each in detail.

1. The Compute Services– 

These consists of services related to computing workloads and they are the following:

• EC2(Elastic Compute Cloud)
• Lambda
• Elastic Beanstalk
• Amazon LightSail

2. Storage Services- 

It provides services related to data storage and comprises the following services:

• S3 (Simple Storage Service)
• Elastic Block Store
• Amazon Glacier
• AWS Snowball

3. Database Services-

 The Database Services are used for database-related workloads and consist of the following services:

• Amazon Aurora
• RDS
• Amazon DynamoDB
• Amazon RedShift

4. Migration Services- 

These services are related to transferring data to or from AWS and include the following:

• AWS Database Migration Service
• AWS SnowBall

5. Networking and Content Delivery Services-

These domain services help to isolate your network infrastructure and faster deliver your content. The services are the following:

• Amazon Route 53
• AWS CloudFront

6. Management Tools- 

The Management Tool Services help to manage other services in AWS and include the following services:

• AWS CloudWatch
• CloudFormation
• AWS CloudTrail

7. Security & Identity and Compliance Services-

These services help to manage, authenticate and provide security to your AWS resources. The services are the following

• AWS IAM
• KMS
• AWS Shield

8. Messaging Services

These domain services are used for notifying, queuing, notifying, or emailing messages and include the following services:

• Amazon SQS
• SNS
• Amazon SES
• Amazon Pinpoint

Now let’s discuss in detail the AWS services.

1. AWS EC2- Elastic Compute Cloud

Amazon’s EC2 is a web service provider that delivers safe, resizeable compute capacity in the cloud. And it allows you to acquire and configure capacity quickly and with less effort.

EC2 gives you several options to create Virtual Machines like predefined instance profiles or virtual server definitions. Thus, Virtual Machines instances can be storage-optimized, memory-optimized, or compute-optimized. Moreover, instances can be autoscaled using Amazon Auto Scaling on demand or self-provisioned. And it can be stopped whenever not required, consequently saving costs.

Functions-

 EC2 is used to deploy containers. In order to run the containers you can easily deploy and manage your own clusters of EC2 instances.

Points To Remember-

The most important thing to consider here is to choose EC2 based on your needs. Thus, the wrong choice will adversely affect your user experience and your business.

2. Amazon Web Services Lambda

AWS Lambda helps you to run code without provisioning or managing servers as it is an event-driven and serverless computing service. You 

will put your code as a ZIP file or a container image. And Lambda will automatically compute execution power and run your code based on the incoming request or event. It is written in languages of Java Python, Node.js, etc. Besides it is used in both serverless and container tools(AWS SAm or Docker CLI) to build, test, and deploy your functions.

Functions-

Lambda is a good choice for background processing, triggered by events. It is also very good at handling huge-scale loads without the need for more infrastructure. 

Lambda can perform  the following

• Image transformation for recently uploaded images
• Delivering data validation, filtering, and transformation
• Actual-time metric data processing

Points to Remember

AWS Lambda is excellent for small, individual, short-lived functions as they are event-driven. And moreover, it is programmed to accept a specific input event. And if dealing with temporary files of temporary files to withstand the internal state between multiple invocations, then the serverless option is not the right choice. 

3. Amazon Web Services S3

Amazon Simple Storage Service provides constant storage through a web service interface. Basically, it is built-in storage to protect, and retrieve data from “buckets”. And the data can be accessed at any time, place, and from any device. 

AWS S3 is an easy key-based object store. You do not know the details of how and where it is stored. You simply put data in the cloud and pull it back out by using REST-and SOAP-based web services. Actually, you are assigned a unique key that is used later to retrieve the data. Moreover, S3 Object Tagging is used to organize your data across all of your S3 buckets.

This service helps in building applications. S3 has a track of 99.99% availability of objects. Moreover, it is popular for its cost-effectiveness, and you pay only for what you use. It is good for start-ups as there is no compromise in performance or reliability.

Functions

• S3 keeps your data safe and secure and there is no risk of data loss.
• Amazon S3 Intelligent Tiering helps you to move data to the most cost-effective access tier. And, it also has no effect on performance or operational overhead.
• S3 can store both static and dynamic assets like raw events data, backup files, etc. S3 can serve via many locations around the world and thereby reduce the load on web servers. Besides, it also gets regional support for storing assets in particular locations around the world.

Points to Remember

Amazon S3 objects are not like standard files.S3 is distributed over multiple servers and data centers so it takes time to propagate file changes. Notably, some S3 requests may fail. And S3’s IP addresses can change so you must update them over time.

4. Amazon Web Services RDS

Mostly, all applications that use AWS require access to a database. And, here use of Relational Database Service (RDS) occurs. RDS helps in setting up, operating, and scaling a relational database in the cloud easily. It is available in predefined types as optimized for memory, performance, or I/O. Moreover, you can also choose from the database engines like Amazon Aurora, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle Database, and Microsoft SQL Server. 

Functions

• Its managed service automates time-consuming administration tasks such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups.
• RDS reduces the burden that arises from managing, maintaining, and other database-related tasks.
• It deploys a new database server within minutes. It is reliable and does not increase overhead or personal costs. RDS is best for Online transactional processing or moderately complex day-to-day database requirements.
• RDS helps to customize the configuration for each database deployment with a number of database engines. Other tasks like setting up automatic failover, automated backups, and resizing your database deployments in line with traffic are done. Moreover, it lets you focus on the application and not on managing the database.

5. Amazon Web Services Dynamo DB

DynamoDB supports document and key-value data models. It is a multi-region, multi-active, and fully managed durable database. Moreover, it has built-in security, backup, restore, and in-memory caching for internet-scale applications. 

Points to remember

It is a multi-master distribution system. Dynamo DB allows single-digit millisecond low-latency data access. So it is best for internet-scale mobile, web, gaming, IoT, retail, and entertainment applications. It can automatically scale up/ down and provides ACID transaction support.  Database Administrators of users do not need to provision, patch, or manage servers. Software maintenance, operation, or installation is not required.

6. Amazon Web Services SQS

Amazon Simple Queue Service helps you to decouple and scale microservices and serverless applications. Furthermore, it is a fully managed event-queuing service. Users can send, store, and receive messages between software components at any volume without losing messages. And, messages stay in the queue if no workers pull jobs from SQS. 

SQS has two types of event queues: Standard queues and SQS FIFO queues.

Functions

• SQS is a fully managed message queuing service. It eliminates the complexity of managing operations. And users can focus on core tasks.
• It lets you scale the amount of traffic up or down without any configuration. SQS brings reliability as it has extremely high message durability.

Points to Remember

SQS does not create the dead-letter queue automatically so you need to create them explicitly. And another point is you can set up alarms that monitor SQS queues, and automatically add or remove EC2 worker instances. Besides, the instances are added or removed according to the size of the queue.

7. AWS CloudFront Delivery

Amazon’s CloudFront is a CDN or content delivery network service. The data is cached at the AWS POPs(Point of Presence). These POPs are used to deliver data images, videos, apps, and APIs. And, they are delivered with high transfer speeds and low latency to consumers. CloudFront helps you to cache common responses from your HTTP/HTTPS web application.

Points to Remember

CloudFront is often used with S3 to capture clickstream from it. Moreover, AWS CloudFront is resilient to L3 and L4 DDoS attacks when used with AWS Sheild.

We need to talk about these 10 Mindblowing Uses of Amazon Web Service

1. Storage and Backup- 

AWS cloud storage system is very useful for businesses as it is a simple storage system. S3 or Simple Storage Service is used to share large or small files with a large audience online. Online sharing of huge volumes of data is expensive and here comes AWS’s role. Uses of AWS help in the scalability of File Sharing. Moreover, the data can be easily accessible. Besides, the uses of Amazon Web Service lie in storing critical data and its Backup. There are a lot of storage types to choose from and this helps businesses to make decisions based on their needs. It is used for file indexing, storage, archiving for a longer time, high-performance writing, and reading. 

2. CloudFront-

One of the uses of Amazon Web Service is that it handles data transfer in an efficient manner. End-user gets the benefit as web data is transferred from a central server to an edge server’s distributed network that is closer to their location. Content Delivery Network (CDN)handles this task. The distribution of the traffic loads improves the load times and delivers a better experience to the end user. Amazon’s CDN is not expensive like others and handles everything smoothly with no limit to its scalability.

3. Enterprise IT-

Amazon’s Enterprise IT has advantages over others. There are a lot of factors which is responsible for the slow running of an operation like server implementation, time-consuming procurement, etc. And AWS handles it ideally by allowing businesses to develop, test, and run secondary operations. Thus, launch projects can run at a much faster rate. Thus the uses of Amazon Web Service are flexibility and management. And this facility increases the project speed.

4. File Sharing Flexibility

Usually, a large company’s central drive uses all the computers to store and share files with other members of the team. When the system is ready, it works on scale forever. Most importantly you will never run out of the drive and can access the files from anywhere in the world.

5. Infrastructure Software-

    The uses of Amazon Web Service are to smoothly extend their existing 

     Infrastructures and framework to enhance security and scale for growth. 

     Moreover, with the help of AWS users can cut down on their IT costs 

      and save their data from physical or logical errors.

6. Website Hosting-

 AWS customer does not have to worry about exceeding the allocated usage of resources. The uses of  Amazon Web Service are perfect for hosting different websites due to its scalability. 

7. Mobile, Web, and Social Applications-

The uses of Amazon Web Service facilitate the launch and scaling of applications, especially e-commerce, mobile, and SAAS applications.   Importantly other cloud service providers can not do this.

There is a lot of development over the years and now new applications are coming on serverless platforms. And there is no need for OS and other systems. AWS uses API-driven code to build well-designed scalable applications. 

8. Simple Email Service-

Email service providers like Yahoo, Gmail, etc consider emails send to thousands of customers as spam mail. The uses of Amazon Web Service help  Amazon’s Simple Email Service to handle such transactional emails at an economical price.

9. E-Commerce-

    AWS gives business owners options, for alternate communication 

    channels and this helps them to connect with the target audience. 

   The uses of Amazon Web Service help business owners to provide their 

    customers with compelling experiences and thus boost sales.

 10. Remote Work- 

 One of the uses of Amazon Web Service is Remote Work Service. And it allows one to manage future peak levels of business activity. Users do not over-invest in resources up front rather they scale the usage accordingly. This also helps in future unplanned events.

Where to find the right place for AWS Solutions Architect Training?

Are you looking for a successful platform to learn about AWS? Henry Harvin’s AWS Architecture Course is by far the best course you can find. And whether you need it for knowledge or to prepare for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect-Associate Exam SAA-C02. Henry Harvin ranks No. 1 amongst the top 5 Upskilling Courses in India by India Today and The Tribune. It is one of the top Indian Institutes with a global base and also an affiliated institute. 

Why choose Henry Harvin

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AWS Course will help you to match up the skillset with the AWS cloud platform. There are lots of benefits in choosing the course, let’s have a look.

• 9-in-1 Course and gold membership facility are available for a lifetime benefit.
• AWS Architect Training is for 36 hours of the two-way live online classroom session.
• Live projects related to AWS Cloud, EC2, IAM, etc.
• Internship facility for getting practical experiences.
• 100% placement support for one year of post-completion.
• E-learning Access with abundant tools and get free access to 30+ Cloud Computing Tools.
• Bootcamps and Hackathons to ace your competitive edge.
• Learning benefits of the AWS Course are developing the best AWS Architecture, learning Hybrid IT, EC2 Instances types, and others. Moreover, it will give you knowledge about Amazon Virtual Private Cloud.
• Career benefits of Henry Harvin include exposure to global jobs and companies. Besides, become a certified AWS Solutions Architect and improve your Cv and Linkedin profiles.

  Related Courses at Henry Harvin

1. AWS Developer Associate Course
2. The AWS SysOPs Associate Course
3. Google Professional Cloud Architect Training
4. AWS Technical Essentials Course

Summing Up

Undoubtedly, using AWS hardware resources, customers can develop code or run apps. Individuals, as well as companies, prefer AWS due to its numerous benefits as seen above. General issues are there in AWS Cloud services. But, with so many best services customers will not worry about a few flaws. Now the choice is really yours if you want to give it a try. 

In this blog, we focussed on AWS services and uses in a detailed manner. AWS started slow but gradually it become a robust industry leader. In coming years it will go way up due to its momentum, culture, and business model. Clearly, AWS will leave Amazon’s e-commerce business far behind and will become much larger. 

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