A Passage To AWS

AWS (Amazon web services ) is a list of services provided by AWS cloud platform through the internet to millions of customers on-demand basis. This services which are exposed to the customer are provided from the different infrastructure technologies like computing power, storage, database, network to emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things. With these services, we can build any type of applications. We have to pay only for the services which have been used.AWS provides these services from multiple regions which are spread across the world. Each region contains multiple availability zones. Each availability zone contains one or more physical data centres and they are interlinked through high-speed network cables. With all this facility, we can deploy our application from anywhere in the world. This data centre ensures high availability, non-durability services to end-users.

AWS cloud – Introduction

One of the most discussing words in the software industry is now Cloud. Earlier it was part of technology, now everybody starts talking about the cloud. Even a small businessman to the big organizations also planning to move their business to cloud technology. The person who came from the non-technology background also seeking the information about what is cloud and its usages.That much cloud technology and its service provider span across the world. Cloud services and providers brought major changes in the software industry. Still, lots of innovation is going on in this industry.

Millions of customers are using cloud services nowadays. Before going into the cloud and its services, let me explain how a company, startup or businessman sold their product before cloud platform come into the picture. To start or establish their business with the customer, each company has spent lots of money on buying servers and maintain its own data centre to store and maintain the product data. Company has spent lots of money on resources, software, and security to protect the customer data or product data. It was a big headache for lots of startup and big companies. The startup has to spend huge fund in upfront to buy the servers even before their product was launched into the market. They were also having the limitation to explore in new technology because of high-cost soft wares. Big companies also spent lots of money on buying servers to establish the data centre in different regions. All these obstacles and expenses put a big burden on startup or organisations growth at early stages, before cloud services were launched. But cloud providers rewritten the concepts. Cloud services launching was a big relief for most of the startup and big companies.

In those cloud providers, AWS cloud services have been (Amazon web services, a subsidiary of Amazon) playing a major role nowadays. They are holding half of the world market cloud services. Instead of the organization to establish its data centre, now they are approaching to a cloud provider like AWS, they will provide all facility to organizations in the form of cloud services. The organization or startup will use those services as an on-demand basis. Cloud offering high availability, high durability and good performance to the customer . Here organization paying only for the services which they are using for their business to bring up. Here companies and startup organizations savings lots of money. Because of this startup can do lots of innovation without spending lots of money on the infrastructure creations.

Amazon AWS platform started in 2002 and it commercially launched in the year of 2006. In 2006 it started with basic services like EC2 (Amazon elastic compute cloud), SQS (simple queue service) and S3 storage. Today it provides more than 175 services around the world. It spans around 76 availability zones within 24 geographical regions around the world. Plan to announce three more regions in Indonesia, Japan, and Spain soon.

Now AWS services are the most demanding services and millions of customers are using it to reduce the cost, to become more agile and innovative. AWS providing lots of online cloud training, publishing white papers and well written Architectural forum are helping lots of clients to migrate their project into the cloud platform. Meetup groups and online groups are the right platforms to explore yourself into AWS. Free usages of their services and product, helping the industry people to some extent familiar with AWS existing products usages and upcoming products. This facility helping the people to get hands-on experience in AWS products. Finally, the well experienced Amazon engineers are providing tremendous support to their client migrate the product to the AWS cloud. It helps the AWS to grow faster in the current market.

Some Big Names using AWS

Listing out a few clients who have been successfully implemented AWS services in their use cases and also how AWS beneficial to their business growth here.

Siemens: To analyse and reduce the power plant alert Siemens built serverless AWS solution. To implement that siemens used AWS Lambda and DynamoDB services of AWS.

Wirelesscar, a subsidiary of Volvo group :It has developed its own delivery engine—a test and development environment for its own software—based on Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3

Royal Dutch Shell: To identify the cyber security thread shell used the AI services of AWS

Airbnb: Migrated it application to AWS and they are using EC2, elastic load balancer, RDS, Memcache and cloud watch services of AWS

Companies like Netflix, Spotify, Reddit, NSA, Expedia and all already moved the services to AWS .Healthcare.gov and CIA are now providing few of their services from AWS. As I mentioned lots of clients efficiently using AWS services. AWS is the most advanced cloud provider in the market. It’s a good choice for cloud services when compared to what’s available in the cloud today and reduces vendor lock-in. AWS is building with the future in mind, they have rethought the entire IT stack with a focus on next-generation applications and requirements.

Before going to wind up let me put a few lines of words about the core services which are frequently used by AWS cloud and played the major role in AWS journey so far. 

AWS Compute

EC2

Elastic compute cloud: Resizable compute service. Easily scale up and down.AWS allows you to create 1000 of virtual servers within a limited time period.

AWS Storage

S3 (Simple Storage Service)

Used to store data in the form object and the same data can be retrieved through HTTP protocol. Capacity is higher than EBS.Data stored in the bucket. Each bucket data capacity is unlimited.

EBS (Elastic block storage)

Mounted with EC2 as a hard disk partions storage. Simply you can say it is a hard drive associated with your computer.EBS has a standard limit of 20 partitions and each partition can hold 1TB data

AWS database

RDS (Relational database services)

This service manages the database configuration through the database engine. It supports multiple databases like Oracle, SQL, Postgres and Amazon Arora (Much faster than all other DB)

DynamoDB

Highly scalable, key-value and document,NoSQL database.It handles 20 million requests per second in peak and 10 million in a day. It is serverless and easily scalable the tables.

Elastic Cache

AWS in-memory data store use as a database, message broker, cache and queue. To meet the application demand you can easily scale out, scale in and scale up the cache. This service improves the performance of the web application.

AWS Management

Cloud watch: Kind of monitoring tool to monitor the resources and services in AWS.Monitor the performance and health of each service. Useful tool working closely with Auto scaling functionality in AWS

Cloud Trial: Monitoring tool to monitor the AWS account activity. It mainly focuses on who did what on AWS resources and account. This logs information to S3 bucket on who made a request, the services used, the actions performed, parameters for the actions, and the response elements returned by the AWS service.

AWS Application Integration

SQS (Simple Queue Services)

Fully managed message queue system in AWS.Using SQS we can store and send the message between two software system at any volume without losing the data. We can keep the data in SQS up to 14 days. It acts as a buffer between two components. It provides a guarantee, with that message will be processed at least once.

SNS (Simple Notification Services)

SNS is a fast, flexible, fully managed push notification services. This allows as to send individual messages or bulk messages to large numbers of recipients. This is cost-effective and generally to send push notifications to several endpoints such as SMS, email HTTP endpoint and SQS. With Amazon SNS, you can send push notifications to Windows devices, Apple, Google and Windows devices, as well as to Android devices.

AWS Security

IAM->AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM): This is one of the security services in AWS.To this service, we can create users and groups in AWS and by using permissions to allow or deny their access to AWS resources. Another one is the IAM role which similar to the group but providing permission to an instance or EC2. Permission will decide which operation a user, group and role perform of AWS resources. Through MFA devices we can provide additional security which is known as Multifactor authentication.

Final Thoughts on AWS Services

AWS is one of the fastest moving cloud provider and services and training which they have been providing can fulfill most of the client requirements and use cases. Services which they are providing for the latest trend like Artificial intelligence and Data science area are really innovative and most of the customers are already invested lots of money and resources to bring it to reality. Amazon SageMaker playing fantastic job AI world. Existing core services also ensure high durability, high availability and good network throughput to the end-users. That is the reason AWS is one step ahead of all its competitor.