AWS Infrastructure and Services – A Developer’s Point of View

Amazon Web Service (AWS) has become the dominant force on cloud computing services. Powering companies like Netflix, Amazon with such power and rich. It can be a little daunting to evaluate clearly whether AWS is the right solution for your application. Well today I clear up this for you with this article. Empower you to determine whether it’s right for your applications. AWS comprises a multitude of individual services that interact and work incredibly in a complex number of ways. These may be one of the reasons you are reading this article. Because AWS is a little overwhelming, I will cut through this complexity and boiled down the key functionality of AWS and how they can work for your applications. I am a developer and I will be approaching the AWS infrastructure and services from a developer point of view. I will approach AWS from the user of the services. These will require to talk about how services will interact. Since that is the key point of developing AWS.

The Web Application Conundrum

Traditionally the software application is a collection of compile lines of code delivered and running on the computer in front of you. With the introduction of WWW, however a new paradigm emerged, where software applications run on different computer miles or continents away. Users access the applications with HTTP protocol and interact through a web browser, this is called web application. Now let us imagine a scenario where our friend Lisa startup a new web starts up with shiny codes and real nice products and she is running the entire web application from the server connected to the internet located in her room. As customers visited her products, she realized that her server located in her room not working so well. It’s getting hot and started to run slowly. The overhead on-premise hosting solution is hurting her business. The difficulty being flexible and scaling up quickly and respond to customer’s demand is costing her sale.  Web application cries out for different solutions to solve the many owes presented by on premium hosting. Modern business doesn’t wait for physical demand and speed to customers to become a serious age for competitions. The cloud industry begins to provide the solution to small and large businesses alike, that needed an affordable and flexible way to serve web content to customers. By abstracting away, the physical hardware removing much of the configuration both virtually and geographically. The cloud can get companies up and running quickly. Most pricing models allow companies to pay for what they used instead of physical machines. And ask cloud server providers improved deploying an application on the new machines became as easy as a single click. It’s no surprise the cloud grew fast it did. It’s especially popular for startup enabling them to move quickly. Enterprise companies are flogging to the cloud more and more. Enterprise companies are finding a lot of value in the different pricing model and reduce liability, they don’t have to manage physical data centers. The cloud truly solves the web applications’ biggest contra.

Introduction to AWS

Around 2003 some engineers of amazon figure out that not only amazon needs standardized server configurations but there is a potentially huge revenue stream waiting if they could sell the same capabilities to other businesses. It only took one year after this proposal to offer service to business for cloud computing, the first offering simple Queue Service was launched. This was just the first of the services that added more and more functionalities to satisfy the need for modern web applications. Amazon was not the only company that identified these business opportunities but they were one of the first to fill it successfully.

AWS was the collection of cloud computing services, that can be utilized individually to run a computer application, to break this out it’s called cloud computing service because service is running in some magical data center somewhere, and marketing people need a simple term for these things. The services are providing some type of computing operations. Whether it could be,

• Literal computing
• Messaging computing
• Storage

Although, AWS typically used for web applications that are not a requirement. You can run any type of application with AWS. Many universities, government agencies, and corporations use the flexibility of AWS to process large amounts of data or run a lot of computations that would be difficult and expensive on-premises. AWS is simply one of the many providers of cloud services. They distinguish themselves from the most reliable and also the largest geographical footprints. Large tech enterprises have the entire infrastructure running on AWS, which is a huge vote of confidence for the services. Essentially if AWS went down there would be no Netflix. Amazon established themselves in this market by having fears focus on creating services that solve its customers’ needs, offered by affordable price.

Why Depend on AWS?

Why would someone want to put the entire business on AWS? It seems a huge gamble, right? The two biggest reasons are low cost and easy scalability.

Low Cost

Let us discuss cost first, let us discuss our friend Lisa company again, without AWS or cloud provider, she will be looking buying a server to serve web application, perhaps a separate server for the database, cable to hook it up to the business broadband internet connections and she may need a dedicated room to house all of this hardware and keep it safe from physical danger. All of these before she has even one customer paying for her service, seems a little daunting right? compare these all upfront capital to the cost of hosting on AWS. Here is what you need upfront to run your application on AWS. The upfront cost of AWS is nothing. For AWS you only need to pay for what you used, usually on a monthly basis, so once those customers start signing up to pay for your service you already have the money to pay for the web application they are using. Not to mention that instead of dropping hundreds and thousands of money to purchase hardware that may fail and have to be replaced you are paying pennies on hour for some of these services that AWS provided. Even AWS provides you, handy calculators, to help you to estimate the price for your intended usage.

Easy Scalability

Let us use Lisa company as an example here also, imagine she pays for the infrastructure upfront and her application ends up wildly successful. Customers are flooding on the platform overwhelming her initial server setup someone posted and read it and now her application dies from too many requests. She needs to scale up but her only option is to order another server, which can take days even weeks to order another server to arrive. In the meantime the user experiences are suffering, in growth may drop-off or disappear entirely, killing her business before even had a chance. By deploying her application on AWS, these scalability concerns resolved in literal seconds. With AWS adding more servers running your applications takes only a few clicks. The server startup immediately and her applications can be up and running around a minute. Pricing is the same as before, paying only for what uses. So again, there are no upfront costs for spending new instances of web applications. Both of these two define features of the cloud and AWS. Now you can see why the adaption of these types of services spread so quickly through the technology industry.

Conclusion

So, let us review what we learn using this article, it’s started by discussing web application hosting and the main drivers for moving to the cloud. Amazon grasps this new paradigm to develop a business to support and profit of cloud computing in the form of AWS. The two major drivers of AWS’s popularity continued to be pricing and scalability. Hopefully, this helped you to identify AWS is the best solution for your use case.