Introduction to AWS- A Technology in Itself.

The Name or Technology Itself - AWS

The Name or Technology Itself - AWS

A subsidiary of Amazon.com, Amazon Web Service (AWS) is a comprehensive ondemand cloud computing platform. AWS offers a mixture of IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), and SaaS (Software as a Service).

Launched in 2006, the technology allows subscribers to have a virtual cluster of computers at their disposal. This cluster is available to the users all the time through internet.

The AWS technology is implemented using a collection of computer servers (also known as server farms) all over the world. The technology was primarily built to handle online retail operations and currently operates from multiple global regions including 6 in North America. The data centers are spread across various availability zones all over the world. Each availability zone comprises of several physical data centers while each region comprises of multiple availability zones that are in geographic proximity.

AWS is one of the first companies to offer pay-as-you-go cloud computing model that is scalable and offers web servers, databases, CRM, and more as needed. The subscribers can connect to their AWS system simply with the help of a browser.

Acting as a window, the browser lets subscribers log into and use their system similar to a physical computer.

AWS portfolio comprises of more than 100 services covering different aspects like computing, storage, database, infrastructure management, application development, and security.

The Name or Technology Itself - AWS

Compute Amazon's EC2 service, popularly known as Elastic Compute Cloud, provides virtual servers with varying capacities and sizes. EC2 is tailored to specific type of workloads and applications.

Storage Amazon provides a scalable object for data archival, backup, and analytics: Amazon S3 or Simple Storage Service. Data and files upto 5 GB can be stored and organized inside S3 buckets.

Database Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) offers high-performance and managed database services including Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB, and Amazon Aurora (proprietary relational database).

Networking Amazon offers administrative control over its isolated section of the AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). To provide extra protection, Amazon automatically provisions new resources within the cloud. Moreover, network traffic can be balanced with the help of AWS load balancing tool.

Migration For seamless migration of applications, databases, servers, and data from premises on to the cloud, Amazon offers AWS Migration Hub comprising of various tools and services to monitor and manage migrations.

The Name or Technology Itself - AWS

Tools and SDKs The AWS Command Line Interface is a proprietary code interface to manage cloud services. Various command-line tools and SDKs (Software Development Kit) are offered by Amazon to manage cloud services and applications.

Monitoring In order to manage and track cloud resource configuration, Amazon offers tools like AWS Config and AWS Trusted Advisor .

Admin can also use Amazon's automation tools – AWS OpsWorks and Chef – to automate infrastructure provisioning and system configurations.

Security Cloud security is ensured by Amazon by allowing admins to define and manage user's resource accessibility. A range of services including AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is offered to manage cloud security.

Using AWS Directory Service, an admin can create a user directory with the help of Amazon Cloud Directory, or connect cloud resources to existing Microsoft Active Directory.