There’s so much buzz going around about AWS. So what exactly is it? Amazon Web Services is a global cloud platform that allows you to host and manage services on the internet. It’s used by small start-ups to large enterprise companies to host their infrastructure and provide services to customers. They offer infrastructure service where they provide their servers as a service so you don’t need to manage the back-up and power supply. They provide platform service where you can get Java, Ruby, or PHP as a service so you don’t need to manage the binaries of these applications. There is also the option of software as a service (SaaS) for example, email sending capabilities like SES. AWS is a hosting provider that gives you a lot of services where you can run your applications on the cloud.
AWS’ popularity stems from a few things. Their billing is simple. They offer per hour billing where every service and instance has a microbilling. They also include a billing dashboard with monthly report options based on services and paramters. Also quite simple is the sign-up process. There is no agreement, you just sign up with a credit card and email ID. You can launch your servers without buying hardware which is much more simple as well. You can be up and running in minutes. AWS is also known to be stable and trusted. They’re outages are very minimal.
AWS offers some common, popular services:
- ES2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is the most commonly used service. This service gives you bare servers that you can launch and run your software on.
- VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) lets you create networks in the cloud and run your servers in those networks. Since Amazon will not give up full control of their cloud, they offer pieces of their cloud.
- S3 (Simple Storage Service) is a file storage and sharing service.
- RDS (Relational Database Service) allows you to run and manage databases on the cloud using SQL or Oracle, for example.
- Route 53 is a service that manages domain name systems.
- ELB (Elastic Load Balancing) allows you to balance the load of incoming traffic to mulitple machines so your web applications can handle any number of users.
- Autoscaling adds capacity automatically to ELBs so that your app is never down due to a load.
AWS is in 15 regions across major countries around the world and has huge data centers that have 300,000-500,000 servers. With 64 services including infrastructure service, software as a service, platform as a service, machine learning services and continually launching new services, AWS is the top choice for doing anything on the cloud.