Amazon Web Services

What is AWS?

AWS (Amazon Web Services) is the largest cloud service provider in the cloud industry! and how should I learn about it? Simple! Watch videos and read tutorials. Want to learn in-depth. Then take up an online training that will teach all the AWS concepts with real-life demos.

Before learning more about AWS, let me give you a few links which are really helpful from a beginners perspective.

• To understand AWS, you need to understand Cloud Computing technology, so check out this video on the same.
• After you get an idea about cloud computing you can dive deeper into the ocean of AWS. For a simple and informative start, you can watch this session. Also, you can learn how to host a website in this session. It is pretty easy!

I have provided the links which are more than enough for a beginner to learn AWS in detail. But, let me discuss some topics here, and these are the topics:

1. What is Cloud Computing?
2. What is AWS? (with example)
3. AWS Services to learn
4. AWS Facts
5. Market share
6. Availability Zones
7. Services and many more

What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud Computing is an on-demand service that lets you use resources, mainly storage and computing resources without you maintaining any of them physically. You can connect with it remotely and use it as you wish.

For example, if you own a MacBook and want a Windows system for running software. Will you buy separate hardware just for this? NO! Instead, you can rent it from AWS and just pay for the time you have spent using it. Also, if you do not need it, you can terminate it or just stop it and you will not be charged anymore.

What is AWS?

Amazon Web Services is a cloud provider founded and owned by Amazon. They are the leading providers in the cloud industry. Fortune 500 companies like Netflix and Expedia use AWS for hosting their complete infrastructure! So, obviously, this is a technology with the highest potential!

To be very simple, let us consider the example of getting Apples for eating.

There are two options:

1. The hard way — Buy apple seeds, plow the land, plant the apple seeds, water them regularly, secure it from being stolen and pluck them when grown, and after that maintain them. All this for an Apple? Too much work!
2. The easy way — Take enough money to buy Apples as much as you require, go to a fruit shop, buy and eat.

The easy way is what AWS is, it provides the resources when it buys, monitors, maintains, updates, and secures all of it and we only have to pay for the time we use it! This is an absolute win!

AWS Services to learn:

Learn all the popular services in AWS. Services like EC2, S3, Lambda, Elastic Beanstalk, RDS, and many more.

AWS EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)

This is an Infrastructure as a Service provided by AWS. EC2 is used to create and run servers in the AWS datacenter. You can create a server with the OS of your selection as well as the configuration (RAM and vCPUs). You have full control over the OS, installing software, or hosting a website.

AWS S3 (Simple Storage Service)

This is the most used AWS service. This is an object storage service and there is no folder concept. Every file is uploaded to a single repository that you created. It is fast to upload and download objects, also the integration with other AWS services is seamless.

Auto-scaling

Auto-scaling is a feature that can only be used in conjunction with a load balancer. This feature helps you scale the number of compute servers up or down based on parameters, such as CPU usage, memory usage, network throughput, etc.

Amazon RDS

This is a managed Relational database service. AWS takes care of running the database on a server and you just have to use it, this is why it is called a managed service.

AWS IAM

AWS Identity and Access Management give you access to managing resource permissions of users and groups. You can give access to an AWS service to use another AWS service as you go.

AWS Facts:

• AWS owns 34% of the cloud market share
• AWS provides 200+ services currently
• AWS provides a free tier for 12 months for every user
• Amazon’s and Netflix’s architecture has been completely migrated to AWS
• AWS has 69 Availability Zones in 22 worldwide regions. There are plans to add 12 more.
• AWS has customers from 190+ countries
• 1/3rd of the people who visit the internet every day will at least visit a website that is hosted on AWS! Pretty impressive right!
• On average, people watch 8 million videos, movies on Netflix, Amazon Prime and buy 250,000$ worth of products on Amazon every minute.
• All of these services are hosted on AWS!
• The first three months of 2019 are the most profitable quarterly ever with earnings crossing 7.7 billion dollars!

Hope this helps!