In 2006, Amazon Web Services, (AWS) began offering IT services to the public in the form of web services commonly known as cloud computing. One of the key benefits of cloud computing is that it replaces upfront capital infrastructure expenses with an on-demand low-cost pay-as-you-go model. AWS made businesses no longer need to plan for and procure IT infrastructures weeks or months in advance. Instead, they can instantly select any number of servers and other technologies needed for them and it is delivered to them in minutes. Today, AWS provides a highly reliable, scalable, and low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that powers hundreds of thousands of businesses in more than 190 countries around the world. AWS services are typically grouped into different categories like compute, networking, storage, applications, databases, and analytics.
Important Cloud Services provided by AWS
The Important Cloud Services according to various categories that are provided by AWS are given below :
1. Compute
Amazon EC2: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It allows organizations to obtain and configure virtual compute capacity in the cloud. You can select from a variety of operating systems and resource configurations like memory, CPU, and storage that are required for your application. Amazon EC2 enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes. You can use one or hundreds or even thousands of server instances simultaneously. Because this is all controlled with web service APIs, your application can automatically scale itself up and down depending on its needs. Amazon EC2 is integrated with most AWS services, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) to provide a complete, secure solution for computing applications. Amazon EC2 is an example of Infrastructure as a Service(IaaS). EC2 delivers secure, reliable, cost-effective compute and high-performance compute infrastructure so as to meet the needs of demanding businesses. Amazon EC2 is one of the easiest ways of providing servers on AWS Cloud and also the access to Operating system.
AWS Lambda: AWS Lambda is a serverless, event-driven compute service that allows you to run code without managing servers. You pay only for the compute time you consume and there is no charge when your code is not running. With AWS Lambda, you can run code for any type of application with zero administration. Just upload your code, and Lambda takes care of everything required to run and scale your code with high availability. You can set up your code to automatically trigger from other AWS services, or you can call it directly from any web or mobile app. But triggering Lambda is possible with over 200 AWS services. You can only pay for what you have used. The compute time that you consume, you are needed to pay for it. You just only need to upload your code and everything required to run will take care of by Lambda and it automatically scales your code with high availability.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk: AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a Platform as a Service that facilitates quick deployment of your applications by providing all the application services that you need for your application. Beanstalk is a plug-and-play platform that allows working with multiple programming languages and environments. Elastic Beanstalk supports a large range of platforms like Node js, Java, PHP, Python, and Ruby. So, you can develop your application to meet your requirements and simply deploy it on Elastic Beanstalk. The main aim to use AWS Elastic Beanstalk is to allow you to focus on the deployment and management of your applications. You can simply upload your code, and AWS Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment, from capacity provisioning, load balancing, and auto-scaling to application health monitoring. At the same time, you retain full control over the AWS resources powering your application and can access the underlying resources at any time.
2. Networking
Amazon VPC: Amazon VPC is your network environment in the cloud. It allows you to create a private network within the AWS cloud that uses many of the same concepts and constructs as an on-premises network. Amazon VPC also gives you complete control of the network configuration. Customers can define normal networking configuration items such as IP address ranges, subnet creation, route table creation, network gateways, and security settings. Amazon VPC is an AWS foundational service and integrates with numerous AWS services. For instance, Amazon EC2 instances are deployed into your Amazon VPC. Similarly, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) database instances deploy into your Amazon VPC, where the database is protected by the structure of the network just like your on-premises network. You can easily launch AWS resources into a virtual network by Amazon Virtual Private Cloud. An isolated virtual network environment in the AWS cloud is created by Amazon VPC.
Amazon Route 53: Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name System (DNS) web service. It is designed to give developers and businesses an extremely reliable and cost-effective way to route end users to Internet applications by translating human-readable names, such as www.neveropen.com, into the numeric IP addresses that computers use to connect to each other. Amazon Route 53 is fully compliant with IPv6 as well.
3. Storage
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service): Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is object storage with a simple web service interface to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the web. It is designed to provide an infinite amount of storage and it is delivered with 99.999999999% durability. You can use Amazon S3 as primary storage for cloud-native applications as a target for backup and recovery and disaster recovery. It offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. It’s simple to move large volumes of data into or out of Amazon S3 with Amazon’s cloud data migration options. Once data is stored in Amazon S3, it can be automatically tiered into lower cost, longer-term cloud storage classes like Amazon S3 Standard – Infrequent Access and Amazon Glacier for archiving.
Amazon Glacier: Amazon Glacier is a secure, durable, and extremely low-cost storage service for data archiving and long-term backup. Data stored in Amazon Glacier takes several hours to retrieve, which is why it’s ideal for archiving. The fastest access to your archive data is via Amazon Glacier.
4. Databases
Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service): Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while managing time-consuming database administration tasks, freeing you up to focus on your applications and business. You can find Amazon RDS is also available on several database instance types – optimized for memory, performance, or I/O. Amazon RDS provides you with six familiar database engines to choose from, including Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server.
Amazon DynamoDB (Non-Relational Database): Amazon DynamoDB is a fast and flexible NoSQL database service for all applications that need consistent, single-digit millisecond latency at any scale. It is a fully managed database and supports both document and key-value data models. When you create a database table that can store and retrieve any amount of data you can simply use Amazon DynamoDB that will serve any level of requested traffic. Its flexible data model and reliable performance make it a great fit for mobile, web, gaming, Internet of Things (IoT), and many other applications. DynamoDB provides many features like
- built-in security
- backups
- automated multi-region replication
- in-memory caching
- data export tools.
