Amazon Web Services is known as the gold standard of Cloud Computing and it has reasons for it. In this article, we will explore this cloud service provider and in the process answer questions like What is Amazon Web Services, what are its benefits, applications or cases? So let us go ahead and get started with this article. You can also take up a AWS for beginners course to gain the knowledge about fundamentals in Cloud.
Following pointers will be discussed in this article:
- What is Cloud Computing?
- What is Amazon Web Services?
- Benefits of Using Amazon Web Services
- Applications/ Use Cases Of Amazon Web Services
What is Cloud Computing?
Let us see what the definition of Cloud Computing looks like?
‘Cloud Computing is nothing but a practice of providing of Cloud Services (Storage, Computation, Databases, Security, etc) on rent and also through a network that can be accessed over the internet’
Now that we know what the general definition is, let us understand this concept with an example. To understand this definition we need to go some 20 years back from 2020. In the early two-thousands, in order to host an application, we needed to buy stack servers and have skilled professionals to set the infrastructure up. The process looked simple, but there were drawbacks,
- Servers were costly back then, and they still are
- It was difficult to find skilled professionals
- A lot of efforts went into planning
What this meant was the owner had to pay money in buying servers. Then invest more money in people who could set it up. The evening after a lot of planning, there was never certainty on how many resources were enough and how many were too much? As an owner, one would always worry about money resources, planning and scalability. Hence there was very less time one could devote to actually focus on business. Also, this meant setting up such business was becoming limited to ones who could afford it.
This is where Cloud Computing came to save the day. There were service providers in the market that started providing Compute, Storage, Networking, and other application hosting services on ‘pay as you go model’. This meant people could rent these services and pay for only those services they used and only for the time duration they used those for. Also, these services providers managed the configuration, scalability and management part. In simple terms, this solved all the issues we listed above. This process we just discussed, evolved and started to be known as Cloud Computing.
So by now, you should have an understanding of Cloud Computing. Let us go ahead and understand the next topic,
What Is Amazon Web Services?
Amazon Web Services or AWS as an abbreviation is a popular Cloud Service Provider that enables on-demand services like compute, storage, networking, security, databases, etc which can be accessed through the internet across the globe and the user is not required to manage or monitor these resources.
Amazon Web Services is a global leader in terms of Public Cloud market share and provides cloud solutions in 245 different countries across the globe. It provides more than 200 Cloud Computing services, which touch domains like,
- Storage
- Computation
- Security
- Databases
- Networking
- Monitoring
- Migration
- Messaging
- Analytics
- DevOps
- IoT
- Big Data, etc
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a versatile, secure and reliable cloud service provider and is the most sort after Cloud Computing and Hard skill in the market. Companies have invested billions of dollars in this service provider and the number shows an upward trend in the near future. The major reason why see this the market reach of Amazon Web Services, the quality of services and support it provides and the benefits it offers.
Let us now go ahead and see the benefits or advantages of using Amazon Web Services.
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Benefits of Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services(AWS) offers numerous benefits, let us explore a few of these ones by one:
AWS Pricing
Whether you are a small scale startup or a full-fledged enterprise, Amazon Web Services has you covered when it comes to pricing. Firstly it offers ‘pay as you go model’, that means you pay for resources in volumes and duration you use them for. It charges you on a per-minute basis. Meaning if a resource is used for 30 minutes you be charged only for those 30 minutes and not more. It also offers a calculator that lets you track your expenses.
Zero Commitment
Whether you need to host a website, or even a high traffic hosting content delivery network. Amazon Web Services keeps you covered. You spawn a virtual machine, a database service or a data warehouse. This happens with you not requiring to be in an upfront commitment. This is because Amazon Web Services charges you on per minute and for some resources per hour basis. This means you are not tied with any yearly, quarterly or even monthly commitments.
Scalability and Procurement
If your applications lie on-premise, procuring your servers may take a lot of time. It can be a few hours to even 1- weeks. This holds true for your software licenses. Amazon Web Services paints a very different picture when it comes to procurement. You can launch new virtual machines or instances in a matter of minutes and save a lot of time and effort.
When it comes to scalability AWS ensures you can scale up and down instantly to adjust to spikes your infrastructure may face. This is something that can be difficult to achieve on your on-premise infrastructure.
Security
Amazon Web Services takes Cloud Security to the next level. It ensures your infrastructure is secure physically and also over the network, that consumers use to access it.
- It supports shared security model. This means the consumer can control security at the consumer end and AWS at data centre end.
- Physical security of data centre can be ensured by the fact that there is around the cloud physical security across all the data centres that Amazon Web Services owns
- Its Global infrastructure ensures your data is well distributed and accessible to you across the globe and is highly resilient, available and safe from disasters
- AWS provides firewalls to man your data at the entry points of the network and also ensures encryption of data that moves over the network, ensuring end to end security
- Amazon IAM is a service that lets you identify user who can access your resources and control who get to access what and when
Flexible
Not a lot needs to be said about the flexibility, when a platform offers, 200+ services in 245 countries. But to point out few key pointers, Amazon Web Services offers flexibility in terms of pricing, security, and even when it comes to automating the process scaling your devices. It offers, IaaS, PaaS and even serverless computing. This means from configuring everything from a scratch to directly using a platform everything is flexible for a consumer. So much so that a user can just put his code in a serverless computing service and the service takes care of everything else.
PaaS Offerings
AWS offers an infrastructure that is scalable and also covers core domains, like compute storage, databases, networking. In the process, it takes care of configuring and managing platforms. Hence it provides good options when it comes to providing PaaS services to people. Meaning people do not have to worry about setting up infrastructures.
Adaptable
They say Amazon Web Services is everyone and that is very correct. Because it gives plenty of options when you want to set up your business on the cloud. If you are starting fresh with cloud or even if you have an infrastructure that needs to move to the cloud, AWS takes care of both situations. Amazon Web Services most types of migrations and license support for a smooth transition to AWS cloud
Your Scaling up and scaling down concerns are also nullified because AWS let us you handle data and applications in different volumes.
There are services that automate scaling and configuration processes. There are services like AWS EC2 that let you spawn instances in minutes and even create copies and backups of these instances ensuring you get adaptability that you were looking for.
API
API give us programmatic control over the resources we use. It comes to taking data backup, or even launching instances this all can be done API’s and in short, it gives us more power compared to AWS management console.
AWS Supports plenty of API’s and SDK’s that let you have control over these resources.
So this was about the benefits that AWS has to offer to us. Let us go ahead and take a look at some popular use cases.
Use Cases of Amazon Web Services
Repp Health
We all hate waiting in hospitals for a turn to come up. As a patient, we do not have patience and want to get done with our diagnosis at the earliest. And that is understandable behaviour. However, the number of people visiting a hospital and the staff having to set up all the equipment, are some reasons that cause these situations.
Amazon Web Services provides some relief here. With the help of AWS Repp has come with cloud-based tracking solutions. It helps keep track of patients and assets that reside in the vicinity and it makes use of IoT to do so. It also updates, electronic health records considering the data from sensors that capture the movements of patients in the room.
AWS offers Server-less IoT infrastructure to this achieve this and help save as much as it can, for speeding up the overall process at the hospital
McDonald’s
It is certain that most of us know what McDonald’s is? McDonald’s is a highly popular Burger and Fast chain across the globe. They have more than 37000 outlets across the globe and serve more than 60 million people every day. This gives you some idea as to the volume of customers they handle. It is no different for home delivery they provide.
However, having a home delivery platform for such a big vendor. Amazon Web Services ensured their home delivery platform was set up in just 4 months. It is a cloud-native microservices platform. It can scale up to 20000 orders per second and the latency is less than 100 seconds. This platform ensures high integration with delivery platforms and ROI even for minimally charged orders.
WeWork
Here is a case study where an application was moved from one service AWS to the other service on AWS. WeWork has built a tool for Project management called FieldLens. Initially, this was set up on Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute. This was a monolith project that functioned well for 2 and a half years. However, it needed expansion and improvement. This came in the form of Docker and AWS Elastic Container Service. On moving this project to containers the performance improved immensely.
Talking of numbers FieldLens, now hosts 80,000 users and 110,000 projects that use containers, and are deployed through AWS Codepipeline and secured using AWS Service. It offers high integration and scalability.
There are plenty of use cases and applications that Amazon Web Services offers. And there are many customers that have invested billions in this cloud platform and continue to do so on a monthly basis. That tell you how reliable this cloud platform is. To note a few popular customers, here are some names that you may want to know about:
Popular Customers of Amazon Web Services
- McDonald’s
- Netflix
- Unilever
- Samsung
- MI
- Airbnb
- BMW
- ESPN
So this was about the final bit of this article and this was about this article on Amazon Web Services – Benefits and Use Cases. We hope like this article.
Do let us know if this article piqued your interest in Amazon Web Services in the comment section below. If you have questions put those in the comment section below, and our team would revert at the earliest. Happy Learning!
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