Welcome to the world of Amazon Web Services (AWS)! If you’re a business owner, developer, or IT professional, chances are you’ve heard of AWS. But what exactly is it and how can it benefit your organization?
In simple terms, AWS is a cloud computing platform offered by Amazon. It provides a wide range of services, such as storage, computing power, and databases, that can be accessed and scaled up or down as needed.
Instead of having to invest in and maintain expensive on-premises infrastructure, organizations can use AWS to access the resources they need over the internet.
Intro to Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Amazon Web Services, or AWS, is Amazon’s cloud computing service consisting of a mix of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS infrastructure.
Amazon Web Services consists of many organizational tool services such as computing power, database storage, to content delivery services.
AWS services include servers, networking, remote computing, email, mobile development, and security.
The AWS cloud platform is known as a service that offers flexible, scalable, easy-to-use, and cost-effective cloud computing solutions.
Amazon Web Services was launched in 2006 from an internal infrastructure built to handle Amazon’s enterprise online retail operations.
Amazon was one of the first companies to introduce a pay-as-you-go cloud computing model that can be used as needed.
AWS offers many different services and solutions for enterprises and software developers that can be deployed in data centers in 190 countries.
This cloud platform is also used in many industries, Golden friends! From government agencies, educational institutions, and non-profit organizations to private organizations.
Cloud Computing
According to AWS, cloud computing is the on-demand use of IT resources over the internet at pay-as-you-go prices.
Before the arrival of cloud computing, companies that wanted to build a data center had to make it and predict service workloads. This, of course, will be very inconvenient because it requires a large amount of money.
A data center usually consists of rows of computer racks, a complex network, and a managed storage system. In addition, the company also has to spend funds to pay for building rent, cleaning, electricity, cooling, and security.
And even though the data center is ready for use, the company must ensure that the data center can serve workload needs.
Services
Basically, AWS services themselves can be categorized into several types, namely:
- Migration
- Cloud Computing
- Storage
- Security services
- Database services
- Analytics
- Management services
- Internet of Things
- Application Services
- Deployment and Management
So, in each of these categories there are dozens or even hundreds of types of services that users can choose and use according to their needs.
1. Migration
AWS migration services physically transfer data from your data center to Amazon servers. Some examples of AWS migration services are:
DMS (Database Migration Service) — used to migrate on-site databases to AWS. Services help you to migrate from one type of database to another.
Snowball — is an application that allows you to transfer several terabytes of data within and outside an Amazon Web Services environment.
2. Cloud Computing
Here are some of the cloud computing services offered by Amazon:
1. EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) — a virtual machine where users get OS-level control that allows them to run as they please.
2. Elastic Beanstalk — this tool offers automated deployment and provisioning of highly scalable production website-like resources.
3. LightSail — automatically deploys and manages the computing, storage, and networking capabilities needed to run your applications.
3. Storage
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is a scalable object storage solution that allows IT professionals to store and organize data and files, known as S3 objects, which can be as large as five gigabytes.
It is a cost-effective option for businesses, as they can save money by using S3’s Infrequent Access storage class or Amazon Glacier for long-term cold storage.
Additionally, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provides block-level storage for persistent data storage when using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) offers a managed cloud-based file storage option.
For businesses looking to migrate data to the cloud, AWS offers a variety of options such as AWS Snowball, Snowball Edge, and Snowmobile for storage transport, or AWS Storage Gateway to allow on-premises applications to access cloud data.
With these tools, businesses can easily and securely transfer large amounts of data to the cloud for storage and processing.
4. Networking
An Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) gives an administrator control over a virtual network to use an isolated section of the AWS cloud. AWS automatically provisions new resources within a VPC for extra protection.
Admins can balance network traffic with the Elastic Load Balancing service, which includes the Application Load Balancer and Network Load Balancer. AWS also provides a domain name system called Amazon Route 53 that routes end users to applications.
An IT professional can establish a dedicated connection from an on-premises data center to the AWS cloud via AWS Direct Connect.
AWS Advantages
1. Scaleability and Adaptable
AWS is also claimed to be suitable for building a business from scratch. This platform provides all the necessary tools to get started with cloud computing.
In addition, Amazon also provides low-cost migration services so that all your infrastructure can easily be moved to AWS.
The AWS business model allows flexible use of resources. So you don’t have to spend time budgeting.
2. Secure and Trusted
Regarding security, of course Amazon Web Services is much safer than many web hosting companies or even your own server.
Currently, AWS also has dozens of data centers spread all over the world. All of these AWS cloud data centers are continuously monitored and maintained strictly.
User data will be stored and distributed across multiple data centers to ensure that a disaster that befalls one region does not cause permanent data loss.
In addition, AWS also places their data center in a remote location and only allows access to important personnel with certain login permissions.
Thanks to Amazon’s experience in cloud services, all data in the data center is safe from tampering and can be repaired easily.
Now besides these two advantages, AWS also has many other advantages, such as:
- Customizable: AWS allows users to customize programming models, operating systems, databases, and architectures according to their needs.
- Pay-as-you-go: Amazon web services also allow you to pay for the resources you use, without any down payments or long-term commitments.
- Managed: You don’t have to spend money to run and maintain servers in a data center.
- Broad scope: Aws allows you to release your application to multiple regions around the world with just a few clicks.
- Affordable costs: the total cost of owning AWS is lower than renting a dedicated or private server.