Overview of Amazon Web Services (part 1)

By Ashwin Venugopal -

 





To read part 2, please click here








Introduction

Amazon Web Services or AWS started providing their IT infrastructure services to businesses as web services in the year 2006, also known as cloud computing which also offers an opportunity to replace upfront capital infrastructure expenses into low variable costs that scale with your business. Since the introduction of cloud computing, businesses no longer require to plan for as well as procure servers and the other IT infrastructure weeks or months in advance, on the contrary, they can instantly spin up hundreds or thousands of servers in minutes and delivers quick results. 

Nowadays, AWS offers a highly reliable, scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that powers hundreds of thousands of businesses in 190 countries worldwide.

What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing is known as an on-demand provider of compute power, database, storage, applications, and the other IT resources through cloud services platform via the internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. A cloud service platform will always offer rapid access to flexible as well as low-cost IT resources irrespective of whether the running application shares photos to millions of mobile users or you are supporting critical operations of your business. Hence, you can readily access as many resources as required, almost instantly, and only pay for what you use. 

Cloud computing offers an easier way to access servers, storage, databases, and a broad set of application services over the internet and a platform like AWS owns as well as maintains the network-connected hardware needed for these application services, while you provision as well as use whatever you need via a web application.

Advantages of Cloud Computing

  • Trade capital expense for variable expense- You can only pay for the computing resources you consume or how much you consume instead of heavily investing in data centers and servers before even knowing how to use them.

  • Benefit from massive economies of scale- Cloud computing helps you to obtain a lower variable cost than you can get on your own and as usage from millions of customers is aggregated in the cloud, providers like AWS can achieve higher economies of scale, which in turn translates into lower pay-as-you-go prices.

  • Stop guessing infrastructure capacity- Cloud computing will help you in eliminating the problems like guessing on your infrastructure capacity requirements before deploying an application which generally lead you to either sitting on expensive idle resources or dealing with limited capacity; by simply allowing you to access as much or as little capacity as you need as well as scale up and down as required within only a few minutes' notice.

  • Increase speed & agility- As stated above, all the new IT resources are just a click away in cloud computing which highly reduces the time required to make them available to your developers from weeks to just minutes, which in turn dramatically increases the organization's agility as the cost as well as time taken to experiment and develop is considerably low.

  • Stop spending money running & maintaining data centers- You can easily focus on the projects that differentiates your business instead of the infrastructure as cloud computing helps you to concentrate on your own customers rather than on the heavy lifting of racking, stacking, and powering servers.

  • Go global in minutes- You can easily deploy your application in multiple locations worldwide with just a few clicks which allows you to offer lower latency as well as a better experience for your customers that at minimal cost.    

Types of Cloud Computing

There are various types of cloud computing models as well as deployment strategies that have emerged to help meet specific needs of different users and understanding them will help you to determine what set of services is right for your needs.

Cloud Computing Models

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

It consists of the basic building blocks for cloud IT and typically offers access to the networking features, computers, and data storage space while also providing you with the highest level of flexibility as well as management control over your IT resources which is similar to the IT resources that most of the IT departments are familiar with today.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

It eliminates the requirement to manage underlying infrastructure and helps you to concentrate on the deployment as well as management of your applications which makes you more efficient as you don't have to worry about the things like resource procurement, capacity planning, software maintenance, patching, or any of the other undifferentiated heavy lifting involved in running your application.

Software as a Service (SaaS)

It offers you a completed product that is run and managed by the service provider which simply allows you to think about its usage rather than how the service is maintained or how the underlying infrastructure is maintained. For example, a web-based email can be used to send as well as receive emails without managing any feature additions to the email product or maintaining the servers as well as operating systems that the email program is running on. 

Cloud Computing Deployment Models

Cloud

A cloud-based application and all its parts are fully deployed as well as run in the cloud and can be easily built on a low-level infrastructure pieces or can use higher level services that can offer abstraction from the management, architecture, and scaling requirements of core infrastructure. Applications in the cloud have either been created in the cloud or have been migrated from an existing infrastructure to gain the advantages from the benefits of cloud computing. 

Hybrid

This deployment is a method to connect infrastructure as well as applications between cloud-based resources and existing resources that are not present in the cloud. The most common way of hybrid deployment is between the cloud as well as existing on-premises infrastructure to extend and grow an organization's infrastructure into the cloud while connecting cloud resources to the internal system. 

On-premises

If the resources are deployed on-premises with the help of virtualization as well as resources management tools, then, it's sometimes called the "private cloud". Although, this one doesn't provide many of the benefits of cloud computing, but, it's sometimes sought for its capability to offer dedicated resources. Generally, this deployment model can be taken as same as the legacy IT infrastructure while using application management and virtualization technologies to try and increase resource utilization.

 










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