What is Amazon Web Services?

Cloud technologies are growing in popularity year after year. This is certainly something anyone involved in software development can attest to. Sooner or later, these professionals will have to work with one cloud platform or another.

Statistically, the most popular of them is Amazon Web Services (AWS). In this article, we provide information for a basic understanding of the main features of AWS.

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There's a common misconception that if Amazon were to go out of business, every internet user would feel the impact. Why? Let's try to figure it out.

Amazon's Commercial Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services is an online platform that provides users with virtual computing resources, storage, infrastructure, and services containing ready-to-use functionality.

In simple terms, instead of purchasing a physical server and installing it locally, you can simply rent a virtual online resource.

AWS services are used by large IT companies and corporations. They choose this platform to support workloads including mobile applications, game development, data processing, and information storage.

If AWS were to go down for any reason, it would directly impact many internet users. The reason is simple: popular services rely heavily on AWS capacity, meaning they would simply stop working.

According to research from independent analytics company Canalys, which provides IT professionals with information on the state of the technology industry, AWS accounted for 31% of the market share of all cloud platforms in the second quarter of 2021.

The second most popular in this category was Microsoft Azure, the third was Google Cloud Platform.

A study of the global cloud infrastructure market in Q1 2022 showed that Amazon Web Services C retained its status as the largest cloud provider (33% of total spending). This platform's revenue increased by 37% year-over-year, and the company continues to actively expand its infrastructure.

Notable Amazon Web Services Customers

Coursera

Coursera, the world's largest online educational institution, can handle approximately 500 TB of traffic monthly using the AWS platform. The platform provides capabilities for tracking user data, storing and delivering video content, and facilitating student-instructor interaction. Using AWS services, Coursera delivers more than 2,000 courses to over 21 million students worldwide.

Netflix 

Netflix became the first major corporate user of AWS 13 years ago. Today, it uses over 100,000 server instances to run resource-intensive workloads.

Netflix uses AWS for nearly all of its computing and storage needs, including databases, analytics, recommendation engines, video transcoding, and more.

Coinbase 

Popular cryptocurrency exchange platform Coinbase is preventingfraudulent activities, using the Amazon SageMaker cloud platform to develop machine learning algorithms.

AWS Platform Management

One of the ways to interact with Amazon Web Services is throughAWS ConsoleThis is a website where you can manage resources through a browser. The console provides a simple web interface for administering Amazon Web Services.

To access the management console, you need to enter your AWS account details (login and password).

There are other options for managing the AWS platform:

• SDK— a method of programmatic interaction with the platform.

SDKs are implemented for popular programming languages: C++, Go, Java, JS, .NET, PHP, Python, Ruby.

If there's no official SDK for the language you're coding in, you can probably find a community-supported library. Or you can write your own SDK, which will act as a wrapper around the provided HTTP interface.

• AWS CLI— a command line utility that is convenient to use for automating processes.

It is suitable for those who prefer to use the console rather than the graphical interface.

Key Benefits of Amazon Web Services 

1. Small budget

Let's say you want to launch a startup and create a messenger. To do this, you'll need:

• servers for communication;
• a server with a database where the message history will be stored,
• File storage servers: Users need to be able to share images.

All of the above may require significant financial investment. However, there's no guarantee that the business project will be successful and that you'll make a profit rather than lose the money you spent.

After spending a significant amount on a physical server, you'll likely realize you're not using it 24/7 at full capacity because you don't need it. At some point, you'll definitely start thinking about how you can save money.

The solution is a cloud platform. When you use the cloud, your virtual machine can share physical hardware with other users' virtual machines. This distribution reduces server maintenance costs.

Using AWS guarantees savings:

• You can rent only those resources and capacities that are needed at the moment;
• You can pay for them hourly or only for the number of completed requests;
• If something goes wrong, you can simply shut down all the servers and resources involved without risking losing a lot of money.

2. The largest infrastructure among all cloud providers

AWS offers the largest global infrastructure of any cloud provider, spanning 77 Availability Zones worldwide.

The company is constantly expanding its presence in different parts of the world so that clients can improve the quality of service to end users and quickly enter markets in virtually any region of the planet and any country in the world.

All AWS data centers, Availability Zones, and Regions are interconnected using dedicated, private, global network infrastructure with high availability and low latency.

3. Flexibility of use of services 

AWS offers a variety of cloud services that can be combined to meet the needs and organizational objectives of your business project. Servers and resources you're not using can be shut down.

Types of Amazon services

AWS offers a huge number of services for various purposes:

• services for performing calculations;
• file storage;
• databases;
• virtual networks;
• services for machine learning and AI;
• media services and much more. 

10 essentials that web developers will find useful:

1. IAM (Identity Access Management) 

Allows you to create and manage user access levels.

2. S3 (Simple Storage Service) 

An object storage service that offers automatic scalability.

3. CloudFront 

A system of servers that caches static content (also known as edge locations). This system exists independently of regions and availability zones.

4. ELB (Elastic Load Balancer)

A service that allows you to regulate and distribute the load between existing servers.

5. Auto Scaling 

A service that allows you to create server groups and automatically manage their number.

6. Cloud Watch

A service for monitoring hundreds of different predefined metrics (CPU, disk, network, etc.) and defining custom ones. It also provides the ability to collect and analyze logs from your entire infrastructure, applications, and services in one place.

7. RDS (Relational Database Service)

A relational database service from Amazon that supports multiple engines: MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL.

8. Amazon Aurora

A managed relational database engine compatible with PostgreSQL and MySQL that offers automatic scaling. Amazon claims its performance is five times faster than MySQL and three times faster than PostgreSQL.

9. AWS API Gateway

A managed service that requires no infrastructure configuration or support. It allows you to define HTTP RESTful APIs or websocket interfaces to other AWS resources.

10. CloudFormation 

Service for automating infrastructure deployment.

How to learn to use AWS

There are several ways to explore AWS capabilities and the key ways to interact with the platform and cloud computing infrastructure.

You can:

1. Explore helpful materials on your own on the official Amazon Web Services website. Over 500 digital courses, 10 sets of official AWS Certification practice questions, and the AWS Cloud Quest — Cloud Practitioner role-playing game are available for free.
2. Access whitepapers, guides, online courses, and videos from AWS power users.
3. Become a member IT Skills 4U programs, implemented through the joint efforts of Amazon Web Services and the Ministry of Digital Development.

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