The Revolution Called AWS
Let’s switch back to the old ages.
Imagine you are heading overseas for your travel endeavors.
You have options to go anywhere but wherever you go, you need a place to stay.
Traditionally, you would have to build your own shelter upon arrival. You would cut wood for the walls, collect leaves to build shade, and segregate compartment for rooms as required. You would then build a kitchen, toilets, and bed as additional features in the house. At the finest day, your activities will be cooking, sleeping, drinking and showering.
Before you realize it, your holiday has finished and it’s time to come back to reality.
Soon, many great builders arise because of the huge demand for shelters. When you go for a holiday, you could pay to have someone build a house for you. However this is very expensive unless you decide to live at that new place for a long time. And keep in mind disasters do happen. Your floor sinks and your builder runs away with your money, the house is not what you ordered for and now you are in a complete dilemma in an unknown land.
Soon, a service known as ‘hotel’ is created. It provides shelter at locations of your liking, different pricing models based on number of guests, nights, and your preferred exclusivity. In addition, housekeeping service are there to ensure your tenacity in the hotel is at its best. So you always get clean bed sheets, bathroom with toiletries, and alcohol in the fridge for your disposal. Now here comes the hardest choice, pick one.
The great thing about this is, you do not need to know how to build a wall, start a fire, do cooking and so on. The amount you pay is proportional to your chosen preferences and exclusivity. Best of all, you focus on enjoying your holiday.
With this model, it is very obvious that your risks are mitigated, you spend only what is required, and are able to focus on your holiday. Honestly, hotel services are a great innovation!
AWS stack is the hotel service provider in the virtual world, only more powerful. They have expertise in developing and managing a large scale “physical” infrastructures, eg: EC2 (walls, shade, pipes), skillful in providing “features” platform services like VPC, Lambda, RDS, Auto-Scaling and Load Balancing (kitchen, toilet, bedroom, garden). You focus on your main business, they focus on theirs; there is no huge upfront cost; people can build fast, fail fast with minimal cost, and to top it all, it is an extremely powerful component for innovation to happen.
“Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a secure cloud services platform, offering compute power, database storage, content delivery and other functionality to help businesses scale and grow.”
Services Offered By AWS
Let us have a look at the various services offered by AWS and their brief descriptions.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Allows renting a server per hour (from small to huge.)
Amazon Elastic MapReduce
Allows renting a couple of servers per hour as an hadoop cluster (to crunch a lot of data.)
Auto Scaling
Allows renting just enough servers as necessary (using more with a lot of work, using less with less work.)
Amazon CloudFront
Facilitates something like Akamai services (CDN, content distribution network) but at much cheaper rates.
Amazon SimpleDB
Allows noSQL for key-value store, store huge lists of items consisting of attributes that are quickly searchable.
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
MySQL as a Service is one of the best services of AWS at this moment which kills redundant data and provides complete data superiority.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Allows infrastructure automation for java applications. works with tomcat, uses services like autoscaling. (turn-key solution, perfect for getting familiar with several AWS services.)
AWS CloudFormation
Allows infrastructure orchestration. write recipes for different services you want to use, and how, and CloudFormation will do the rest.
Amazon Fulfillment Web Service (FWS)
Have a shop? You can have Amazon manage your fulfillment. your suppliers ship to Amazon, and they ship to your customers.
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
The one of a kind ‘first in, first out’ (in nature) messaging, perfect for jobs that should be processed asynchronously, more or less in order of arrival. think of video rendering or thumbnail generation.
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)
Publish/subscribe mechanism, you create topics interested parties can subscribe to, sending a message to a topic, sends the message to all subscribers (like a mailing list, but for software systems.)
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)
A service for sending mail. You have to earn your quota with a good behaviour. An interesting way of minimizing spam.
Amazon CloudWatch
Alows monitoring of many AWS assets, like instances (servers) and load balancers.
Amazon Route 53
DNS facilities with amazing flexibility.
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
Allows extension of your private network with ‘some cloud’.
Elastic Load Balancing
Allows distributing traffic over one or more instances (servers).
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
The most revolutionary service in AWS. unlimited storage.
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)
The network disks for AWS, attaches a volume to an instance of your choice. You can’t share the disk between multiple instances.
AWS Import/Export
Allows moving large data in and out of S3.
Alexa Top Sites
Display top sites from Alexa.com in your application.
Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Lets you provision users within your AWS account and grant them access to different services and resources.
At GoodWorkLabs, we understand Amazon Web Services in & out. We understand the intricacies involved and the minute details that make the implementation process hassle free.
Contact us today for world class AWS services.
