What is AWS & How Does it Work? – Introduction to Amazon Web Services Components
There was a time where businesses needed a huge infrastructure to structure themselves according to their...
There was a time when businesses needed a huge infrastructure to structure themselves according to their requirements. If you are someone who works in the IT industry or understands the complete working of the IT industry, you would know how infrastructure matters to streamline the overall operation of the company’s day-to-day activities. What if you are the owner of a business that is spread worldwide? You can understand the resources you require to build an infrastructure that would support such a huge business and also the complexities behind building it.
Amazon came up with a solution to this problem back in 2006, and it is named as Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS cloud computing services were the earliest pay-as-you-go (PAYG) computing model that was introduced to scale throughput and storage based on your changing needs.
AWS offers a range of different services, acting as a single infrastructure to handle your business from one place. Everything from databases, hosting, storage, infrastructure management, and so many more are included in this web service portfolio named AWS.
You might have a basic idea of AWS by now and much more if you are already aware of the cloud computing scenario in the world right now. According to a report, 83% of the business workload will be going on the cloud by 2020. Therefore, if you are a continuously growing business or company and still have not given a thought about using AWS, we think, this article will provide you with enough understanding of the AWS cloud computing portfolio.
How does it work?
One thing about cloud computing most people tend to think about is that it might be a difficult task to handle and to break the notion AWS comes with a user-friendly interface.
AWS management console helps you see all the services on one page and also helps you monitor them. There are more than 100 services that comprise AWS, including those for computing, databases, infrastructure management, application development, and security.
Amazon Web Services Components
AWS is a popular cloud service provider launched back in 2006 by Amazon. In order to provide superior performance, there are certain components of AWS that help in managing different aspects of your business. It ranges from storage to networking and everything in between. We will take you through them one at a time.
Storage
When a business comes into the picture, storage is the first thing that holds the top priority. If there is no space to hold the data generated by a business, you will not be able to run your business efficiently. AWS, therefore, offers flexible storage and different storage options to make it easier for you. Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Block Storage (EBS), and CloudFront are the three storage options offered by Amazon Web Services.
AWS offers 5 GB of cloud storage and 20000 GET requests and 5000 PUT requests from S3 free for the first year. You also get an EC2 instance free for the first year.
Databases
AWS offers NoSQL and relational databases along with caching and data storage in the range of petabytes. Dynamo DB is a NoSQL database that offers large storage and economical storage of data. Users can manage their own databases in AWS using EC2 and EBS. You can also operate the MySQL, Oracle, SQL server, or Postgre SQL servers on AWS using the Amazon Relational Database Servers. RDS pricing is based on instance hours and storage amount.
Administration and security
Microsoft’s Active Directory can be accessed on AWS using AWS Directory services. You can link the on-premise Active Directory to AWS Clouds. CloudWatch monitors and controls the cloud resources of AWS. AWS CloudTrail records API calls for user accounts on AWS. CloudTrial does all the monitoring and controlling work for free.
Networking
(VPC) offers versatile and superior network performance in AWS, which means it comes integrated with security and private cloud. It comes free of cost tagged along with EC2. The AWS Direct Connect helps in connecting the on-premises network to Amazon VPC. It is priced on an hourly basis.
Analytics
AWS cloud computing services offer analytics as a part of its offering. It offers services on all fronts like Hadoop, orchestration, and real-time streaming and data warehousing. Analysis of data helps in forming many major decisions by processing data chunks. This can be done by using Elastic MapReduce which is an analytics framework aimed at processing and manipulating big chunks of data in large quantities, known as big data. Pricing is done on an hourly basis.
Application services
Workflow automation between different services on AWS is important. To achieve this AWS cloud service provider offers Amazon Simple Queue Services (SQS) is used. It has a dedicated queue to store different messages. It is a free service for 1 million messages per month, and after that, the charges are $ 0.50 for every 1 million messages.
Conclusion:
AWS is one of the most popular cloud services right now in the industry. Most businesses are using AWS to handle their daily operations which not only saves time but also a chunk of money that can be used for constructive purposes. If you are a business and looking to save some extra chunk of revenue to increase profits, this could be the one for you, since it works on the pay-as-you-go model.
