Today, we want to talk about an introduction to AWS, to its services.

But to do that, I really want us to look at the question, what is cloud? What is AWS? There’s many definitions out there, but the one that we’re going to go with is the idea of an on-demand, pay-as-you-go, IT services that are delivered over the internet. Each one of those arts are important. The idea of an on-demand service, that you don’t have to make any advanced contracts with us, you don’t have to let us know what’s needed. The moment you need services like storage and compute or networking, they’re available immediately without any advanced contract, which goes the same as pay-as-you-go. That, you don’t have to have any prepaid tier, there’s no minimum requirement needed to be part of AWS. Delivered over the internet, means it’s secure and available anywhere for you and your business. That’s what cloud is.

If you want to read more about Cloud, click here check out my blog on Introduction to Cloud.

To read more about the Cloud Services, click here to check out my blog on Services provided by the Cloud.

But a better question to “what the cloud is?”, can be “why is cloud?”. Why does AWS exist in the first place? People might say, “Well, it’s just a substitute for what you have on-premises.” 

I disagree with that statement. Instead, a better answer to why AWS exists, is to look at the idea of IT as a series of actions, and some of them are very important to your business, and some of them are common everywhere. 

Everybody needs compute, everyone needs storage, everyone needs identity management. AWS exists to eliminate those undifferentiated heavy lifting tasks that your IT department needs, that everyone’s IT department needs. 

This means your business can spend time working on what is strategically unique to you rather than repetitive common tasks that everyone has to do. So, what are the things that make up the AWS Cloud? 

Well, there are some obvious things we’ve already talked about. This idea of compute. Common areas where you can do all your calculations, storage of all different types, networking that allows you to have your own private network, while at the same time allowing it exactly who you want to have be part of your application. 

But AWS, we go so far beyond that, and there’s many other things that are not so obvious at first blush. AWS has a high level of security with many security features written especially for your operations team. They have automation suites designed to deploy all of your applications, all of your databases, all of your environments automatically. They have database as a service. 

DevOps, which can be delivered soup to nuts right there as part of the services that we offer. Media services, artificial intelligence, machine learning, ML, Internet of Things, IoT, services like game development, identity management, augmented reality, virtual reality, big data analytics, and the list keeps going on. 

Amazon has over 150 unique services at AWS, and that list continues to grow year after year. The pace of innovation AWS is one of the important factors we bring, that we’re constantly adding, constantly innovating on behalf of you, our customers. They even have a partner network designed to answer questions that may be specific to you and your vertical. The AWS Partner Network (APN), along with the AWS Marketplace, can provide on-demand solutions, pay-by-the-hour solutions, that will allow your company to get exactly what it needs, when it needs it. 

Advantages of AWS

1) Flexibility

• We can get more time for core business tasks due to the instant availability of new features and services in AWS.
• It provides effortless hosting of legacy applications. AWS does not require learning new technologies and migration of applications to the AWS provides the advanced computing and efficient storage.
• AWS also offers a choice that whether we want to run the applications and services together or not. We can also choose to run a part of the IT infrastructure in AWS and the remaining part in data centres.

2) Cost-effectiveness

AWS requires no upfront investment, long-term commitment, and minimum expense when compared to traditional IT infrastructure that requires a huge investment.

3) Scalability/Elasticity

Through AWS, autoscaling and elastic load balancing techniques are automatically scaled up or down, when demand increases or decreases respectively. AWS techniques are ideal for handling unpredictable or very high loads. Due to this reason, organizations enjoy the benefits of reduced cost and increased user satisfaction.

4) Security

• AWS provides end-to-end security and privacy to customers.
• AWS has a virtual infrastructure that offers optimum availability while managing full privacy and isolation of their operations.
• Customers can expect high-level of physical security because of Amazon’s several years of experience in designing, developing and maintaining large-scale IT operation centers.
• AWS ensures the three aspects of security, i.e., Confidentiality, integrity, and availability of user’s data.

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Stay tuned for the next blog ,where we will discuss about Google Cloud Platform (GCP).