What is AWS ?

 

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a secure cloud platform that offers a broad set of global cloud-based products. Because these products are delivered over the internet, you have on-demand access to the compute, storage, network, database, and other IT resources that you might need for your projects and the tools to manage them. You can immediately provision and launch AWS resources. The resources are ready for you to use in minutes. AWS offers flexibility. Your AWS environment can be reconfigured and updated on demand, scaled up or down automatically to meet usage patterns and optimize spending, or shut down temporarily or permanently. The billing for AWS services becomes an operational expense instead of a capital expense. AWS services are designed to work together to support virtually any type of application or workload. Think of these services like building blocks, which you can assemble quickly to build sophisticated, scalable solutions, and then adjust them as your needs change

AWS services fall under different categories, and each category contains one or more services. You can select the services that you want from these different categories to build your solutions. 

So lets see some example of different services provided by AWS -

AWS EC2 -  

It provides scalable computing capacity in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. Using  Amazon EC2 it eliminates your need to invest in hardware up front, so you can develop and deploy applications faster. You can use Amazon EC2 to launch as many or as few virtual servers as you need, configure security and networking, and manage storage. Amazon EC2 enables you to scale up or down to handle changes in requirements or spikes in popularity, reducing your need to forecast traffic.

AWS S3 -

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. Customers of all sizes and industries can use Amazon S3 to store and protect any amount of data for a range of use cases, such as data lakes, websites, mobile applications, backup and restore, archive, enterprise applications, IoT devices, and big data analytics. Amazon S3 provides management features so that you can optimize, organize, and configure access to your data to meet your specific business, organizational, and compliance requirements.

AWS Aurora -

Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud that combines the performance and availability of traditional enterprise databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases.

Amazon Aurora is up to five times faster than standard MySQL databases and three times faster than standard PostgreSQL databases. It provides the security, availability, and reliability of commercial databases at 1/10th the cost. Amazon Aurora is fully managed by Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), which automates time-consuming administration tasks like hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups.

AWS Shield -

AWS Shield is a managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service that safeguards applications running on AWS. AWS Shield provides always-on detection and automatic inline mitigations that minimize application downtime and latency, so there is no need to engage AWS Support to benefit from DDoS protection.

AWS CloudWatch - 

Amazon CloudWatch monitors your Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources and the applications you run on AWS in real time. You can use CloudWatch to collect and track metrics, which are variables you can measure for your resources and applications.

The CloudWatch home page automatically displays metrics about every AWS service you use. You can additionally create custom dashboards to display metrics about your custom applications, and display custom collections of metrics that you choose.

You can create alarms that watch metrics and send notifications or automatically make changes to the resources you are monitoring when a threshold is breached. For example, you can monitor the CPU usage and disk reads and writes of your Amazon EC2 instances.