What Is Amazon Web Services?

Amazon Web Services or AWS as an abbreviation is a popular Cloud Service Provider that enables on-demand services like compute, storage, networking, security, databases, etc which can be accessed through the internet across the globe and the user is not required to manage or monitor these resources.

Amazon Web Services is a global leader in terms of Public Cloud market share and provides cloud solutions in 245 different countries across the globe.  It provides more than 200 Cloud Computing services, which touch domains like,

• Storage
• Computation
• Security
• Databases
• Networking
• Monitoring
• Migration
• Messaging
• Analytics
• DevOps
• IoT
• Big Data, etc

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a versatile, secure and reliable cloud service provider and is the most sort after Cloud Computing and Hard skill in the market.  Companies have invested billions of dollars in this service provider and the number shows an upward trend in the near future. The major reason why see this the market reach of Amazon Web Services, the quality of services and support it provides and the benefits it offers.

Let us now go ahead and see the benefits or advantages of using Amazon Web Services.

Benefits of Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services(AWS) offers numerous benefits, let us explore a few of these ones by one:

AWS Pricing

Whether you are a small scale startup or a full-fledged enterprise, Amazon Web Services has you covered when it comes to pricing.  Firstly it offers ‘pay as you go model’, that means you pay for resources in volumes and duration you use them for. It charges you on a per-minute basis. Meaning if a resource is used for 30 minutes you be charged only for those 30 minutes and not more. It also offers a calculator that lets you track your expenses.

Zero Commitment

Whether you need to host a website, or even a high traffic hosting content delivery network. Amazon Web Services keeps you covered. You spawn a virtual machine, a database service or a data warehouse. This happens with you not requiring to be in an upfront commitment. This is because Amazon Web Services charges you on per minute and for some resources per hour basis.  This means you are not tied with any yearly, quarterly or even monthly commitments.

Scalability and Procurement

If your applications lie on-premise, procuring your servers may take a lot of time. It can be a few hours to even 1- weeks. This holds true for your software licenses. Amazon Web Services paints a very different picture when it comes to procurement. You can launch new virtual machines or instances in a matter of minutes and save a lot of time and effort.

When it comes to scalability AWS ensures you can scale up and down instantly to adjust to spikes your infrastructure may face. This is something that can be difficult to achieve on your on-premise infrastructure.

Security

Amazon Web Services takes Cloud Security to the next level. It ensures your infrastructure is secure physically and also over the network, that consumers use to access it.

• It supports shared security model. This means the consumer can control security at the consumer end and AWS at data centre end.
• Physical security of data centre can be ensured by the fact that there is around the cloud physical security across all the data centres that Amazon Web Services owns
• Its Global infrastructure ensures your data is well distributed and accessible to you across the globe and is highly resilient, available and safe from disasters
• AWS provides firewalls to man your data at the entry points of the network and also ensures encryption of data that moves over the network, ensuring end to end security
• Amazon IAM is a service that lets you identify user who can access your resources and control who get to access what and when

Flexible

Not a lot needs to be said about the flexibility, when a platform offers, 200+ services in 245 countries. But to point out few key pointers, Amazon Web Services offers flexibility in terms of pricing, security, and even when it comes to automating the process scaling your devices.  It offers, IaaS, PaaS and even serverless computing. This means from configuring everything from a scratch to directly using a platform everything is flexible for a consumer. So much so that a user can just put his code in a serverless computing service and the service takes care of everything else.

PaaS Offerings

AWS offers an infrastructure that is scalable and also covers core domains, like compute storage, databases, networking. In the process, it takes care of configuring and managing platforms. Hence it provides good options when it comes to providing PaaS services to people. Meaning people do not have to worry about setting up infrastructures.

Adaptable

They say Amazon Web Services is everyone and that is very correct. Because it gives plenty of options when you want to set up your business on the cloud. If you are starting fresh with cloud or even if you have an infrastructure that needs to move to the cloud, AWS takes care of both situations. Amazon Web Services most types of migrations and license support for a smooth transition to AWS cloud

Your Scaling up and scaling down concerns are also nullified because AWS let us you handle data and applications in different volumes.

There are services that automate scaling and configuration processes. There are services like AWS EC2 that let you spawn instances in minutes and even create copies and backups of these instances ensuring you get adaptability that you were looking for.

API

API give us programmatic control over the resources we use. It comes to taking data backup, or even launching instances this all can be done API’s and in short, it gives us more power compared to AWS management console.

AWS Supports plenty of API’s and SDK’s that let you have control over these resources.

Source: https://www.mygreatlearning.com/blog/amazon-web-services-aws/