Amazon Web Services is a cloud platform that provides infrastructure to its large and expanding user base. Any cloud service that provides infrastructure is commonly known as IaaS, or Infrastructure as a Service provider. Amazon is a leader in providing decentralized IT infrastructure. It allows organisations using its services to access compute, network and storage resources on demand and and to scale them elastically. Amazon utilises virtual servers powered by Xen hypervisors for hardware virtualization, SOA standards, REST, HTTP, SOAP transfer protocols, different operating systems, virtual private servers etc. for the wide range of services it provides.
Benefits of AWS
Pay per use
The billing model for Amazon services is based on the utility model of cloud computing where you only pay for what you use. All the resources utilised by your account is billed efficiently on monthly or annual basis, or per unit consumption basis.
Flexibility
Amazon provides businesses to mix and match architectures, programming models, operating systems, hardware, compute and network resources. This feature of flexibility offers a great deal of interoperability and portability among different types of resources. It allows its customers to choose and switch their requirements based on their previous analytics. Customers can upgrade from legacy architecture to latest technology. Flexibility can enhance the productivity and improve time management for a business.
Cost-effective
Amazon services are designed in a way to maximize your ROI (return on investment), while minimize the actual investment in infrastructure. You can take advantage of resources allocated to you through full utilization and flexibility for balancing the amount allocations as per your requirements. There is no up-front investment, or long-term contracts, you can select the services according to whatever is most suitable for your financial aspects. Features such as autoscaling and flexibility offer great possibilities of increasing your revenues while cutting down on investment costs.
Scalable
Scalability is a feature introduced mainly for the erratic demands on your applications. For example, there may be more demand for a holiday advisor website during the holiday seasons, and less demand otherwise. With AWS, you can rapidly scale up your resources to serve peak demands, and scale down to reduce costs when there is low demand.
Elastic
Elastic means the ability to scale resources up and down with minimal friction. This feature is helpful in variable consumption rates (such as websites with bursts of traffic at particular time of the day, and idle otherwise), or short lifetimes (such as websites with immediate value/offer). It is very difficult to handle sudden spike in traffic as more resources have to be immediately allocated to ensure content distribution is not affected. AWS elasticity features provide smooth allocation of resources.
Secure
AWS follow security best practices to ensure data privacy, data security, application security, data isolation, physical security of data etc. Customers are guaranteed to its security claims with the help of government approved accreditations and certifications.
Experienced
Amazon has more than 15 years of experience with global infrastructure, and since 2006, it is considered as a leader in providing IaaS solutions because of AWS.
Amazon Web Service Components and Services
Listed below are some important components of AWS:
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
The Amazon EC2 provides virtual servers. It is the most popular and significant application from the AWS suite. With EC2, users can build, deploy, manage their virtual private servers. These servers utilize the Xen hypervisor, which runs over any operating system, such as Windows or Linux.
Amazon Simple Queue Service
SQS is a support service for EC2. It is a message queue system for enabling internet based transactions.
Amazon Simple Notification Service
Amazon SNS is a transactino manager that allows users to send messages between applications, regularly updating for any changes, managing RSS feeds etc.
CloudWatch
CloudWatch is a service used to monitor resource utilizatino and performance on the cloud. These metrics can be useful in deciding services to be upgraded and resource scaling to be performed. It is combined with AutoScaling to provide best results to EC2 customers.
AutoScaling
AutoScaling is a feature that enables AWS to automatically scale the resources (compute, storage and network) up and down. Customers no longer have to worry about manually scaling their resources or continually monitoring traffic. AutoScaling is provided with CloudWatch at no extra cost.
Elastic Load Balancing
The Elastic Load Balancing feature is used to reroute instances and resources automatically in times of failure or overload.
Amazon Simple Storage System
Amazon S3 is a very popular backup and storage system. It has a high speed data transfer feature called AWS Import/Export.
Amazon Elastic Block Store
Amazon EBS is a service that allows creation and management of virtual storage disks or block storage facilities. It is most commonly used for Amazon Machine Instances in
EC2.
Amazon SimpleDB
Amazon SimpleDB is a structured data store that enables
indexing and data queries to both EC2 and S3. It uses "bucket" storage system instead of relational schema.
Amazon Relational Database Service
Amazon RDS supports relational database. MySQL is used for database management. RDS provides features such as automated software patching,
database backups, and automated database scaling via API calls.
Amazon Cloudfront
Amazon CloudFront is a content-delivery
system that is used by most websites dealing with content distribution over the internet. It provides fast delivery of content such as videos and images using caching mechanism and content access from different physical locations for lower latency. It works in combination with S3.
