In this post, we will be discussing about the popular applications of Amazon Web Services.
There are a lot of services provided by AWS, so we can use it for a variety of purposes, such as :
- Store public and private data
- Host static website - only HTML, CSS, Javascript
- Host dynamic website - some server side programming including php, asp.net
- Big Data storage and processing - useful for scientific research, business and compute-intensive tasks.
Web Application Hosting
- A web app is an application, or software accessible to the user from the browser or any web client. Web apps are normally structured in three tiers -
- web browser, i.e., the user interface
- server, where most of the programming is done, and
- database storage
An example of how you can use the different services to host your web app with AWS : Create an EC2 instance and use it as virtual server, i.e., middle tier. Create a DB instance, or EBS (Elastic Block Storage) for storing database etc.
There are two features you can use in application hosting:
- Auto Scaling - groups of servers that grow or shrink on demand.
- Cloud Watch - for metrics / data about your virtual servers - used with Auto Scaling.
Content and Media Serving
We can use Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Services) to host static content on the web.
Another example of using Amazon services is for content and media serving is live streaming, using the power of Adobe Flash Media Server hosted on EC2, combined with Amazon Cloudfront for stream distribution and caching. Cloudfront is a content delivery web services, very popularly used for media streams on the internet.
Large Scale Computing and Huge Datasets
AWS is useful for large scale computing, such as in scientific computing, research and business alike. S3 and EC2 are used for storage. Amazon EMR - Elastic Map Reduce, using Hive scripts can be used for Big Data analytics.
Fault Tolerance and High Availability
This is more of a feature than an application. For example, while load balancing, when some instances fail, your application doesn't shut down. Availability zones are special regions - wide geographical locations for protection from failure at a single location.
Elastic Block Store volumes are replicated, point-in-time snapshots taken and replicated on multiple availability zones.
Antivirus Service
Access to AWS data centers is strictly controlled. It uses features such as AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) - a virtual network logically isolated from others, encryption services, bit defender etc.
Media Sharing
Media Sharing services allow for storage of large amounts of media for distribution. It is useful for businesses.
