Everything You Need to Know About AWS Cloud Computing

Amazon Web Service (AWS) is an all-inclusive cloud computing marketplace by Amazon. It serves as an on-demand cloud computing platform that offers multifarious cloud computing models and deployment tools.   

Providing diversified cloud services and products such as database storage, security, compliance, analytics, computation, networking, app management, IoT, developer tools, productivity tools, streaming platforms, and business applications: AWS is one of the top contenders of cloud business. Also, with the pricing model pay-as-you-go, AWS helps enterprises to scale extensively.  

How AWS Cloud Computing works?

Deploying Amazon cloud service, enterprises can scale up without outrageous upfront capital investment. It provides immediate access to superior IT services at low-cost through the 69 availability zones (AZ) spanned across the planet. Every 22 regions comprise connected availability zones with several data centers. It enables the customers to access a reliable IT infrastructure via Virtual Machines like Amazon AWS EC2. 

Amazon cloud computing gives enterprises the freedom to choose business-appropriate cloud computing models such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service, Software as a service. The provision to adjust the infrastructure capacity to the required size on cloud computing models enables the customer to fit in the dynamic market demands. 

Types of Cloud Computing Models

To meet the diversified business needs, several computing models and deployment methods are available. Every model has distinct features to handle complex business operations. Hence, by understanding the mode of service and productive applicability enterprises can choose from the list.

Infrastructure as a Service: 

AWS infrastructure as a service model paves a new path on cloud to store, network, and visualization. Unlike the on-premise infrastructure that costs way high and rigid to handle, IaaS offers a scalable, flexible, and affordable solution. Moreover, it helps to take control of applications, data, operation systems, and runtime efficiently by managing servers, storage, and network.  

Amazon Elastic Compute (Amazon EC2) is the most appreciated cloud service in the IaaS segment. It helps enterprises to be flexible and scalable. It provides applications to upscale the capacity on demand. Using Amazon compute and storage provisions, EC2 turns the web-application elastic. It automates the number of Virtual Machines instantly to facilitate enough servers as per the network demand. 

Amazon Elastic Block Store, Autoscaling, Amazon S3, Elastic Load Balancing are the other cloud-based IaaS products by AWS which make for high availability of data for users. 

Platform as a Service:

AWS Platform as a Service swept away the necessity to maintain cutting-edge hardware and updated operating systems. It took over every daunting task involved in running enterprise applications such as patching, updating, planning, procurement, and maintenance. 

Amazon PaaS products like AWS Elastic Beanstalk provide a firm ground to launch applications. Also, running along with Elastic Compute Cloud offers efficient automation and customization authority. 

Software as a Service:   

AWS SaaS solution provides a seamless end-user application delivery service. This software distribution model would not bother the customers about the infrastructure and maintenance of applications. Enterprises can launch software hosted on AWS infrastructure and open it to customers. 

It facilitates software through AWS, and customers can use it at their place. The two payment models which are subscription-based and contract-based works with usage metering service to generate bills to the customer. In contrast, for contract-based billing, customers have to remit an upfront amount for the expected usage. 

Enterprises can leverage AWS Privatelink to integrate the service as a VPC endpoint service. Through the Virtual Private Cloud(VPC), endpoint service customers can access the software. Besides, service renderers can deliver software access through their own web applications.

Important AWS Cloud Computing Services

AWS launched in 2002, since then it has been evolving game-changing cloud-based services and products. Offering 100+ cloud computing solutions across the market, AWS cloud computing is serving billions of customers across the planet. 

AWS Compute Services

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2):   Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud enables scalable compute to deploy applications in the AWS Cloud. Customers can rent out virtual computers to host applications without on-premise infrastructure requirements. 

Amazon LightSail: LightSail is an ideal cloud-platform for fast application deployment. It helps customers to create websites and run business software. Also, it serves as a test environment. 

AWS Elastic Beanstalk: Using Autoscaling and elastic Load Balancing, Elastic Beanstalk helps to scale workloads. It is a cloud tool to monitor application performance status. Plus, it provides a comprehensive groud to deploy cloud applications. 

Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS): It facilitates migration of Kubernetes application to EKS with ease.  

AWS Lamda: Over AWS Lamda customers pay only for the compute time. Also, Lamda is a serverless platform that runs code and manages the resources when needed. 

Migration Services

Database Migration: A cloud service by Amazon to ease out data migration from data warehouses and other data stores to AWS. It also enables customers to migrate one sort of databased to another. 

Amazon Server Migration (SMS): Amazon SMS is a fast and easy way to position data from an on-premise server to AWS.

Amazon Snowball: AWS Snowball provides data transfer services to move massive packages of data from and to AWS cloud.

Storage Service

Amazon Glacier: Amazon Glacier offers a secure, long-lasting, and continuous data storage and archive service with a monthly charge. It supplies sensible cold-cloud-storage at the different availability zones.  

Amazon Elastic Block Store: It is more like a hard storage drive. Customers can store any sort of data and use it as a primary storage drive and configure operating systems. 

AWS Storage Gateway: Storage Gateway is a hybrid storage service. It links on-site applications to the cloud. It offers fast and affordable data transfer services to cloud storage.

AWS Security Service

AWS Identity and Access Management: IAM is a cloud security web service that provides access control to AWS resources and services. Customers can authenticate users and authorize access. 

AWS Inspector: It is a cloud-based security inspection service deploying to figure out security vulnerabilities of applications. Based on the assessment and instance number, AWS inspector can be availed with a flexible price range. 

AWS Certificate Manager: To facilitate and manage security layers such as SSL/TSL with AWS, the Certificate Manager helps to mitigate the complicated process. 

Web Application Firewall: AWS WAF is a web-based application firewall to protect from application from scripting attacks and SQL injection threats. It is essential for application availability and security. 

Cloud Directory: To build cloud-native-directory in the AWS cloud, this service help to organize data types in its hierarchy with the user and network config list. 

AWS Key Management Service: A cloud-based product that helps to develop and delete keys and control access to data store on AWS. Admins can generate control keys with user control. 

AWS Organizations: It offers centralized control of AWS accounts. Admins can create accounts and grant access to other accounts to join. It enables to manage multiple accounts without compromising security and compliance.   

AWS Shield: It is a security service, particularly for protect our application running on AWS from DDoS attacks. 

Amazon Macie: It is an intelligent security service offered by AWS. It will discover, classify, and protect data using machine learning techniques in the AWS account. 

Amazon Guardduty: It is a continuous monitoring service using for detecting malicious and unauthorized activities across the AWS account. 

AWS Database Service

Amazon RDS: It is a cost-efficient and agile service to build, control, and scale relational databases in the cloud. It simplifies the provisioning, patching, and back up tasks.

Amazon DynamoDB: It is a feature-rich, low latency, and fully managed database service. It offers high security for web applications with scalability and high performance. 

Amazon ElastiCache: It is used to enhance web application performance by providing an in-memory data store and cache memory. It reduces application scaling costs with simplified management solutions. 

Amazon Neptune: It is a highly available graph database service. It is fast and offers continuous backup, read replica, and recovery service.

Amazon Redshift: A cloud-based, fully managed data warehousing service by AWS. It is a relational database management system that permits massive data migration and helps to handle enterprise-level data sets.

AWS Analytics Service

Amazon Athena: It is a serverless data analytics service in the AWS public cloud. It can access the data stored in S3 using the SQL engine-Presto. Customers need to pay only for the query they run.

Amazon CloudSearch: It is a cloud-based search engine. It offers customized searching options and enables developers to deploy a search application quickly.

Amazon ElasticSearch: It is an open-source analytics and search engine similar to CloudSearch. It offers real-time data visualization with almost no downtime. 

Amazon Kinesis: Kinesis is equipped to process big data. Usually, used for data streaming services from a large number of applications. 

Amazon QuickSight: QuickSight serves as an analytics tool for companies. It permits to perform data calculation in a fast manner and help the visualization of customer data.

Amazon Elastic Map Reduce: It is a managed platform that helps to simplify big data processes. It uses frameworks such as Hadoop, Spark to distribute data in instances.

Data Pipeline: It is an AWS service that helps to move data between different systems. It helps to perform steady work-flow with automated data transfer.

Management Services

CloudWatch:  Amazon CloudWatch helps IT get productive insights from AWS environment. It provides performance data logs with detailed metrics, thereby helps to optimize resources and performance.

CloudFormation: It helps to create a standardized environment without custom scripts. It automates the applications securely and enhances the event response time. 

CloudTrail: It helps to audit the entire AWS environment and monitor the exchanges across the infrastructure. It simplifies troubleshooting, compliance analysis, and tracking fo account activities.  

OpsWorks: It simplifies infrastructure building and automates deployment, configuration, and management of servers across the cloud and on-premise environment. 

Amazon Config: It audits AWS resources and evaluates the configurations to the expected configuration levels. It provides detailed records to match against the guidelines and comprehensive estimation of change management, security analysis, and troubleshooting over AWS resources.

AWS Service Catalogue:  It is used to create the authorized IT services catalog on AWS platform, which can quickly be deployed by the end-users. Also, it acts as a centralized control center to govern the deployed services and helps to meet the expected compliance.   

Auto Scaling: By analyzing cloud application Amazon Auto Scaling automates the capacity scale of applications to afford exceptional performance. It is a quick solution to set up a scaling plan for AWS resources.  

SystemManager: It provides a holistic user interface to analyze the operational flow and help to automate tasks over multiple AWS resources. It allows to group instances and buckets and giving adequate data insight to take necessary action. It detects the problems as early as possible and secures the infrastructure.

Managed Services: It is a package of tools and services to manage AWS infrastructure with simplified cloud solutions. It provides a full-fledge AWS management best practice and automates operations such as security, patch management, backup, and change requests for enterprises.

Internet of Things

AWS IoT Core: A managed cloud service by AWS, which acts as a secure meeting ground for connected devices with cloud applications. It provides a broad and secure data exchange channel across the cloud  applications and endpoint devices 

IoT Device Management: It helps to manage, monitor, and track the connected devices. Also, it provides provision to control any number of devices and troubleshoot issues remotely. 

AWS IoT Analytics: It provides detailed data values from the massive data surge. It simplifies data analysis and automates the sorting of data as per the required dimensions. 

Amazon FreeRTOS: FreeRTOS serves as an operating system that enables microcontrollers to deploy and securely connect to cloud resources. Also, it connects end device microcontrollers to the AWS cloud services to gather data for better management.

Application Services

AWS Step Functions: This service provides a combined control over various AWS services at once. It provisions the users to create and operate the step by step workflow and serve as a channel to monitor its function.  

Simple Workflow Service: It helps to manage, maintain, and scale applications in a business-appropriate way. Instead of relying upon manual-coded workflow, it helps to automate applications with greater scalability and flexibility.

Simple Queue Service: To mitigate the complexity tagging with message queuing, storing, and receiving between applications. Further, it offers message queue type such as standard queue and FIFO queue whereby to scale serverless applications and microservices  

Amazon Elastic Transcoder: It undertakes all sorts of transcoding services. Regardless of any advanced on-premise infrastructure, Elastic Transcoder provides simplified media transcoding to different versions. 

Deployment service

AWS CloudHSM: Subject to the configuration, it enables customers to be compliant and maintain exceptional security with custom-generated keys on AWS cloud services. Also, it provides scalability and flexibility to integrate additional HSMs.

Developer Tools

CodeStar: It is a comprehensive tool to develop applications and secure software development activities. Developers can track the process, control the access, and deploy the applications through the CodeStar.

CodeBuilt: It provides a prebuild environment to compile codes, run software tests, and deploy applications. Also, it gives the freedom to set up customized infrastructure with personalized build tools.   

CodeCommit: It provides a secure environment for the coders to collaborate, store codes, and serves as a source control system.

CodeDeploy: It provides automated software deployment service across various AWS compute platforms such as EC2, Lamda, Fargate, etc. It undertakes the complex produces of releasing new features and updating applications. 

Codepipeline: To release software updates and changes in the features, codepipeline serves as a quick channel. It is a reliable delivery service tool that permits to configure the workflow, including building, test, and deploy applications.

Cloud9: It serves as a cloud-based development environment to write and run codes. Without setting up an on-premise integrated development environment, it provides every essential tool to debug the written codes. 

Mobile Services

Mobile Hub: It is a console of AWS tools to develop cloud-based mobile applications. Leveraging various native services such as Analytics, S3, DynamoDB, and Simple notification services mobile hub provides ample support to develop applications.  

Cognito: It helps to simplify user authentication while users sign-up or sing-in to applications. It can afford user data at scale. 

Device Farm: It helps to pinpoint and fix the problems in and around the developed software. It helps to improve the quality of applications. It also provides remote access to devices in real-time.  

AWS AppSyns: It helps to scale business with data-driven insights. It synchronizes data from different sources to derive data-driven app development solutions.  

Business Productivity

Alexa for Business: it provides intelligent business assistance to simplify organizational tasks. It helps to make the discussions more insightful and productive. 

Amazon Chime: It is a one app solution for all organizational communication requirements. It facilitates all sorts of communication services such as business calls, video conferences, etc.

Amazon WorkDocs: It is more like a content creation platform for collaborative content sharing and storing purposes. It is secured with AWS security protocols and ensures high availability of resources from anywhere. 

Amazon WorkMail:  It is an organization mail service by AWS with secure encryption functionality. It allows users to integrate it with custom client applications and corporate directories.

App Streaming

Amazon WorkSpace: It offers a responsive Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). Plus, serving as a Desktop as a Service Amazon workspace is a fast and secure solution to desktop delivery service.

Amazon AppStream: It provides application streaming for any scale of audience. It mitigates the complexities associated with application delivery and security.

Artificial Intelligence

Amazon Lex: It is an advanced service that renders conversational interface development across various applications. It helps to develop software which can exchange life-like conversation using deep learning techniques. 

Amazon Polly: It helps to create interactive applications with advanced text-to-speech technology. It provides like-life voices for better user experience in different languages.

Amazon Rekognition: It provides accurate image and video analysis. Organizations can use it for public security practice. 

Amazon SageMaker: it provides an intelligent platform for data scientists to model machine learning algorithms. Further, it helps to tune and train the models with set-up and deploy the models at a click. 

Amazon Transcribe: It enables applications to recognize speech and turn it into text. It helps to transcribe audio files such as phone calls, generate subtitles, etc. 

Amazon Translate: This is a scalable deep learning neural machine translation model to localize web-based content for users. Learning from diversified datasets, it provides accurate service in a short time. 

Augmented Reality & Virtual Reality

Amazon Sumerian: It redefines user-experience for applications to more dimensions with 3D interactions. It helps to develop 3D scenes from anywhere and integrate it with AWS services.

Customer Engagement

Amazon Connect: It paves a conspicuous path for anyone to create a customer contact flow for enterprises. It is a scalable, affordable, and intelligent solution to develop a smooth communication flow. 

Amazon Pinpoint: It provides a user-centric customer engagement experience for organizations. Leveraging real-time customer data, Pinpoint enables enterprises to engage with the target audience promptly.

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES): It is a cloud-based email communication channel for easy out regular communication between businesses and customers. It is a secure and reliable channel to send tickets, notifications, and newsletters for enterprises.

Game Development 

GameLift: It is an exclusive game server hosting platform with greater scalability. It offers spot as well as on-demand instances to expand the flexibility to enhance networking and reduce latency.

The overwhelming benefits of AWS cloud computing are far and wide, i.e., simple, scalable, affordable, secure and reliable. It has been helping enterprises to gain immense market advantage through its innovative cloud technologies at low-cost. 

Previously published at https://blog.westagilelabs.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-aws-cloud-computing/