Content
- What is AWS?
- Companies Using AWS
- Why Use AWS?
- AWS Services Overview
- AWS Global Infrastructure
- Why will you need a global infrastructure
- AWS Pricing
What is AWS?
AWS (Amazon Web Services) is a subsidiary of amazon.com and a world leader in the cloud computing market. It was launched way back in 2006 when no company had the cloud computing business model. It took the risk and now today 70% of the whole cloud computing market is residing on AWS. Now you can imagine how big AWS is.
Talking about companies who are on AWS. Let’s look at some of the companies, and some of the prominent companies who are using the AWS infrastructure.
Companies Using AWS
These are some of the very popular companies like Kellogg’s, Adobe, Airbnb, General Electrics, Netflix, and Amazon which are using the AWS infrastructure for their operations.
Netflix and Amazon are completely dependent upon the AWS infrastructure, you can imagine if these two companies which are so big and the whole world is using it even your application is going to share the same infrastructure as these apps so you can imagine that your application is in safe hands.
Why Use AWS?
Let’s take an example, you have the application ready so now you have to make it available to the world. The first thing that you have to do is you have to invest some money, buy some servers, and upload your application on it and your application is up and ready.
Scalability
You start with a small user base and you say okay so in one month or so I can expect that this many users will be there, but your plan doesn’t go according to you. What happens overnight your applications become so viral that there are millions of users who are trying to access your application. The servers that you had are now very overburdened with the kind of traffic which is coming in and you get very anxious.
Less Maintenance
So what do you do you invest some more money and buy some more servers. Now the situation seems to be a little normal, but servers are machines we should not forget about it, and they are bound to break down. One day your servers go down and your application is not working anymore. To fix this again you had to hire a maintenance team. Which is now going to manage your servers for you, that is any kind of server upgrade. which is required for any kind of software patch, which has to be put in.
When your server goes down replace it with a new server all of that is now going to be managed by the maintenance team.
The kind of attention that was required for you to give to your application could not get that attention. Because half of your attention was on the infrastructure side which is understandable.
So these were the problems before cloud computing. AWS came up and said why don’t you use my servers. I have a stack of servers in my warehouse why don’t you use some of them? and the best thing about it is that you don’t have to buy the servers from me. You can just rent them from me use them for the time you want them to and give them any time you want.
Pay for What you use
For example, if you gave it to me after five hours you just pay for the five hours that you used it for. At the same time, you don’t have to worry about maintenance. I will do the maintenance for my servers.
This was like the god came in and said let me help you out it. So this was a very good deal for you because now you’re not spending money on buying servers, you’re not spending money on the maintenance team, and everything is being managed by AWS at a very cheap price.
AWS Services Overview
Let’s take an example of a website so this is a skeleton architecture for a very normal website. How does it function? The user first goes on to a website, goes onto the internet, and he types in a web address that web address then goes to a DNS server. That DNS server basically gets that converted into an IP address. That IP address points to a load balancer. that load balancer, in turn, distributes the traffic among many of the servers. And you end up on any one of these servers this is how it happens.
Now this server is again connected to a relational database. This relational database is basically having all the information which is required for your website. Also, both these entities which are your database and your servers are inside a network, so they can communicate with each other. These are the basic entities that are there in a cloud computing world.
Now taking the same problem as before that you know suddenly a whole lot of user group comes in. and your servers become overburdened now how do you take care of that so you don’t have to take care of anything?
Cloud computing will take care of itself, so it automatically senses that the servers are getting overburdened. It adds a server automatically and now your situation becomes normal. This is how the cloud computing world is going to help you out.
AWS Global Infrastructure
AWS provides many services throughout the globe. It has a global presence and each region has multiple zones and zones are nothing but huge data centers with a lot of servers. So probably when you choose America, you’ll be ending somewhere around here.
There are 18 geographical regions around the world and in those regions, we have around 50 availability zones. There are 50 huge data centers around the world that are at your disposal.
Why will you need a global infrastructure?
So if we take the same example forward the website servers and these servers are now distributed among different places throughout the world. What advantage does it give you, first of all, it helps in a disaster recovery kind of situation.
It serves the purpose of users from different countries, for example, if you are in this country and you are trying to access your website. Probably you can access it from this server rather than having your servers at one central location. Which will not only have more latency than response time if a customer is out of the country but also it’s a very bad measure to take when we are to consider disaster recovery. This is the reason that AWS has a global presence and they have a global infrastructure. It is there because your customers can have the lowest latency possible and also you can implement the best disaster recovery measures.
AWS Pricing
AWS pricing is amazing. We have a per-hour billing kind of system and the pricing is also region specific in the sense that each region has different pricing for different services. They don’t differ much but still, they are different from each other.
You can choose a region according to your preference also there’s a scene called reserved instances, so when you choose reserved instances you save up to 90 percent costs, so when you say reserved instead basically means you rent the server for a particular term says a one year term or a three-year term. And when you do that when you compare it with on-demand pricing you save up to 90 percent, which is awesome.