What is AWS?

o AWS stands for Amazon Web Services.

o The AWS service is provided by the Amazon that uses distributed IT
infrastructure to provide different IT resources available on demand. It
provides different services such as infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform
as a service (PaaS) and packaged software as a service (SaaS).
o Amazon launched AWS, a cloud computing platform to allow the different
organizations to take advantage of reliable IT infrastructure.

Uses of AWS
o A small manufacturing organization uses their expertise to expand their
business by leaving their IT management to the AWS.
o A large enterprise spread across the globe can utilize the AWS to deliver the
training to the distributed workforce.
o An architecture consulting company can use AWS to get the high-compute
rendering of construction prototype.
o A media company can use the AWS to provide different types of content such
as ebox or audio files to the worldwide files.

Pay-As-You-Go
Based on the concept of Pay-As-You-Go, AWS provides the services to the
customers. AWS provides services to customers when required without any prior
commitment or upfront investment. Pay-As-You-Go enables the customers to
procure services from AWS.

o Computing
o Programming models
o Database storage
o Networking
Advantages of AWS
1) Flexibility
o We can get more time for core business tasks due to the instant availability of new
features and services in AWS.
o It provides effortless hosting of legacy applications. AWS does not require
learning new technologies and migration of applications to the AWS provides
the advanced computing and efficient storage.
o AWS also offers a choice that whether we want to run the applications and
services together or not. We can also choose to run a part of the IT
infrastructure in AWS and the remaining part in data centres.

2) Cost-effectiveness

AWS requires no upfront investment, long-term commitment, and minimum expense

when compared to traditional IT infrastructure that requires a huge investment.

3) Scalability/Elasticity

Through AWS, autoscaling and elastic load balancing techniques are automatically
scaled up or down, when demand increases or decreases respectively. AWS
techniques are ideal for handling unpredictable or very high loads. Due to this
reason, organizations enjoy the benefits of reduced cost and increased user
satisfaction.

4) Security
o AWS provides end-to-end security and privacy to customers.
o AWS has a virtual infrastructure that offers optimum availability while managing full
privacy and isolation of their operations.
o Customers can expect high-level of physical security because of Amazon's several
years of experience in designing, developing and maintaining large-scale IT operation
centers.
o AWS ensures the three aspects of security, i.e., Confidentiality, integrity, and
availability of user's data.
Features of AWS
1) Flexibility
o The difference between AWS and traditional IT models is flexibility.
o The traditional models used to deliver IT solutions that require large
investments in a new architecture, programming languages, and operating
system. Although these investments are valuable, it takes time to adopt new
technologies and can also slow down your business.
o The flexibility of AWS allows us to choose which programming models,
languages, and operating systems are better suited for their project, so we do
not have to learn new skills to adopt new technologies.
o Flexibility means that migrating legacy applications to the cloud is easy, and
cost-effective. Instead of re-writing the applications to adopt new
technologies, you just need to move the applications to the cloud and tap into
advanced computing capabilities.
o Building applications in aws are like building applications using existing
hardware resources.
o The larger organizations run in a hybrid mode, i.e., some pieces of the
application run in their data center, and other portions of the application run
in the cloud.
o The flexibility of aws is a great asset for organizations to deliver the product
with updated technology in time, and overall enhancing the productivity.

2) Cost-effective
o Cost is one of the most important factors that need to be considered in
delivering IT solutions.
o For example, developing and deploying an application can incur a low cost,
but after successful deployment, there is a need for hardware and bandwidth.
Owing our own infrastructure can incur considerable costs, such as power,
cooling, real estate, and staff.
 o The cloud provides on-demand IT infrastructure that lets you consume the
resources what you actually need. In aws, you are not limited to a set amount
of resources such as storage, bandwidth or computing resources as it is very
difficult to predict the requirements of every resource. Therefore, we can say
that the cloud provides flexibility by maintaining the right balance of
resources.
o AWS provides no upfront investment, long-term commitment, or minimum
spend.
o You can scale up or scale down as the demand for resources increases or
decreases respectively.
o An aws allows you to access the resources more instantly. It has the ability to
respond the changes more quickly, and no matter whether the changes are
large or small, means that we can take new opportunities to meet the business
challenges that could increase the revenue, and reduce the cost.

3) Scalable and elastic

o In a traditional IT organization, scalability and elasticity were calculated with
investment and infrastructure while in a cloud, scalability and elasticity provide
savings and improved ROI (Return On Investment).
o Scalability in aws has the ability to scale the computing resources up or down
when demand increases or decreases respectively.
o Elasticity in aws is defined as the distribution of incoming application traffic
across multiple targets such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, IP
addresses, and Lambda functions.
o Elasticity load balancing and scalability automatically scale your AWS
computing resources to meet unexpected demand and scale down
automatically when demand decreases.
o The aws cloud is also useful for implementing short-term jobs, mission-critical
jobs, and the jobs repeated at the regular intervals.

4) Secure
o AWS provides a scalable cloud-computing platform that provides customers
with end-to-end security and end-to-end privacy.
 o AWS incorporates the security into its services, and documents to describe
how to use the security features.
o AWS maintains confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your data which is
the utmost importance of the aws.

AWS Global Infrastructure

o AWS is a cloud computing platform which is globally available.
o Global infrastructure is a region around the world in which AWS is based.
Global infrastructure is a bunch of high-level IT services which is shown below:
o AWS is available in 19 regions, and 57 availability zones in December 2018
and 5 more regions 15 more availability zones for 2019.

The following are the components that make up the AWS infrastructure:

o Availability Zones
o Region
o Edge locations
o Regional Edge Caches

Availability zone as a Data Center

o An availability zone is a facility that can be somewhere in a country or in a city.
Inside this facility, i.e., Data Centre, we can have multiple servers, switches,
load balancing, firewalls. The things which interact with the cloud sits inside
the data centers.
 o An availability zone can be a several data centers, but if they are close
together, they are counted as 1 availability zone.

Region
o A region is a geographical area. Each region consists of 2 more availability
zones.
o A region is a collection of data centers which are completely isolated from
other regions.
o A region consists of more than two availability zones connected to each other
through links.

o Availability zones are connected through redundant and isolated metro fibers.

Edge Locations
o Edge locations are the endpoints for AWS used for caching content.
o Edge locations consist of CloudFront, Amazon's Content Delivery Network
(CDN).
o Edge locations are more than regions. Currently, there are over 150 edge
locations.
o Edge location is not a region but a small location that AWS have. It is used for
caching the content.
o Edge locations are mainly located in most of the major cities to distribute the
content to end users with reduced latency.
o For example, some user accesses your website from Singapore; then this
request would be redirected to the edge location closest to Singapore where
cached data can be read.
Regional Edge Cache
o AWS announced a new type of edge location in November 2016, known as a
Regional Edge Cache.
o Regional Edge cache lies between CloudFront Origin servers and the edge
locations.
o A regional edge cache has a large cache than an individual edge location.
o Data is removed from the cache at the edge location while the data is retained
at the Regional Edge Caches.
o When the user requests the data, then data is no longer available at the edge
location. Therefore, the edge location retrieves the cached data from the
Regional edge cache instead of the Origin servers that have high latency.