What is AWS? Cloud computing technology has grown enormously popular in recent years, as evidenced by Amazon Web Services’ popularity. It is currently the most popular service on the market. There are over 170 services offered through AWS that can be accessed from anywhere at any time. Amazon Web Services is now used by more than 90 countries and by a variety of government agencies and institutions.
AWS services are used by major companies like ESPN, Netflix, etc. The benefits of running your applications on AWS are numerous. It helps in managing and maintaining the hardware and infrastructure along with reducing the cost and complexity of running the resources. AWS allows you to use Amazon’s best services and resources for free or on a pay-per-use basis.
In this article, we will discuss AWS, how it evolved, its advantages, disadvantages, provided tools and services. There is no doubt how massive AWS is.
Introduction to AWS
AWS is a platform offering flexible, reliable, scalable, and cost-effective computing solutions. AWS is a platform that is provided by Amazon with a combination of various cloud services such as Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Software as a Service. Well, the invention of AWS is completely unintentional. In 2000, Amazon was just an e-commerce company with a falling business. Due to Amazon’s failing business, they started creating reusable modules for its internal development and utilizing its resources. As a result, they developed new features to speed up their work and to save money.
With time, this list of services grew and Amazon started the Cloud business to offer such services in the market. In 2004 and 2006, Amazon launched three pay-per-use services that we call cloud computing. But by 2006, Amazon faced competition as Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform were in the market to offer the same services.
- Being one of the leading cloud computing platforms, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is now considered to be the primary profit driver for Amazon.
- In 2020, AWS had a record-breaking business of more than $10 billion.
- Today, Amazon controls approx more than a third of the cloud market, which is an amazing thing to consider.
AWS offers various cloud computing products and services. The highly profitable Amazon division offers a variety of servers, storage, networking, email, mobile development, security, and many more. AWS has three major products:
- EC2 which is Amazon’s virtual machine service.
- The glacier which is a low-cost cloud storage service
- S3 which is Amazon’s storage system.
Due to the variety of AWS services, it has now outpaced its competitors. As of February 2020, it was estimated that AWS has spread its wings over a third of the market at 32.4%, which will leave behind the Azure market approach at 17.6%, and Google Cloud approx at 6%.
Today, AWS has covered more than 76 availability zones where its servers are located which is a big count as compared to other competitors in the market. It allows the users to set geographical limits on their services that will ensure security by diversifying the physical locations where the data is distributed and stored. Overall, AWS covers more than 245 countries and territories.
Advantages of AWS
There are various benefits of using AWS cloud services, and we have mentioned some of the benefits below.
1. Easy to use
Regardless of the type of application, AWS enables application providers to host your applications in a secure manner. AWS provides you with an API and management console to manage AWS’s platform for hosting applications.
2. Flexible
With AWS, you have the freedom to choose the desired operating system, programming languages, web-based application platform, database, and other services in almost every field that you can think of. With AWS, you can take advantage of its virtual environment that is available for loading the software and services for running your application. This helps simplify the migration process even for the existing applications while providing you with new computing solutions.
3. Cost-Effective
It offers cost-effective services as you only have to pay for those services, power, storage that you are using. If you want to know more about the costs of other hosting alternatives as compared to AWS then you can go to AWS Economics Center.
4. Reliable
AWS offers you the most scalable, reliable, and secured computing infrastructure globally. There is enough reliability in AWS that you can trust it blindly for hosting your websites, applications, and more.
5. Scalable and high-performance
A variety of AWS services like auto-scaling, load balancing, and others ensures that your application can scale as per the changing business requirements in the market. Also, it offers you a massive backend infrastructure that is available for your computing and storing requirements and can be accessed whenever you require them.
6. Secure
Amazon Web Services ensures complete security of its infrastructure by implementing end-to-end security measures. You can learn more about AWS security by visiting its Security Center.
Disadvantages of AWS
Despite AWS’s many advantages, you may find that it also has a few disadvantages once you begin using it. We have compiled some of the disadvantages, so you can be aware of them and come up with a solution in advance.
1. Limitations
Regardless of how many regions and countries have been covered by AWS servers, still you will face some limitations when it comes to the EC2 and security. When a company uses AWS services, they will receive default resources to use, but the problem arises when the limits of these default resources vary from one region to another. Although any company can request more resources as per their requirements, for some companies it is a limitation.
2. Lack of experts
Because AWS is not a very old technology and can support and maintain complex infrastructure, it needs professionals who are cross-skilled and have common knowledge across multiple fields, so they can assist AWS in maintaining its infrastructure. If you look around, you will find very few professionals who have aced the AWS services. Companies are even ready to invest in individuals who can lead these organizations to ensure a higher level of productivity and performance. From a money and time perspective, it is considered a major disadvantage.
3. Price variations
Services plans for Amazon Web Services may vary from region to region depending on factors such as land costs, electricity fiber, and others. Additionally, the price may vary if you need additional resources, services, tech support, etc. Amazon Web Services offers three major plans based on business needs: Developer, Business, and Enterprise. Each plan has a different pricing plan and offering.
AWS offers a CloudWatch service that you can integrate within your system for monitoring your usage of resources and services so that you can optimize your costing.
4. General issues
With millions of users and customers, Amazon sometimes experiences temporary cloud computing issues. This may lead to the downtime of servers and make all the services unavailable for users. This may lead to businesses losing a lot of profits. It may be caused by a connectivity problem, which can be resolved as soon as possible.
AWS Best Practices
While working with AWS, you can make sure to implement and follow the below-mentioned best practices.
1. Protect your AWS credentials
An AWS account is important as it specifies your relationship with the AWS. with the root access to your account allows you to handle and control your resources and services. Thus it needs to be protected from unauthorized access. If you have the root permissions to the AWS account then it may come with various risks. Make sure to implement various security measures for protecting your data and controls for your business.
2. Securing applications
Using AWS, you can deploy small-scale or large-scale applications. To prevent any attacks on those applications, make sure they are protected. In order to deploy any application, you will need a Web server, an App server, and a database server, and all of these should be accessed from the outside. Therefore, we must create security groups with different access controls so everyone does not have access to the same information. Creating security groups for securing and allowing incoming traffic, and another for restricting traffic, is necessary. By applying some rules, you can even restrict some IP addresses.
3. Backup and recovery system
Once you implement the right measures for protecting the resources and applications, now it is time that you create a backup and place the recovery strategies in place to protect your data due to failure.
Make sure you maintain regular and automatic backups using Amazon EBS snapshots or any other backup tool. Deploy the critical components of your applications in various availability zones to enhance the availability of the application and to avoid any downtime due to any technical error. Make sure that the application handles the dynamic IP addressing with the start of the instance. Make sure you consistently monitor and respond to the events. Make sure you are all set and prepared to handle failovers. Make sure you test your recovering process for all your instances and apply them whenever required.
4. AWS trusted advisor service.
AWS provides four main trusted advisor services without any pay:
- It helps in checking the service limits.
- It helps in creating the security groups
- Conducting IAM Use checks.
- MFA on the root account checks.
Trusted Advisor is one of the useful AWS tools that are available under the AWS management console. It helps in providing instant snapshots of the current status of the four items that we have mentioned above.
Conclusion
AWS is one of the leading cloud computing services providers in the market and has benefitted many businesses globally. AWS is one of the best options if you are planning to run your own online business or website. You can customize one of the plans according to your business requirements. If you choose AWS, then you don’t have to worry about managing and maintaining resources for your business – everything from small to large is under the control of AWS. Aside from that, you will also have access to its management console, which allows you to monitor the usage and leads to a cost-effective solution for your business.
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