AWS Full Form | What is the Full Form of AWS?
AWS: Amazon Web Services
AWS stands for Amazon Web Services. It is a cloud service platform that provides on-demand computational services, databases, storage space and more. AWS allows its user to select products from its vast variety of services and use it on-demand without any upfront payment for most of the services.
Individually, an AWS service may lack some functionality, but AWS services can be easily integrated to create highly complex and robust applications given the correct AWS architecture.
Netflix uses AWS for almost all of its computational, storage, and database needs, using over 1 00 000 AWS server instances.
Most services in AWS don’t require an upfront payment, and you pay for what you use and how long you use it. One of the most important features of AWS is the pay-as-you-go pricing model.
For example, you want to perform a computational task of ‘5x’ capacity. You can use a machine of ‘x’ capacity to do your work in 5 units of time or five machines of ‘x’ capacity to do the work for one unit of time.
Your cost is the same. This billing model allows users to customize their application architecture to suit their business needs and budget.
History of AWS
AWS was launched back in 2002, where it provided simple cloud services and tools. Later that year, AWS released its Vision as a Service providing fully automated computational processing for AWS.
In 2004, AWS launched SQS (Simple Queue Service), one of its first services, followed by the release of AWS-Compute (EC-2) in 2006. This marked the beginning of the AWS cloud computing era. .
AWS, as of now, is spread across 24 geographic regions and 76 availability zones. As of Q-4 2019, AWS held the largest market share (33 percent) of cloud services worldwide, beating second (Microsoft Azure) by 15 percent. As of early 2020, AWS included more than 212 different services.
AWS Service Categories
Computation: Allows users to provide a variety of computational services for their application.
Container: Allows users to run container-based applications.
Storage: This is a set of different types of storage services, and each included its own set of features.
Databases: These services provide a variety of Amazon managed databases.
Migration and Transfer: These services allow users to seamlessly onboard their applications and data to AWS.
Networking and Content Delivery: It allows users to manage the various networking features provided by AWS.
- Building Scalable Networks
- Creating a private cloud.
- Management of application traffic.
Developer Tools: These services allow developers to build cloud-native applications and allow for easy integration with AWS.
Cloud Enablement: These are on-demand expert support for AWS solutions and services.
Robotics: Allows users to develop, simulate and deploy intelligent robotics applications.
Blockchain: Provides an AWS-managed blockchain service for blockchain-based applications.
Satellite: This includes only one service so far: AWS Ground Station. The AWS Ground Station is a single center for satellite communications, data processing and analysis.
Quantum Technologies: Services for Quantum Computing.
Management and Governance: These services manage other services and can run analytics on data generated by the services on AWS.
Media Services: These services enhance video production, analysis and distribution.
Machine Learning: These are various machine learning services offered by AWS.
Analytics: Services and tools for running analysis on data.
Security, Identity and Compliance: Manage access and permissions of users and services in your account.
AWS Cost Management: Shows the current cost of the service and predicts the cost based on current usage.
Mobile: Enhance and support mobile app development.
AR and VR: Enhance and aid the development of virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and 3-D applications.
Application integration: assisting in communication between decoupled services.
Customer Engagement: Support and enhance customer engagement for apps.
Business applications: These are small applications like Alexa for Business and work-mail that businesses can use for support.
End User Computing: Assisting in workforce management for security-sensitive companies.
Internet of Things: To enhance and support IoT based application development.
Game Development: This is a dedicated gaming server hosting service.
Following are some of the terms related to AWS that you should know:
- Regions: These are geographic locations spread across the globe that contain one or more data centers.
- Availability Zone: Each AWS data center is called an Availability Zone.
- Local Areas: These are extensions of AWS regions closer to users. This is a fairly new service and is not yet available in all regions.
- Vertical Scaling: To scale up/down the application, increase/decrease instance features like RAM and processing power is called vertical scaling.
- Horizontal Scaling: Vertical scaling is to increase/decrease the number of instances to scale up/down the application.
Features of AWS
- Geolocation: AWS has become a worldwide leader despite a late and slow start in its cloud journey. The platform offers unparalleled availability across 24 geographies.
- Multi-region backup: AWS offers a variety of backup methods that are implemented in a decentralized nature, and AWS’s global reach makes it easy and affordable to store important information across multiple geographic locations.
- Streamlined disaster recovery: Downtime and data loss can be critical for some businesses and tolerable for others. Or you want some of your data to be highly secure and some of your data to be in cheaper, less secure storage. Whatever your needs, AWS has the right plan for cheap and efficient storage of data.
- Scalability: Allows dynamic scaling of AWS databases and servers. This means that the application does not need to run at 100% capacity and use a lot of resources during off-hours.
- Pay-as-you-go pricing: One of the most attractive features of AWS is its pricing model. The prices are reasonable, but you only pay for what you use and for as long as you use said resource.
- Security: AWS provides the same level of world-class security to all of its client spectra ranging from giant banks and enterprises to small websites. The company’s data centers maintain the highest security standards and update security features with the latest security patches.
Advantages of AWS
- Users do not have to buy expensive equipment like servers and storage drives. AWS Provides infrastructure for all these use cases.
- Users do not have to worry about maintaining the physical and software security of their infrastructure, and all these overheads are taken care of by AWS.
- Dynamic Scalability (ability to increase server capacity during high work hours) provides a cheap and efficient means to host durable and robust applications.
- AWS offers easy signup and a simple console UI to its users.
- AWS has a highly skilled support team that can help you with your issues on AWS.
- AWS continuously adds more services, features and security updates to their infrastructure.
- Many AWS storage services (S3 and Glacier) offer a virtually unlimited storage capacity.
Limitations of AWS
- AWS provides over 200 services. The architecture of applications can become increasingly complex.
- It is sometimes difficult to choose the best service among many options, which can lead to a waste of some money.
- AWS solution architects are highly paid individuals, and as a business owner, you may need to hire one or more such individuals.
- AWS is constantly growing according to the needs of its customers. There may be some use cases that you wish AWS doesn’t offer yet. It is possible to raise a feature request for such use cases, but you may have to wait until that feature is officially released.
AWS provides many different tools and solutions for enterprises and software developers that can be used in data centers in 190 countries. Groups such as government agencies, education institutions, nonprofits, and private organizations can use AWS services.
How AWS works?
AWS is separated into different services; each can be configured differently based on the user’s needs. Users should be able to see configuration options and individual server maps for an AWS service.
Availability
Amazon Web Services provides services from dozens of data centers spread across Availability Zones (AZ) in regions around the world. AZ is a location that consists of multiple physical data centers.
A business will choose one or more availability zones for a number of reasons, such as compliance and proximity to end customers. For example, an AWS customer can spin up virtual machines (VMs) and replicate data across different AWS to achieve a highly reliable infrastructure that is resistant to failures of individual servers or entire data centers.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a service that provides virtual servers – called EC2 instances – for computing capability. The EC2 service provides dozens of instance types with different capacities and sizes to suit specific workload types and applications, such as memory-intensive and quick-computing jobs. AWS also provides an auto scaling tool for scaling capability to dynamically maintain the health and performance of the instance.
Storage
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) provides scalable object storage for data backup, archiving and analysis.
An IT professional stores data and files as S3 objects-which can be up to 5 gigabytes (GB)-inside an S3 bucket to keep them organized. A business can save money with the S3 through its wacky Access storage tier or by using Amazon Glacier for long-term cold storage.
Amazon Elastic Block Store provides block-level storage volumes for persistent data storage when using an EC2 instance. Amazon Elastic File System provides managed cloud-based file storage.
A business can migrate data to the cloud via a storage transport device, such as the AWS Snowball and Snowmobile, or use an AWS Storage Gateway to enable on-premises apps to access cloud data.
Database
Amazon Relational Database Service — which includes options for Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB and a proprietary high-performance database called Amazon Aurora — provides a relational database management system for AWS users. AWS also offers NoSQL databases managed through Amazon DynamoDB.
AWS customers can use Amazon ElastiCache and DynamoDB Accelerator as in-memory and real-time data caches for applications.
Migration, hybrid cloud
AWS includes a variety of tools and services designed to help users migrate applications, databases, servers, and data to their public cloud. AWS Migration Hub provides one place to monitor and manage migration from on-premises to cloud. Once in the cloud, EC2 System Manager helps an IT team configure on-premises servers and AWS instances.
Amazon also has partnerships with a number of technology vendors that make hybrid cloud deployment easier. VMware Cloud on AWS brings software-defined data center technology from VMware to the AWS cloud. Another partnership product is Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Amazon EC2, which extends Red Hat’s operating system to the AWS cloud.
Networking
An Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) gives an administrator control over a virtual network to use an isolated section of the AWS cloud. AWS automatically provisions new resources within a VPC for extra protection.
Admins can balance network traffic with the Elastic Load Balancing service, including the Application Load Balancer and Network Load Balancer. AWS also provides a domain name system called Amazon Route 53 that routes end users to applications.
An IT professional can establish a dedicated connection from an on-premises data centre to the AWS cloud via AWS Direct Connect.
Developer tools
A developer can use AWS command-line tools and software development kits (SDKs) to deploy and manage applications and services. It includes:
The AWS Command Line Interface, which is Amazon’s proprietary code interface.
A developer can use AWS Tools for Powershell to manage cloud services from Windows environments.
Developers can use AWS Serverless Application Model to simulate an AWS environment to test Lambda functions.
AWS SDKs are available for various platforms and programming languages, including Java, PHP, Python, Node.js, Ruby, C++, Android and iOS.
Amazon API Gateway enables a development team to create, manage and monitor custom application program interfaces (APIs) that let applications access data or functionality from back-end services. API Gateway manages thousands of concurrent API calls at once.
AWS Functions
A development team can also create continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines with services like:
- AWS Code Pipeline
- AWS Code Build
- AWS CodeDeploy
- AWS CodeStar
A developer can also store code in Git repositories with AWS CodeCommit and evaluate the performance of microservices-based applications with AWS X-Ray.
Management and monitoring
An administrator can manage and track cloud resource configuration through AWS Config and AWS Config Rules. Together with AWS’s trusted advisor, those tools can help an IT team avoid improperly configured and unnecessarily expensive cloud resource deployments.
AWS offers several automation tools in its portfolio. An administrator can automate infrastructure provisioning via AWS Cloud Formation templates and use AWS OpsWorks and Chef to automate infrastructure and system configuration.
An AWS customer can monitor resource and application health with Amazon CloudWatch and AWS Personal Health Dashboard and use AWS CloudTrail to maintain user activity, and call for API auditing.
Security and Governance
AWS provides a range of services for cloud security, including AWS Identity and Access Management, which allows admins to define and manage user access to resources. An admin can also create a user directory with Amazon Cloud Directory or connect cloud resources to an existing Microsoft Active Directory with the AWS Directory Service. Additionally, the AWS Organizations service enables a business to establish and manage policies for multiple AWS accounts.
Amazon Web Services has also introduced tools that automatically assess potential security risks. Amazon Inspector analyzes an AWS environment for vulnerabilities that might impact security and compliance. Amazon Macie uses machine learning (ML) technology to protect sensitive cloud data.
AWS also includes tools and services that provide software- and hardware-based encryption, protect against DDoS attacks, provision Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificates and filter potentially harmful traffic to web applications.
The AWS Management Console is a browser-based graphical user interface (GUI) for AWS. The Management Console can be used to manage resources in cloud computing, cloud storage and security credentials. The AWS Console interfaces with all AWS resources.
Big data management and analytics
AWS includes a variety of big data analytics and application services. It includes:
- Amazon Elastic MapReduce, which offers a Hadoop framework to process large amounts of data.
- Amazon Kinesis, which provides several tools to process and analyze streaming data.
- AWS Glue, which is a service that handles extract, transform and load jobs.
- Service enables a team to perform application monitoring, log analysis and other tasks with the open-source Elasticsearch tool.
- Amazon Athena for S3, which allows analysts to query data.
- Amazon QuickSight, which help analysts visualize data.
Artificial intelligence
AWS provides a range of AI model development and delivery platforms, as well as packaged AI-based applications. The Amazon AI suite of tools includes:
- Amazon Lex for voice and text chatbot technology;
- Amazon Polly for text-to-speech translation; And
- Amazon recognition for image and face analysis.
AWS also provides developers with machine learning techniques and techniques to build smart apps that rely on complex algorithms.
With AWS Deep Learning Amazon Machine Image (AMI), developers can build and train custom AI models with graphics processing units (GPUs) or clusters of compute-optimized instances. AWS also includes a deep learning development framework for MXNet and TensorFlow.
On the consumer side, AWS technologies power Alexa Voice Services, and a developer can use the Alexa Skill Kit to build voice-based apps for Echo devices.
Mobile development
AWS Mobile Hub provides a collection of tools and services for mobile app developers, including the AWS Mobile SDK, which provides code samples and libraries.
A mobile app developer can use Amazon Cognito to manage user access to the mobile app and Amazon Pinpoint to send push notifications to end users of the application and then to analyze the effectiveness of those communications.
Messages & Notifications
AWS Messaging Services provides core communication for users and applications. Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a managed message queue that sends, stores, and receives messages between components of distributed applications to ensure that parts of an application work as intended.
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) enables businesses to send publish/subscribe messages to services such as end-users or endpoints. SNS includes a mobile messaging feature that enables push messaging on mobile devices. Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) provides a platform for IT professionals and marketers to send and receive email.
AR & VR (Augmented reality and virtual reality)
AWS offers augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) development tools through the Amazon Sumerian service. Amazon Sumerian allows users to create AR and VR applications without needing to program or create 3D graphics. The service also enables users to test and publish applications in-browser. Amazon Sumerian can be used in:
3D web applications
- E-commerce & sales applications
- Marketing
- Online education
- Manufacturing
- Training simulations
- Gaming
Game development
AWS can also be used for game development. Large game development companies, such as Ubisoft, will use AWS services for their games. AWS can provide services for each part of the game’s lifecycle.
For example, AWS will provide back-end services, analytics, and developer tools to a developer. Developer tools should help developers build their game, while back-end services may be able to help build, deploy, or scale a developer’s platform. Analytics can help developers get to know their customers better and how they play games. Developers can also store data or host game data on AWS servers.
Internet of Things
AWS also has a variety of services that enable the internet of things (IoT) deployments. The AWS IoT service provides a back-end platform to manage IoT devices and data ingestion to other AWS storage and database services. The AWS IoT Button provides hardware for limited IoT functionality, and AWS Green grass brings AWS to compute capabilities to IoT devices.
Other services
Amazon Web Services has a range of business productivity SaaS options, including:
- The Amazon Chime service enables online video meetings, calls and text-based chats across devices.
- Amazon WorkDocs, which is a file storage and sharing service
- Amazon WorkMail, which is a business email service with calendaring features.
Desktop and streaming application services include Amazon WorkSpaces, a remote desktop-as-a-service platform (DaaS), and Amazon AppStream, which lets a developer stream a desktop application from AWS to an end user’s web browser.
AWS pricing models and competition
AWS offers a pay-as-you-go model for its cloud services on an hourly or per second basis. There is also an option to redraw
There is a set amount of computing capacity at a discounted price for customers who prepay in full or who sign up for one- or three-year usage commitments.
If potential customers can’t afford the costs, the AWS Free Tier is another possible way to use AWS services. The free tier is offered in three different options: Always Free, 12 Months Free, and Trial.
AWS primarily competes with Microsoft Azure, Google, and IBM in the public IaaS market.
History
The AWS platform was originally launched in 2002 with only a few services. In 2003, AWS was re-imagined to standardize, automate, and web service centric Amazon’s compute infrastructure. This re-imagining included the idea of selling access to a virtual server as a service platform. In 2004, the first publicly available AWS service – Amazon SQS – was launched a year later.
In 2006, AWS was relaunched to include three services – including Amazon S3 cloud storage, SQS and EC2 – officially making AWS a suite of online core services.
In 2009, S3 and EC2 were launched in Europe, and Elastic Block Store and Amazon CloudFront were released and AWS was adopted. In 2013, AWS began offering the certification process in AWS Services, and in 2018 an autoscaling service was released.
Over time, AWS has added a number of services that have helped make it a low cost infrastructure platform that is highly available and scalable. AWS now focuses on the cloud with data centers placed around the world in locations such as the United States, Australia, Europe, Japan, and Brazil.
Acquisitions
Over time, AWS has acquired a number of organizations, shifting its focus to the technologies it intends to incorporate further.
The recent acquisition of AWS has focused not on large well-established companies, but on organizations that can strengthen and improve the cloud vendor’s existing offerings. These acquisitions do not add to AWS but enhance its core services. For example, AWS has acquired TSO Logic, Sqrrl and CloudEndure.
Sqrrl was a security startup that collects data from gateways, servers, and routers and then puts those findings inside a security dashboard.