What is Amazon Web Services | AWS Regions & AZs | Different AWS Services

October 19, 2021
CODE OF GEEKS
0

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon providing on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs on a metered pay-as-you-go basis. These cloud computing web services provide a variety of basic abstract technical infrastructure and distributed computing building blocks and tools.

Deep Dive to History

Initially, AWS was launched internally in 2002, which later scaled and launched publicly during mid 2004 with some of the core AWS services (SQS) and in 2006 with S3, EC2.

Overview

Main aim of AWS is to provide a platform that offers flexible, reliable, scalable, easy-to-use and, cost-effective cloud computing solutions and hence, this platform is developed with a combination of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and packaged software as a service (SaaS) offerings. In more simpler words, they provide you with servers and services that you can use on demand and scale easily.

Top Firms using AWS : Netflix, NASA, LinkedIn, Facebook, BBC, Baidu and many more.

Typical Use cases

AWS enables you to build complex, sophisticated, scalable applications easily.
Most popular in Enterprise IT, Backup, Storage, Big data Analytics
Web hosting
Streaming Services

Fascinating Facts about AWS

Amazon Web Services has more than 1 million active users.
Cost-Optimized Server less Architecture.
‘Design for Failure‘ is the key in AWS Architecture.
$40 billion in revenue for 2020 – $23 billion more than in 2017.
Netflix, Quora, NASA, Reddit, and a bunch of other huge firms are hosted on AWS.
AWS is an ACE Player in the Cloud Market.

Worldwide IaaS Public Cloud Services Market Share, 2017-2018

AWS Global Infrastructure

The AWS Global Cloud Infrastructure is the most secure, extensive, and reliable cloud platform, offering over 200 fully featured services from data centers globally. Whether you need to deploy your application workloads across the globe in a single click, or you want to build and deploy specific applications closer to your end-users with single-digit millisecond latency, AWS provides you the cloud infrastructure where and when you need it.

With millions of active customers and tens of thousands of partners globally, AWS has the largest and most dynamic ecosystem.

AWS Regions : Regions refers to the physical location that can be present all over the world. Example : us-west-1, eu-west-1 etc are AWS Regions. Most AWS Services are region-scoped. Not necessary that all services available in Region ‘a’ are available in Region ‘b’.

AWS Availability Zones : An Availability Zone (AZ) is one or more discrete data centers with redundant power, networking, and connectivity in an AWS Region. AZs give customers the ability to operate production applications and databases that are more highly available, fault tolerant, and scalable than would be possible from a single data center.

Example : AZs for Sydney Region are ap-southeast-2a, ap-southeast-2b, ap-southeast-2c

Types of AWS Services

AWS provided number of services that greatly fulfills enterprise level requirements, including solutions for storage, databases, analytics, networking, mobile, development tools, enterprise applications, with a pay-as-you-go pricing model.

Above services are clubbed within various categories depending upon their nature and their role :

AWS Compute Services
AWS Storage Services
AWS Database Services
AWS Security Services
AWS Management Services
AWS Developer Tools
AWS Migration Services
AWS Networking Services
AWS Machine Learning Services
AWS IOT Services
AWS Media Services
Web & Mobile Services
AWS Analytics Services
AWS Business Application Services
AWS AR/ VR Services
AWS Game Development Services
AWS Blockchain Services

Let’s check some of the services that lie under above categories :

1. AWS Compute Services

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute)

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides scalable computing capacity in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. Using Amazon EC2 eliminates your need to invest in hardware up front, so you can develop and deploy applications faster. You can use Amazon EC2 to launch as many or as few virtual servers as you need, configure security and networking, and manage storage. Amazon EC2 enables you to scale up or down to handle changes in requirements or spikes in popularity, reducing your need to forecast traffic.

AWS Batch

AWS Batch helps you to run batch computing workloads on the AWS Cloud. Batch computing is a common way for developers, scientists, and engineers to access large amounts of compute resources. AWS Batch removes the undifferentiated heavy lifting of configuring and managing the required infrastructure, similar to traditional batch computing software. This service can efficiently provision resources in response to jobs submitted in order to eliminate capacity constraints, reduce compute costs, and deliver results quickly.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

With Elastic Beanstalk, you can quickly deploy and manage applications in the AWS Cloud without having to learn about the infrastructure that runs those applications. Elastic Beanstalk reduces management complexity without restricting choice or control. You simply upload your application, and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, scaling, and application health monitoring.

Read more about AWS Elastic Beanstalk here

AWS Lambda

Lambda is a compute service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. Lambda runs your code on a high-availability compute infrastructure and performs all of the administration of the compute resources, including server and operating system maintenance, capacity provisioning and automatic scaling, code monitoring and logging. With Lambda, you can run code for virtually any type of application or backend service. All you need to do is supply your code in one of the languages that Lambda supports.

2. AWS Storage Services

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. Customers of all sizes and industries can use Amazon S3 to store and protect any amount of data for a range of use cases, such as data lakes, websites, mobile applications, backup and restore, archive, enterprise applications, IoT devices, and big data analytics. Amazon S3 provides management features so that you can optimize, organize, and configure access to your data to meet your specific business, organizational, and compliance requirements.

Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store Service)

Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) provides block level storage volumes for use with EC2 instances. EBS volumes behave like raw, unformatted block devices. You can mount these volumes as devices on your instances. EBS volumes that are attached to an instance are exposed as storage volumes that persist independently from the life of the instance. You can create a file system on top of these volumes, or use them in any way you would use a block device (such as a hard drive). You can dynamically change the configuration of a volume attached to an instance.

Amazon EFS (Elastic File System Service)

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) provides a simple, serverless, set-and-forget elastic file system for use with AWS Cloud services and on-premises resources. It is built to scale on demand to petabytes without disrupting applications, growing and shrinking automatically as you add and remove files, eliminating the need to provision and manage capacity to accommodate growth. Amazon EFS has a simple web services interface that allows you to create and configure file systems quickly and easily. The service manages all the file storage infrastructure for you, meaning that you can avoid the complexity of deploying, patching, and maintaining complex file system configurations.

Amazon FSx

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP is a fully managed service that provides highly reliable, scalable, performant, and feature-rich file storage built on NetApp’s popular ONTAP file system. It provides the familiar features, performance, capabilities, and APIs of NetApp file systems with the agility, scalability, and simplicity of a fully managed AWS service.

AWS Snowcone

AWS Snowcone is a portable, rugged, and secure device for edge computing and data transfer. You can use a Snowcone device to collect, process, and move data to the AWS Cloud, either offline by shipping the device to AWS, or online by using AWS DataSync.

3. AWS Database Services

Amazon Aurora

Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud that combines the performance and availability of traditional enterprise databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases.

Amazon Aurora is up to five times faster than standard MySQL databases and three times faster than standard PostgreSQL databases. It provides the security, availability, and reliability of commercial databases at 1/10th the cost. Amazon Aurora is fully managed by Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), which automates time-consuming administration tasks like hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups.

Amazon RDS (Relational Database)

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a web service that makes it easier to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the AWS Cloud. It provides cost-efficient, resizable capacity for an industry-standard relational database and manages common database administration tasks.

Amazon DynamoDB

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability. DynamoDB lets you offload the administrative burdens of operating and scaling a distributed database so that you don’t have to worry about hardware provisioning, setup and configuration, replication, software patching, or cluster scaling.

With DynamoDB, you can create database tables that can store and retrieve any amount of data and serve any level of request traffic. You can scale up or scale down your tables’ throughput capacity without downtime or performance degradation. You can use the AWS Management Console to monitor resource utilization and performance metrics.

Amazon ElastiCache

Amazon ElastiCache is a web service that makes it easy to set up, manage, and scale a distributed in-memory data store or cache environment in the cloud. It provides a high-performance, scalable, and cost-effective caching solution. At the same time, it helps remove the complexity associated with deploying and managing a distributed cache environment.

Amazon ElastiCache supports the Memcached and Redis cache engines. Each engine provides some advantages.

Amazon Redshift

Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the AWS Cloud. An Amazon Redshift data warehouse is a collection of computing resources called nodes, which are organized into a group called a cluster. Each cluster runs an Amazon Redshift engine and contains one or more databases.

Amazon Neptune

Amazon Neptune is a fast, reliable, fully managed graph database service that makes it easy to build and run applications that work with highly connected datasets. The core of Neptune is a purpose-built, high-performance graph database engine. This engine is optimized for storing billions of relationships and querying the graph with milliseconds latency. Neptune supports the popular graph query languages Apache TinkerPop Gremlin and W3C’s SPARQL, enabling you to build queries that efficiently navigate highly connected datasets. Neptune powers graph use cases such as recommendation engines, fraud detection, knowledge graphs, drug discovery, and network security.

4. AWS Security Services

AWS IAM (Identity and Access Management)

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a web service that helps you securely control access to AWS resources. You use IAM to control who is authenticated (signed in) and authorized (has permissions) to use resources.

Amazon Cognito

Amazon Cognito lets you add user sign-up, sign-in, and access control to your web and mobile apps quickly and easily. Amazon Cognito scales to millions of users and supports sign-in with social identity providers, such as Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon, and enterprise identity providers via SAML 2.0 and OpenID Connect.

AWS Secret Manager

Secrets Manager enables you to replace hardcoded credentials in your code, including passwords, with an API call to Secrets Manager to retrieve the secret programmatically. This helps ensure the secret can’t be compromised by someone examining your code, because the secret no longer exists in the code. Also, you can configure Secrets Manager to automatically rotate the secret for you according to a specified schedule. This enables you to replace long-term secrets with short-term ones, significantly reducing the risk of compromise.

5. AWS Management Services

AWS Cloud Formation

AWS CloudFormation is a service that helps you model and set up your AWS resources so that you can spend less time managing those resources and more time focusing on your applications that run in AWS. You create a template that describes all the AWS resources that you want (like Amazon EC2 instances or Amazon RDS DB instances), and CloudFormation takes care of provisioning and configuring those resources for you.

Read more about AWS Cloud Formation here

AWS CloudTrial

AWS CloudTrail is an AWS service that helps you enable governance, compliance, and operational and risk auditing of your AWS account. Actions taken by a user, role, or an AWS service are recorded as events in CloudTrail. Events include actions taken in the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface, and AWS SDKs and APIs.

AWS CloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch monitors your Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources and the applications you run on AWS in real time. You can use CloudWatch to collect and track metrics, which are variables you can measure for your resources and applications.

The CloudWatch home page automatically displays metrics about every AWS service you use. You can additionally create custom dashboards to display metrics about your custom applications, and display custom collections of metrics that you choose.

You can create alarms that watch metrics and send notifications or automatically make changes to the resources you are monitoring when a threshold is breached. For example, you can monitor the CPU usage and disk reads and writes of your Amazon EC2 instances.

AWS Config

AWS Config provides a detailed view of the configuration of AWS resources in your AWS account. This includes how the resources are related to one another and how they were configured in the past so that you can see how the configurations and relationships change over time.

AWS Health

AWS Health provides ongoing visibility into your resource performance and the availability of your AWS services and accounts. You can use AWS Health events to learn how service and resource changes might affect your applications running on AWS. AWS Health provides relevant and timely information to help you manage events in progress. AWS Health also helps you be aware of and to prepare for planned activities. The service delivers alerts and notifications triggered by changes in the health of AWS resources, so that you get near-instant event visibility and guidance to help accelerate troubleshooting.

AWS Systems Manager

AWS Systems Manager (formerly known as SSM) is an AWS service that you can use to view and control your infrastructure on AWS. Using the Systems Manager console, you can view operational data from multiple AWS services and automate operational tasks across your AWS resources. Systems Manager helps you maintain security and compliance by scanning your managed instances and reporting on (or taking corrective action on) any policy violations it detects.

Read more about AWS Systems Manager here

Some other AWS Management Services are AWS Account Management, AWS AppConfig, AWS Chatbot, AWS CLI.

6. AWS Developer Tools

AWS Cloud9

AWS Cloud9 is an integrated development environment, or IDE.

The AWS Cloud9 IDE offers a rich code-editing experience with support for several programming languages and runtime debuggers, and a built-in terminal. It contains a collection of tools that you use to code, build, run, test, and debug software, and helps you release software to the cloud.

You access the AWS Cloud9 IDE through a web browser. You can configure the IDE to your preferences. You can switch color themes, bind shortcut keys, enable programming language-specific syntax coloring and code formatting, and more.

AWS CloudShell

AWS CloudShell is a browser-based, pre-authenticated shell that you can launch directly from the AWS Management Console. You can run AWS CLI commands against AWS services using your preferred shell (Bash, PowerShell, or Z shell).

AWS CodeArtifact

CodeArtifact is a fully managed artifact repository service that makes it easy for organizations to securely store and share software packages used for application development. You can use CodeArtifact with popular build tools and package managers such as NuGet, Maven, Gradle, npm, yarn, pip, and twine.

CodeArtifact automatically scales when you ingest or publish new packages to your repositories

AWS CodeBuild

AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed build service in the cloud. CodeBuild compiles your source code, runs unit tests, and produces artifacts that are ready to deploy. CodeBuild eliminates the need to provision, manage, and scale your own build servers. It provides prepackaged build environments for popular programming languages and build tools such as Apache Maven, Gradle, and more. You can also customize build environments in CodeBuild to use your own build tools. CodeBuild scales automatically to meet peak build requests.

AWS CodeCommit

AWS CodeCommit is a version control service hosted by Amazon Web Services that you can use to privately store and manage assets (such as documents, source code, and binary files) in the cloud.

AWS CodeDeploy

CodeDeploy is a deployment service that automates application deployments to Amazon EC2 instances, on-premises instances, serverless Lambda functions, or Amazon ECS services.

AWS CodePipeline

AWS CodePipeline is a continuous delivery service you can use to model, visualize, and automate the steps required to release your software. You can quickly model and configure the different stages of a software release process. CodePipeline automates the steps required to release your software changes continuously.

AWS X-Ray

AWS X-Ray is a service that collects data about requests that your application serves, and provides tools that you can use to view, filter, and gain insights into that data to identify issues and opportunities for optimization. For any traced request to your application, you can see detailed information not only about the request and response, but also about calls that your application makes to downstream AWS resources, microservices, databases, and web APIs.

7. AWS Migration Services

AWS Application Discovery Service

AWS Application Discovery Service helps you plan your migration to the AWS cloud by collecting usage and configuration data about your on-premises servers. Application Discovery Service is integrated with AWS Migration Hub, which simplifies your migration tracking as it aggregates your migration status information into a single console. You can view the discovered servers, group them into applications, and then track the migration status of each application from the Migration Hub console in your home region.

Read more about AWS Application Discovery here

AWS Application Migration Service

AWS Application Migration Service (MGN) is a highly automated lift-and-shift (re host) solution that simplifies, expedites, and reduces the cost of migrating applications to AWS. It enables companies to lift-and-shift a large number of physical, virtual, or cloud servers without compatibility issues, performance disruption, or long cutover windows. MGN replicates source servers into your AWS account.

Read more about AWS Application Migration here

AWS Database Migration Service

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) is a cloud service that makes it easy to migrate relational databases, data warehouses, NoSQL databases, and other types of data stores. You can use AWS DMS to migrate your data into the AWS Cloud or between combinations of cloud and on-premises setups.

With AWS DMS, you can perform one-time migrations, and you can replicate ongoing changes to keep sources and targets in sync.

Read more about AWS Database Migration here

AWS DataSync

AWS DataSync is an online data transfer service that simplifies, automates, and accelerates moving data between on-premises storage systems and AWS storage services, and also between AWS storage services. DataSync can copy data between Network File System (NFS), Server Message Block (SMB) file servers, self-managed object storage, AWS Snowcone, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets, Amazon EFS file systems, and Amazon FSx for Windows File Server file systems.

AWS Migration Hub

AWS Migration Hub (Migration Hub) provides a single place to discover your existing servers, plan migrations, and track the status of each application migration. The Migration Hub provides visibility into your application portfolio and streamlines planning and tracking. You can visualize the connections and the status of the servers and databases that make up each of the applications you are migrating, regardless of which migration tool you are using.

AWS Transfer Family

AWS Transfer Family is a secure transfer service that enables you to transfer files into and out of AWS storage services.

AWS Transfer Family supports transferring data from or to the following AWS storage services.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) storage.
Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) Network File System (NFS) file system.

Read more about AWS Transfer Family here

Some other AWS Migration Services are AWS Schema Conversion Tool.

8. AWS Networking Services

AWS API Gateway

Amazon API Gateway is an AWS service for creating, publishing, maintaining, monitoring, and securing REST, HTTP, and Web Socket APIs at any scale. API developers can create APIs that access AWS or other web services, as well as data stored in the AWS Cloud. As an API Gateway API developer, you can create APIs for use in your own client applications. Or you can make your APIs available to third-party app developers.

AWS CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront is a web service that speeds up distribution of your static and dynamic web content, such as .html, .css, .js, and image files, to your users. CloudFront delivers your content through a worldwide network of data centers called edge locations. When a user requests content that you’re serving with CloudFront, the request is routed to the edge location that provides the lowest latency (time delay), so that content is delivered with the best possible performance.

AWS Elastic Load Balancing

Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes your incoming traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses, in one or more Availability Zones. It monitors the health of its registered targets, and routes traffic only to the healthy targets. Elastic Load Balancing scales your load balancer as your incoming traffic changes over time. It can automatically scale to the vast majority of workloads.

Read more about AWS Elastic Load Balancing here

AWS Route 53

Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service. You can use Route 53 to perform three main functions in any combination: domain registration, DNS routing, and health checking.

AWS VPC

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) enables you to launch AWS resources into a virtual network that you’ve defined. This virtual network closely resembles a traditional network that you’d operate in your own data center, with the benefits of using the scalable infrastructure of AWS.

9. AWS Machine Learning

Amazon SageMaker

Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed machine learning service. With SageMaker, data scientists and developers can quickly and easily build and train machine learning models, and then directly deploy them into a production-ready hosted environment. It provides an integrated Jupyter authoring notebook instance for easy access to your data sources for exploration and analysis, so you don’t have to manage servers.

Read more about Amazon Machine Learning here

Amazon Augmented AI

Amazon Augmented AI (Amazon A2I) is a service that brings human review of ML predictions to all developers by removing the heavy lifting associated with building human review systems or managing large numbers of human reviewers.

Amazon DevOps Guru

DevOps Guru is a fully managed operations service that makes it easy for developers and operators to improve the performance and availability of their applications. DevOps Guru lets you offload the administrative tasks associated with identifying operational issues so that you can quickly implement recommendations to improve your application. DevOps Guru creates reactive insights you can use to improve your application now. It also creates proactive insights to help you avoid operational issues that might affect your application in the future.

Amazon Kendra

Amazon Kendra is a highly accurate intelligent search service that enables your users to search unstructured data using natural language. It returns specific answers to questions, giving users an experience that’s close to interacting with a human expert. It is highly scalable and capable of meeting performance demands, tightly integrated with other AWS services such as Amazon S3 and Amazon Lex, and offers enterprise-grade security.

10. AWS IoT Services (Internet of Things)

AWS IoT

AWS IoT provides the cloud services that connect your IoT devices to other devices and AWS cloud services. AWS IoT provides device software that can help you integrate your IoT devices into AWS IoT-based solutions. If your devices can connect to AWS IoT, AWS IoT can connect them to the cloud services that AWS provides.

AWS IoT Analytics

AWS IoT Analytics automates the steps required to analyze data from IoT devices. AWS IoT Analytics filters, transforms, and enriches IoT data before storing it in a time-series data store for analysis. You can set up the service to collect only the data you need from your devices, apply mathematical transforms to process the data, and enrich the data with device-specific metadata such as device type and location before storing it. Then, you can analyze your data by running queries using the built-in SQL query engine, or perform more complex analytics and machine learning inference. AWS IoT Analytics enables advanced data exploration through integration with Jupyter Notebook. AWS IoT Analytics also enables data visualization through integration with Amazon QuickSight. Amazon QuickSight is available in the following Regions.

AWS IoT Events

AWS IoT Events enables you to monitor your equipment or device fleets for failures or changes in operation, and to trigger actions when such events occur. AWS IoT Events continuously watches IoT sensor data from devices, processes, applications, and other AWS services to identify significant events so you can take action.

You can use AWS IoT Events to build complex event monitoring applications in the AWS Cloud that you can access through the AWS IoT Events console or APIs.

Cart