What is AWS?
AWS (Amazon Web Services) is the world’s biggest and most secure cloud platform.
AWS offers many services such as computing power, virtual private network, database storage, content delivery, etc. to millions of customers including individual user, startups, organizations, and government agencies across the globe.
AWS History
- In 2002 Amazon Web Services was launched as a subsidiary of Amazon.
- In 2004, first AWS service Simple Queue Service (SQS) was launched.
- In 2006, AWS re-launched the three initial service S3 cloud storage, SQS, and EC2.
- In 2009, AWS launched a new service virtual private cloud (VPC) which enables customers to create their own isolated network within the AWS cloud.
- Now, AWS offers around 175 fully featured services from data centers globally.
Advantages of AWS
- AWS is a comprehensive cloud platform with almost 73 Availability Zones within 23 geographic regions around the world. They already support millions of active clients.
- AWS offers to all customers(an individual, start-up, or organizations) simple billing with dynamic options such as per hour billing, term-based pricing, and region-based pricing, you can select any option as per your requirement.
- Security is one of the major concerns when using a cloud platform. They have well defined security compliance and protocol to protect your important business information from leaks and the risk. Some well-known organizations like Netflix, NASDAQ, Dow Jones, US Govt. applications use AWS platform.
- Almost every service available on AWS cloud platform can be required for your organization. Also, Amazon continuously working on cost optimization for services like machine learning, analytics, blockchain, SAAS (Software as a Service) etc.
- Gartner report names AWS a 2021 Magic Quadrant Leader. Read the full article >>
AWS Global Cloud Infrastructure
AWS Global Cloud Infrastructure is built around multiple geographical locations (Regions) and Availability Zones (AZs). Availability Zones can have one or more psychically separated data centers.
AWS Global infrastructure components
Region
Region is a collection of availability zones (AZs) and each region contains at least two Availability Zone. Each region is geographically/physically isolated from the others. AWS has deployed regions worldwide to provide low latency connections, redundant networks, and high throughput to their customers.
Availability zones(AZs)
Availability zones (AZs) are the logical data centers of AWS. Each availability zone is isolated from another AZ within the same region. Each Availability zone has separated infrastructure resources such as power, network, compute server, database resources, storage, etc. with low latency connections. An Availability zone can have one or more physical data centers.
These AZs allow users to configure, design and run applications and databases with high availability, scalability, and fault tolerance. For example, when AWS resources are configured with ‘Multi-AZ’ deployments, AWS automatically replicates same data based on its primary and secondary AZs configurations.
Edge locations
In order to reduce latency, AWS provides content delivery network (CDN) endpoints called Edge location. Edge locations are not used to deploy your AWS resources, instead use (by end users) to cache data to reduce latency.
Regional Edge Caches
CloudFront points of presence (POPs) (edge locations) help to serve your popular content quickly to your viewers. AWS announced a new type of Edge Location (Regional Edge Caches) where a larger cache-width is available to store content like video, photos, artwork, etc. Data can be served from Regional Edge Cache even after expires/invalidate from the cache at the Edge Locations.
AWS Global and Regional Services
- Global Services
- IAM (Users, Groups, Roles, Accounts)
- Route 53
- WAF
- CloudFront
- S3 – Global but data is Regional
- Regional Service – Check Complete list here: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regional-product-services
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