Author: Daniel Frost
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is Amazon’s robust, evolving cloud computing network, which provides a combination of technology as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and offers bundled software as a service (SaaS). AWS services may include resources for an enterprise, such as computing power, management of databases, and distribution services for information.
Amazon was one of the early e-commerce players back in the early 90s, and AWS grew out of their desire to create a platform for themselves. CEO Jeff Bezos wanted every Amazon department to function as its subsidiary. They had to develop an enterprise-grade interface to retrieve the data if they needed information or services from another department. They took this mentality to create data centers (along with a lot of money and resources) with all the infrastructure and backup capacity and made them widely available.
Today, enterprises worldwide will effectively rent the infrastructure from AWS instead of constructing the infrastructure themselves, lowering the barrier to entry for innovators and entrepreneurs. Companies don’t have to have a data center on-site; they may rely on AWS, its redundancies, high efficiency, and all the items that make it useful for the infrastructure.
AWS offers hundreds of options, from the traditional website hosting servers and permanent data storage databases, all the way to robotics, game creation, and augmented reality. As a company or sole individual developer, you define which AWS resources you need, and it does the work for you!
Cloud computing is a convenient way to connect over the Internet, servers, storage, databases, and a wide variety of application resources. The network-connected hardware needed for these application services is owned and managed by a cloud storage provider such as Amazon Web Services. At the same time, you get and access what you need with a web application. There are over 100 services available to the user, including application services, networking, transportation, telephone, management, computing, among many more. For anyone who can’t afford an in-house infrastructure, the pay-as-you-go approach is a huge asset. Startups appreciate this because they cannot afford to pay upfront enormous server costs.
AWS is much more reliable than a corporation that hosts its storage or website. Currently, AWS has hundreds of data centers that are tracked continuously and strictly maintained around the globe. Datacenter diversification means that a catastrophe striking one area does not cause a permanent worldwide lack of data. Imagine if Netflix had to get all their files, content, and backed-up data consolidated on-site on the verge of a storm.
Overall, Amazon Web Services makes it easy, quicker, and more secure to run apps and store vast data volumes. This is why they can dominate 34% of the global room for cloud computing services (as of 2017), higher than their rivals' market share (Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud).
To get started, it helps if you were mindful of AWS as a beginner, but you do not need to dwell on it. You want to get the foundations of logic flow and understand algorithms and data structures as you start as an inexperienced coder. But it is important to realize that beyond drawing the dots as an engineer, there is a larger community, and it helps, manages, and keeps the code accessible to users. To get started, many YouTube videos helped me, but this was my favorite:
