Amazon Web Services is currently the largest e-retailer of cloud computing services in the world. Its presence now encompasses 69 availability zones and comprises of highly automated data centers with over 165 featured service offerings.

If you want to get a grasp on just how big and influential the AWS cloud is, you need to know that 34% of all cloud computing services used in this world are powered by the AWS cloud and its affiliated products.

But despite its growing importance in modern-day fields like DevOps, IoT, and AI among others, a lot of people really don’t know much about AWS cloud and what if offers.

And mind you, this ambiguity can mean that you are missing out on a lot of important scalability and analytical solutions from the cloud landscape that could help you meet your business goals.

To end this ambiguity from your end, we’ll take you through the many different characteristics of Amazon Web Services, allowing you to develop a good grasp on its service model, important product offerings, pricing models and more.

Lets Start!

Starting off with AWS:

Creating an AWS account is easy and all you have to is to register yourself with the service through a very simple process. Once you secure user credentials, you can then delve into different services and learn more about their deployment needs, usability requirements and pricing.

But for those who first want to try out the service for free, AWS facilitates them by providing a month’s worth of access to a t2.micro Virtual machine that can be run on two different OS i.e. Windows or Linux, whichever you deem a better fit.

If you are wondering how powerful this VM is, then think of it as roughly equivalent to a single CPU unit with a RAM of just 1 GB. Along with this, you will also get S3 Object Storage to keep up to 5GB of data in the cloud.

Access to these free services will end after 12 months of your account being registered.

Acquiring The Right Kind of Training:

Most of AWS products and services require in-depth training if anyone wants to learn how to utilize them in the correct manner.

The firm itself does a half-day conference that’s streamed live and is titled “AWSome Day” on a frequent basis. This conference will let newcomers gather some valuable insights on many different facets of AWS and its related services.

But this conference can be best termed as “Basic” and won’t help you much if you want to learn how to best integrate these products with your business processes along with other fine details like managing budgets, security, etc.

For more detailed insights, you will need to sign up for instructional courses offered by services like CloudInstitute.Io. These courses power adaptive learning and can cater to unique business teams by offering customized learning packages. From Kubernetes to Migration, these course syllabuses cover a lot of things from the AWS landscape in vivid detail.

Core Services:

As mentioned earlier as well, AWS offers more than 165 products with each one of them coming under a subdomain/category and powering a specific functionality. Going through all of them one by one is beyond the scope of this article, but let’s just run through some of the core services offered by AWS and how you can best leverage them for your business:

EC2 – Elastic Compute Cloud:

This might sound very complex to understand but it’s a really very useful solution for developers looking to host things like applications, games, software and anything else using cloud resources.

In the EC2, you can choose the server configuration of your choice, get a Virtual Machine based on your OS preference (Windows or Linux) by booting an Amazon Virtual Machine. After this, you will just need to deploy your clusters, allowing you to run any kind of software on it.

Simply put, this is just a way for AWS to tell that if you don’t want to host an application on your end for whatever reason, you can do it here and the best part is that you pay by the seconds for which you use each deployed server.

A user can deploy or terminate any server based on its own preference with any bounds or limitations.

AWS also allows you to choose “regions” of your choice to minimize latency in service offerings down to the barest minimum.

Amazon S3:

This is just simple cloud storage but it’s incredibly scalable. Users can store or move data in what Amazon calls “Buckets”, a specialized term for a space designated for a single user’s applications.

There are four different types of sub-services in the S3, differentiated by the frequency with which data is to be called by the user.

If you require storage of data that will be accessed frequently, you will need to pay more but the recall power is almost instantaneous.

You can also store data that is important but doesn’t require to be called up too frequently, so you pay less for it. However, recall can take hours in some instances for this type of S3 storage.

Elastic Container Service:

This service works primarily around Containers, a component of the micro-services architecture that allows much more efficient system virtualization through userspace abstraction.

Yes, this is definitely difficult to understand but if you are not interested in yet, you will definitely do so once you learn more about how ECS powers incredible cost optimization.

A Containerized application doesn’t require the full use of a host machine, rather it runs in isolated parts and just uses variable resources whenever required.

AWS allows you to capitalize on this concept by charging you just when the resource is used and not for storing it in the cloud itself.

This empowers businesses to create multiple different types of apps and services through containerization in the cloud, creating a self-balancing cost mechanism between demand and use. The cost will only be incurred when there is demand, making this “pay as you go” model definitely the thing to use for multiple application hosting needs.

AWS Lambda:

This service is fast becoming one of AWS's most important service offerings. It’s the platform that is capable of running code in a serverless network whenever an “Event Trigger” demands a response from it.

The AWS Lambda powers all underlying functionalities and delivers the final result. But the best part here is that you are not charged for anything apart from that actual function. There is no cost for storage or computing resources involved at all.

Let’s learn more about this with the help of an example. Imagine you have an app that allows users to change the filters on a particular image whenever prompted. The AWS Lambda will charge you only when someone tries to apply a filter and terminate the transaction once the filter has been applied, charging you for only this instance.

This service is revolutionary for businesses looking to build service-capable apps for many different purposes by providing them with the leverage to just pay when the app is demanded by the user to perform a certain function.

Wrapping Things Up:

The AWS cloud infrastructure contains many different, equally capable products that are being widely adopted by businesses across the globe.

From AI to IoT, AWS Cloud is capable of providing in-depth solutions for all kinds of cloud computing needs required by different types of emerging technologies.

If you too want to jump on this bandwagon and leverage AWS Cloud business solutions like others, you can start off today by registering with the CloudInstitute.Io. While AWS provides the product, CloudInstitute.Io will enable you to get in-depth training on how to incorporate that product into your business for the best possible results.