Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a comprehensive, scalable cloud computing platform from Amazon.
The AWS Cloud manages 60 Availability Zones in 20 geographic regions around the world. Plans have been announced for 12 availability zones and 4 additional regions in Bahrain, Cape Town, Hong Kong (Special Administrative Region of China) and Milan.
The first AWS offerings were created in 2006. To ensure system robustness and minimize the effects of outages, AWS’s geographic footprint is split across different regions. Each region groups together several smaller geographical areas called availability zones.
The AWS range (still growing) offers more than thirty services mainly IaaS and PaaS, although SaaS services have also been launched (messaging, EFSS ).
There are many AWS consulting partners who are major service providers.
In IaaS and PaaS, for example:
Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) that allows you to run a virtual machine pool (VM ) of an almost infinite number.
Simple Storage Service (S3) is a scalable service for storing, backing up and archiving data and applications online.
Amazon DynamoDB is a fast, NoSQL database solution that supports huge amounts of data.
Primarily intended for storage and archiving, the data is stored on SSDs and replicated in 3 zones, ensuring a high level of durability and availability especially in the event of a server failure. DynamoDB does not automatically adjust rates, but administrators can resize them through an API and management console. Diagrams in DynamoDB tables are not fixed. Each element can, therefore, have different attributes. Secondary indexes can be put in place to provide greater query flexibility while preserving performance, typically in the order of milliseconds on the Amazon DynamoDB service side.
On the security side, users are authenticated using cryptographic methods to prevent data breaches.
DynamoDB does not offer a powerful query mechanism, but it can be coupled with CloudSearch for this purpose.
RedShift, a very large scale (several petabytes) data warehouse service designed for analytics.
All AWS offers are billed for consumption. Rates vary depending on the service.
An EC2 instance is a virtual server hosted in Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to run applications on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure.
AWS is a cloud computing platform; EC2 is a service that lets you run application programs. The EC2 service can serve as a park for an almost unlimited number of virtual machines.
To meet everyone’s needs, Amazon offers a range of instance types with different configurations in terms of CPU, memory, and storage and network resources. In addition, each type is available in several sizes to meet different workloads.
Instance types are grouped into families according to target application profiles: general, optimized for computation, GPU instances, optimized for memory, optimized for storage and micro-instances.
Instances are created from AMI (Amazon Machine Images) machine images. These machine images are similar to models configured with an operating system and other software, all forming the operating environment of the user.
Users can select an AMI instance from AWS, the user community, or AWS Marketplace. They can also create their own AMIs and share them.
