AWS

What is AWS?

AWS (Amazon Web Services) is a comprehensive, evolving cloud computing platform provided by Amazon. It includes a mixture of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and packaged software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings. AWS offers tools such as compute power, database storage and content delivery services.

Amazon.com Web Services launched its first web services in 2002 from the internal infrastructure that the company built to handle its online retail operations. In 2006, it began offering its defining IaaS services. AWS was one of the first companies to introduce a pay-as-you-go cloud computing model that scales to provide users with compute, storage and throughput as needed.

AWS offers many different tools and products for enterprises and software developers in 245 countries and territories. Government agencies, education institutions, nonprofits and private organizations use AWS services.

Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud offering, with more than 200 fully featured services from data centres globally. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—are using AWS to lower costs, increase security, become more agile, and innovate faster.

Management and monitoring

An admin can manage and track cloud resource configuration using AWS Config and AWS Config Rules. Those tools, along with AWS Trusted Advisor, can help an IT team avoid improperly configured and needlessly expensive cloud resource deployments.

AWS provides several automation tools in its portfolio. An admin can automate infrastructure provisioning via AWS CloudFormation templates, and also use AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate to automate infrastructure and system configurations.

An AWS customer can monitor resource and application health with Amazon CloudWatch and the AWS Personal Health Dashboard. Customers can also use AWS CloudTrail to retain user activity and API calls for auditing, which has some key differences from AWS Config.

Storage

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) provides scalable object storage for data backup, collection and analytics. An IT professional stores data and files as S3 objects -- which can range up to five terabytes -- inside S3 buckets to keep them organized. A business can save money with S3 through its Infrequent Access storage class or by using Amazon Glacier for long-term cold storage.

Amazon Elastic Block Store provides block-level storage volumes for persistent data storage when using EC2 instances. Amazon Elastic File System offers managed cloud-based file storage.

A business can also migrate data to the cloud via storage transport devices, such as AWS Snowball, Snowball Edge and Snowmobile, or use AWS Storage Gateway to let on-premises apps access cloud data.