Simplified introduction to AWS

The main aim of this article is to provide a basic understanding on  Amazon Web Services terminology, their global infrastructure, and core resources of AWS.



What is AWS?

Amazon Web Services is a cloud service providing the infrastructure as a service. In addition to infra, AWS delivers networking, virtualization, security, database, storage and developer tools.

The main advantage of AWS cloud is “High Availability”, “Fault Tolerance”, “Scalability” and “Elasticity”

scalability & Elasticity

AWS has to capacity to adapt the growing workload on its hardware and can dynamically add hardware on demand.

For instance, in the case of too many users trying to access then Amazon scales up to the number of instances to handle. Similarly, when users reduce the number of instances will be reduced.

High availability

High scalability and elasticity of AWS result in high availability.

Fault tolerance

If there is a fault in the system due to corruption or any other failure we will still be able to access our files. For example, if an instance fails, AWS automatically removes that instance and launches a new instance.

Amazon global infrastructure

AWS has 60 Availability zones in 20 geographic regions across the world, planning to expand for 12 more Availability zones and 4 more AWS Regions as shown in below image. Each region has a set of availability zone and each availability zone hold the physical data center.  Edge locations are also part of AWS infra, edge locations host the content delivery network called Amazon CloudFront for fast delivery of content to the user from any location.

Virtual Private Cloud(VPC’s)

VPC is a private virtual network, that allows the user to place AWS resources & set permissions to them as a layer of security.

RDS

Relational Database Service is a database that AWS provides for storing data running as a web service in the cloud.

S3

Simple Storage Service is a large unlimited storage bucket. S3 can store any number objects providing high availability.

EC2

The EC2 instance is nothing but a server with computing power for running applications on AWS. One of the common use case, a web hosting server that contains all the files and code to display a web page.



AWS Architecture