What is Amazon Web Services?

So, what is Amazon Web Services?

Amazon Web Services, usually referred to as AWS, is one of the world’s leading cloud providers. It’s both the most comprehensive and widely used cloud platform. All around the world organisations use the AWS Cloud’s products and services to lower costs, increase availability and drive innovation.

In this blog we’ll explore what cloud computing is, why AWS is the market leader and the products and services Amazon Web Services has on offer. Click on any of these links and you’ll be taken to the corresponding section:

What is Cloud Computing?
What is Amazon Web Services?
Why Choose Amazon Web Services?
Key Services
Get Started with Amazon Web Services

What is Cloud Computing?

Before diving into the nitty gritty of AWS we need to define what Cloud Computing is. Cloud Computing is a term given to outsourcing software, data storage and processing. In the cloud computing model users pay a monthly fee to their cloud provider instead of buying hardware or software.

Before cloud, organisations needed onsite data centres and computing infrastructure. Now, most organisations pay third-parties to store information and workloads in a global network of data centres. Together, these data centres make up what we call ‘the cloud’.

Advantages of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a more efficient way of delivering computing resources. Computing power is remote instead of centralised, so users can tap into extra capacity if business spikes.

Other benefits of cloud computing include:

Cost reductions
Increased mobility
Easier collaboration
Loss prevention
Automatic software updates

AWS is Amazon’s cloud computing platform. It’s the world’s most popular cloud platform, used by millions to innovate faster, lower costs and scale with ease. AWS is trusted by organisations of all sizes for storage and to power a wide variety of workloads.

These workloads include:

Web and mobile applications
Game development
Data processing and warehousing
Storage
Archiving

Why Choose Amazon Web Services?

Now we understand the concept of cloud computing, let’s explore the advantages specific to the AWS Cloud.

More Services

With over 175 services, Amazon Web Services has more services than any of its competitors. Within each of these services is a great breadth and depth of functionality. Put simply, you can do more on AWS than any other cloud.

This makes it faster, easier, and more cost effective to shift existing applications and workloads to the cloud. It also means you can build just about anything you can imagine.

Largest Community of Customers and Partners

Amazon Web Services has a large and diverse community of users. This includes customers of all sizes and across all industries.

AWS also has an expansive network of partners. Thousands of systems integrators specialise in AWS services and tens of thousands of vendors adapt their technology to work on AWS.

Secure

It doesn’t matter how big your organisation is, or the industry, security is always your top concern. That’s why it’s Amazon’s top concern. With 230 security, compliance, and governance services, AWS is the most flexible and secure cloud environment available. Amazon Web Services’ core infrastructure is used by the military, banks and other organisations who deal with highly sensitive data.

Operational Expertise

Amazon Web Services has a proven track record. They deliver cloud services to millions of customers around the world running a wide variety of use cases. With over 14 years of experience, it’s unmatched in maturity, reliability, security, and performance.

Key Services

Amazon Web Services offers over 175 fully featured services so covering all of them just wouldn’t be possible in this blog. Instead, let’s take a look at the platform’s most popular services.

Amazon S3

Amazon Simple Storage Service, or S3, is an object storage service. Customers can use S3 buckets to store and protect data for a range of uses. These include data lakes, websites, mobile applications, backup and restore, archive, enterprise applications, IoT devices, and big data analytics.

Amazon VPC

Ever wanted to have your own private piece of the AWS Cloud? Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, or VPC, lets you build your own secure network within the larger Cloud. Users have complete control over their virtual networking environment. This includes your own IP address range, creation of subnets, and configuration of route tables and network gateways.

AWS EC2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, known as EC2, provides secure and resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It’s designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources in Amazon’s proven computing environment.

Get Started with Amazon Web Services

As you would have picked up from this article, Amazon Web Services is an expansive, complex environment. To get the most out of it you will need a broad, high-level knowledge of the Cloud.

Our introductory courses, AWS Technical Essentials and AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials, equip you with this knowledge.

AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials is designed with non-technical and managerial roles in mind. AWS Technical Essentials has been designed for technical staff who work directly in the cloud.