By Dhanya Arumughom —

Learning Amazon Web Services (AWS)

What is AWS?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a secure cloud computing platform, which offers a wide variety of services like computing power, database, storage, networking, content delivery, developer tools and many more functionalities which helps businesses scale. Cloud computing refers to the delivery of computing services- from applications to storage and processing power using the internet. Instead of companies owning and maintaining their own computing infrastructure or data centers, cloud allows them to rent these from a cloud service provider on a pay as you go basis.

Cloud computing is one of the most disruptive technologies that has evolved over the last two decades and Amazon Web Services is one of the pioneers in the area. It's a very common thing these days and organizations are leveraging cloud services for various benefits it offers like reduced costs, scalability, access from anywhere, efficiency and many more. AWS was the first cloud based service launched in 2002 with a suite of services including storage and computation. It was initially used by Amazon only. This was one of the historic developments in cloud computing. It was in 2006 that Amazon launched the Elastic Cloud compute of AWS as a commercial web service which allows companies and individuals to rent computing infrastructure to run their applications. This was in fact the first widely accessible computing infrastructure service.

Why AWS?

AWS is an IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) offering which offers various building blocks for computing like physical or virtual servers, storage, networking, etc. This makes it ideal for companies that want to build applications from scratch and enables to control applications, database, middleware, etc.

There are many cloud computing platforms available today like the Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure, etc. Then why go for AWS? AWS is probably the cloud service which provides the most number of cloud products. It is the undisputed leader of cloud computing services. AWS is a platform for virtually very use case you can think of in various facets of computing– from data warehousing to deployment tools, analytics, machine learning, Artificial Intelligence, IoT, and many more. There are over 90 services available in AWS as of now and is still expanding. There are a few things that you ought to look for when you decide to move to a cloud platform like security, global infrastructure, flexibility, performance and deployment speed and last but not the least pricing. AWS excels in all these features and that is the reason why it clearly dominates the cloud services with many other well-qualified competitors. Let’s take a look at some of the advantages of AWS now.

Ease of use: AWS allows users to quickly and securely host existing as well as new applications. It has a well-documented web services API and AWS management console which helps users to access AWS’s application hosting platform easily.

Flexibility: AWS allows the users to select the OS, language, platform, database, and various other services making it very flexible. You can load the software and services your application requires in the AWS virtual environment.

Global Infrastructure: AWS offers multiple global locations for deployment across the globe. You can decide where to deploy applications or place your data.

Security and Reliability: AWS offers a top-notch security system with an end to end approach to secure the infrastructure including physical, operational, and software measures. Remember, AWS comes from the Amazon family which has proved itself with the multi-billion dollar online business for over a decade and the Amazon.com itself uses AWS. I hope that explains how reliable AWS would be!

High performance in speed, availability and scalability: AWS offers high speed. It also offers high availability because of the auto-scaling feature in AWS which is achieved by Availability Zones with two data centers in all regions so that downtime in one doesn’t affect other. Moreover, the Elastic Load Balancing feature in AWS automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets which also add to the high availability. AWS also offers a storage system that is capable of scaling vastly.

Pricing: AWS offers a Pay as you go pricing which means you need to pay only for what you use. This makes more sense compared to pay per day or pay per second concepts of other services.

Learn AWS

Cloud and in particular AWS has turned out to be a mainstream skill that’s here to stay for the next few years. Cloud computing services, today has become the backbone of most businesses, and AWS is the choice for many large organizations. If you want to be an AWS professional, an AWS certification is also highly recommended as AWS certified professionals earn more than non-certified peers.

Best Tutorials for AWS

We have collected a list of some of the best beginner level tutorials on AWS.

Best Courses For AWS

However, if you already decided to take a deep dive, here are some of the best courses we found on AWS.

For Beginners
For Advanced Level

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