Cloud computing is a pool of on-demand resources gathered using virtualization. These resources are then offered for computing, network, and storage services which can be used for applications according to the desired requirements.
AWS can help businesses grow tremendously in the market and get substantial growth by using AWS-provided services focusing on analytics, blockchain, AI, ML, IoT, etc., with minimal cost to host their application on AWS.
Components:
- Compute
- Network
- Database
- Storage
These cloud services can be used on demand using the cloud provider platform using the internet with the pay-as-you-go model. When using cloud computing, you do not need to make large upfronts and spend most of the time managing the hardware. You can instantly provision and de-provision any number of services for your applications and pay just for the use.
It can be either uploading many images or downloading a large amount of data from the databases. Either run an application for a few minutes to test on a spot instance or store petabytes of data into S3 class tiers.
Cloud computing is the simplest way to provide access to servers, storage, databases, and applications. Cloud services platform such as AWS, Azure, and GCP provides network-connected hardware for the application.
Some ways applications can be directly integrated with:
- Analytics Tool
AWS provides Kinesis Data Analytics, a framework that can be used to analyze the data regarding ongoing resources and visualize the metrics for your existing infrastructure. These insights can be served to authorized personnel to make decisions to manage the required infrastructure. You can also check for insights regarding the high times for your applications and maintain resources for the same.
- Artificial Intelligence
AWS offers AWS SageMaker, which can be used quickly to build, train and deploy machine learning models easily with the fully managed infrastructure, tools and workflow. It can be used to process large amounts of data for machine learning models. The training time of models is optimized to minutes instead of hours which increases team productivity with the proper tools.
- Internet of Things
AWS IoT allows you to build solutions for a number of devices, manage the data generated from the devices, and also to secure the data on the cloud. You can turn the devices into smarter devices that too without an internet connection. It helps you identify issues in the early stage and apply best practices in order to prevent them from remaining in a vulnerable state.
Scaling of solutions to billions of devices and trillions of messages is possible with only the use of AWS IoT, It can be easily integrated with other AWS services. You can have a combination of AI, ML, and IoT in the models created in the cloud.
Benefits of AWS Cloud Computing
- Low capital investment
Without investing a large amount of capital in purchasing the hardware of the data centers and servers, you can only use what is required and pay for the same. When managing the hardware, it is a must to have a skilled team to handle the odds and bring the data center a profitable position.
- Scaling benefits
When using cloud services to deliver the data, you can receive a low cost than you are charged when the number of customers increases using AWS services, the cost is overall aggregated, and you are charged for a much low amount that can be referred to as lower pay as you go.
With AWS, you are allowed to scale up your application limits as much as you require without any restrictions, that too at a low amount of cost with the best storage offerings.
- Quit guessing
You can eliminate the guessing about your infrastructure capacity, most of the time, you might overprovision the server capacity, and then you need to leave the resources sitting idle or another case of low capacity with more needs. But with the introduction of Cloud computing, scale-up and scale-down of services, you can quickly make it possible with the help of a few clicks.
You are allowed to choose any amount of services for any duration, There are no limits associated with minimum use of service. Use the services at your convenience.
- Speed
In an on-premises infrastructure, the time required to set up an infrastructure is much longer than a few clicks on a cloud platform provider to provide an environment for your developers. Thus, the time and speed of your application provided you with a better experience with lower costs than ever. Amazon has a team of experts continuously working on building a huge network that is consistent and reliable architecture.
- Go global
Everyone wants their application to spread worldwide, but in the case of on-premises data centers, it is a relatively long time to stay. Still, with the introduction of a cloud platform, your application can go global in a few minutes. The amount of flexibility provided by AWS allows them to support and build infrastructures according to their requirements within a few minutes.
- Security
AWS offers various stages of security restrictions on cloud storage options; it is quite important to secure your data and manage access to the data in rest as well as in transit. AWS infrastructure is designed to be highly scalable, reliable, and secure, which will ultimately result in better performance for applications hosted on AWS and data stored on various services.
AWS architecture uses high-security standards and follows best practices along with application redundancy, validation, and testing. It provides multiple-layered security options so that the infrastructure is continuously monitored and secured under AWS monitoring tools. AWS works under a shared responsibility model in which AWS is responsible for the security of cloud infrastructure, and the customer is responsible for securing workloads that are being deployed by you in AWS.
Cloud Computing Models
- IaaS
Infrastructure as a Service, the cloud provider manages the IT infrastructure, such as storage, server, and networking resources. The cloud provider hosts infrastructure components in an on-premises data center, such as servers, storage, networking hardware, and the virtualization layer. IaaS provides an all-time high level of flexibility and management control over IT resources, and it is one of the most similar to many IT departments’ existing IT resources.
IaaS provides a range of services for infrastructure components:
- Monitoring
- Load balancing
- Security
- Log access
- Clustering
- Backup and replication
- PaaS
Platform as a Service removes the need to manage the infrastructure and allows you to focus entirely on deploying and managing the applications. This helps us to be more efficient in capacity planning, software maintenance, and patching.
Benefits of PaaS:
- Skill’s re-usage
- Cost reduction
- Fast development
- Effective DevOps
- Maintain security
- Increased productivity
- SaaS
Software as a Service provides a way to deliver our applications over the internet as Service. The cloud provider manages all the infrastructure parts, access to the application, and security, and you are just required to put your code on it and free yourself from hardware and software management. When you are using a SaaS service, you do not need to worry about how the service will be maintained or managed. You need to focus on your application code rest will be handled by SaaS. Some characteristics of SaaS are:
- Multitenant architecture
- customized application
- easy access
- packaged software
Benefits of SaaS:
- Low infrastructure cost
- Worldwide Accessible
- Scalability
- SLA
- High Security
Get Started
To start with AWS Cloud Computing, you need to understand the below two points:
- Best practices in architecting an AWS cloud solution
- AWS Well-architected Framework.
Build your knowledge:
- Start with cloud computing history and cloud.
- Create your knowledge base with AWS fundamentals:
- EC2
- Load Balancing
- Auto Scaling
- AWS Global Infrastructure
- Storage
- S3 Bucket
- EBS (Elastic Block Store)
- Amazon VPC
- Databases
- RDS
- AWS Shared Responsibility Model
- IAM
- CloudFront
- Route53
- CloudWatch
- Elastic Beanstalk
- AWS Free tier provides all its customers the ability to explore and try out AWS service free of charge up to a specified limit associated with each service for 12 months or consumption-based; find full details in the below link:
https://aws.amazon.com/free-tier - Prepare yourself for AWS certifications based on your interest as well as the requirements of your organization.
- Continue learning about AWS services and updates shared by the AWS newsletter and whitepapers.
A place for big ideas.
Reimagine organizational performance while delivering a delightful experience through optimized operations.
AWS for Beginners
- EC2
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud provides users the capability to add on hardware infrastructure as per the demand of the user application, and you can directly eliminate the cost of maintaining your own data center with no high upfront and setup costs, along with human resources to maintain an on-premises data center. You can launch as many EC2 instances as per your needs, along with configuring security and networking for the same.
Features:
- Preconfigured templates for instances
- Instance types for configuration of CPU, storage, and memory
- Key pairs for secure log-in to the instance
- Volumes to store temporary data of the instance
- Regions, the physical location of resources
- A Firewall restricts IP ranges using security groups.
- Elastic IP addresses, static IPv4 addresses for cloud computing
- Metadata, tags to create and assign to EC2 instances
- VPC, to isolate your network from the rest of the AWS.
- AWS LightSail
It is a simple cloud hosting framework which can be easily set up within a few minutes. It offers various options to developers in hosting, For example, WordPress websites. It does not matter what the size of your website is, LightSail handles it efficiently. The pricing for Amazon LightSail is quite affordable.
- AWS Lambda
It is one of the most powerful computing services that allows you to run your code easily without maintaining a server. It allows us to upload our code to the lambda function. Lambda can easily maintain a fleet of computing resources to execute your code and provide a final output for the code.
Conclusion
Starting with AWS Cloud is much simpler to work with some basic knowledge. However, it is recommended to finish the fundamental topics and then resume the exploration of AWS services since, unknowingly, you can incur unnecessary costs if resources are consumed beyond the free-tier resource limit.
For deep dive, you can check for AWS Documentation – Amazon.com and practice more lab environments to get hands-on experience.
