AWS(Amazon Web Service) and It’s Use Cases

Lalita Rajpoot
10 min readApr 13, 2022

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Firstly, Before knowing about AWS I would to explain you what is Cloud Computing and why it is?

So, Let’s start..

Why Cloud Computing?

Let’s take an example to understand that why we use cloud computing.

I’m about to start a company and need resources to setup on-premise infrastructure but on premise we have some challenges to face e.g

  1. Higher pay, less scalibity
  2. Allot huge space for servers
  3. Appoint a team for hardware and software maintenance
  4. Poor data security
  5. Less chance of data recovery
  6. Lack of flexibility
  7. No automatic updates
  8. Less collaboration
  9. Data cannot be accessed remotely
  10. Takes longer implementation time

But By using Cloud Computing you have those solution that were facing on premise

cloud computing having many advantages

  1. Pay for what you use
  2. No server space required
  3. No experts required for hardware and software maintenance
  4. Better dat security
  5. Disaster recovery
  6. High Flexibility
  7. Automatic Software updates
  8. Teams can collaborate from widespread location
  9. Data can be accessed and shared anywhere over the internet.
  10. Rapid implementation

So assumed that Cloud Computing is better that on-premise

What is Cloud Computing?

You can define cloud computing is the ability to delivery of on-demand computing services over the internet on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Rather than manage files on a local storage device, cloud computing makes it possible save them over the internet.

Types of Cloud Computing

Now, move forward to main topic….

What is AWS?

AWS stands for Amazon Web Service. It is cloud platform offered by Amazon.com Inc. You can easily say that AWS provides the resources on rent over the internet.

AWS provides servers, storage, networking, remote computing, email, mobile development, and security. AWS can be broken into three main products: EC2, Amazon’s virtual machine service, Glacier, a low-cost cloud storage service, and S3, Amazon’s storage system. It is a comprehensive, easy to use computing platform offered Amazon. The platform is developed with a combination of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and packaged software as a service (SaaS) offerings

AWS has 81 availability zones in which its servers are located. These serviced regions are divided in order to allow users to set geographical limits on their services but also to provide security by diversifying the physical locations in which data is held. Amazon Web Services is a global leader in terms of Public Cloud market share and provide cloud solutions in 245 different countries across the globe. It provides more than 200 Cloud Computing services.

AWS History:-

AWS Regions

Data Centre of AWS -

Amazon AWS: South Dublin Data Center

AWS have some important services.

Examples:- Compute service, Migration, Security, Storage, Networking, Messaging, Database, Management Tools, Analytics.

  1. Compute Services:- Compute services are also known as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). it supplies a virtual server instance and storage and APIs that let users migrate workloads to a virtual machine.

a)EC2(Elastic Compute Cloud)- EC2 is a virtual machine in the cloud on which you have OS level control. You can run this cloud server whenever you want.

b)EKS (Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes)- The tool allows you to Kubernetes on Amazon cloud environment without installation.

c) AWS Lambda- This AWS service allows you to run functions in the cloud. The tool is a big cost saver for you as you to pay only when your functions execute.

2. Migration:- Migration services used to transfer data physically between your datacenter and AWS e.g DMS(Database Migration Service), SMS (Server Migration Service), Snowball

3. Storage:-

a) Amazon Glacier- It is an extremely low-cost storage service. It offers secure and fast storage for data archiving and backup.

b) Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)- It provides block-level storage to use with Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon Elastic Block Store volumes are network-attached and remain independent from the life of an instance.

c) AWS Storage Gateway- This AWS service is connecting on-premises software applications with cloud-based storage. It offers secure integration between the company’s on-premises and AWS’s storage infrastructure.

4. Security Services:-

a) IAM (Identity and Access Management) — IAM is a secure cloud security service which helps you to manage users, assign policies, form groups to manage multiple users.

b) Inspector — It is an agent that you can install on your virtual machines, which reports any security vulnerabilities.

c) Certificate Manager — The service offers free SSL certificates for your domains that are managed by Route53.

d) WAF (Web Application Firewall) — WAF security service offers application-level protection and allows you to block SQL injection and helps you to block cross-site scripting attacks.

5. Database Services:-

  1. Amazon RDS- This Database AWS service is easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud.
  2. Amazon DynamoDB- It is a fast, fully managed NoSQL database service. It is a simple service which allow cost-effective storage and retrieval of data. It also allows you to serve any level of request traffic.

6. Management Services:-

  1. CloudWatch — Cloud watch helps you to monitor AWS environments like EC2, RDS instances, and CPU utilization. It also triggers alarms depends on various metrics.
  2. CloudFormation — It is a way of turning infrastructure into the cloud. You can use templates for providing a whole production environment in minutes.

Applications of AWS services

Amazon Web services are widely used for various computing purposes like:

  • Web site hosting
  • Application hosting/SaaS hosting
  • Media Sharing (Image/ Video)
  • Mobile and Social Applications
  • Content delivery and Media Distribution
  • Storage, backup, and disaster recovery
  • Development and test environments
  • Academic Computing
  • Search Engines
  • Social Networking

Benefits of Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services(AWS) offers many benefits, let us explore a few of these ones by one:

Global network of AWS Regions

AWS has the most extensive global cloud infrastructure. No other cloud provider offers as many Regions with multiple Availability Zones connected by low latency, high throughput, and highly redundant networking. AWS has 84 Availability Zones within 26 geographic regions around the world, and has announced plans for 24 more Availability Zones and 8 more AWS Regions in Australia, Canada, India, Israel, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland, and United Arab Emirates (UAE). The AWS Region and Availability Zone model has been recognized by Gartner as the recommended approach for running enterprise applications that require high availability.

Mobile Friendly Access

Mobile friendly access includes two things:

AWS Mobile Hub

This Amazon Web Services feature is for both Android and IOS. AWS Mobile Hub supports and guides you towards the suitable and compatible feature for your app. It includes a console that helps you to access AWS services which include development, testing, and monitoring of the mobile application. It includes lucid ways to select and configure mobile app features like content delivery and push notifications.

AWS Mobile SDK

By this AWS feature, your app can directly access Amazon Web Services such as DynamoDB, S3, and Lambda. The Mobile SDK supports IOS, Android, Web, React Native, Unity and many more.

AWS Pricing:- Amazon Web Services has you covered when it comes to pricing. Firstly it offers ‘pay as you go model’, that means you pay for resources in volumes and duration you use them for. It charges you on a per-minute basis. Meaning if a resource is used for 30 minutes you be charged only for those 30 minutes and not more. It also offers a calculator that lets you track your expenses.

Zero Commitment:- Whether you need to host a website, or even a high traffic hosting content delivery network. Amazon Web Services keeps you covered. You spawn a virtual machine, a database service This happens with you not requiring to be in an upfront commitment. This is because Amazon Web Services charges you on per minute and for some resources per hour basis. This means you are not tied with any yearly, quarterly or even monthly commitments.

Scalability and Procurement

If your applications lie on-premise, procuring your servers may take a lot of time. It can be a few hours to even 1- weeks. This holds true for your software licenses. Amazon Web Services paints a very different picture when it comes to procurement. You can launch new virtual machines or instances in a matter of minutes and save a lot of time and effort.

When it comes to scalability AWS ensures you can scale up and down instantly to adjust to spikes your infrastructure may face. This is something that can be difficult to achieve on your on-premise infrastructure.

Security

Amazon Web Services takes Cloud Security to the next level. It ensures your infrastructure is secure physically and also over the network, that consumers use to access it.

  • It supports shared security model. This means the consumer can control security at the consumer end and AWS at data centre end.
  • Physical security of data centre can be ensured by the fact that there is around the cloud physical security across all the data centres that Amazon Web Services owns
  • Its Global infrastructure ensures your data is well distributed and accessible to you across the globe and is highly resilient, available and safe from disasters
  • AWS provides firewalls to man your data at the entry points of the network and also ensures encryption of data that moves over the network, ensuring end to end security
  • Amazon IAM is a service that lets you identify user who can access your resources and control who get to access what and when

Flexible

Not a lot needs to be said about the flexibility, when a platform offers, 200+ services in 245 countries. But to point out few key pointers, Amazon Web Services offers flexibility in terms of pricing, security, and even when it comes to automating the process scaling your devices. It offers, IaaS, PaaS and even serverless computing. This means from configuring everything from a scratch to directly using a platform everything is flexible for a consumer. So much so that a user can just put his code in a serverless computing service and the service takes care of everything else.

PaaS Offerings

AWS offers an infrastructure that is scalable and also covers core domains, like compute storage, databases, networking. In the process, it takes care of configuring and managing platforms. Hence it provides good options when it comes to providing PaaS services to people. Meaning people do not have to worry about setting up infrastructures.

Adaptable

They say Amazon Web Services is everyone and that is very correct. Because it gives plenty of options when you want to set up your business on the cloud. If you are starting fresh with cloud or even if you have an infrastructure that needs to move to the cloud, AWS takes care of both situations. Amazon Web Services most types of migrations and license support for a smooth transition to AWS cloud

Your Scaling up and scaling down concerns are also nullified because AWS let us you handle data and applications in different volumes.

API

API give us programmatic control over the resources we use. It comes to taking data backup, or even launching instances this all can be done API’s and in short, it gives us more power compared to AWS management console.

Industrial Use Cases of Amazon Web Services

Repp Health

We all hate waiting in hospitals for a turn to come up. As a patient, we do not have patience and want to get done with our diagnosis at the earliest. And that is understandable behaviour. However, the number of people visiting a hospital and the staff having to set up all the equipment, are some reasons that cause these situations.

Amazon Web Services provides some relief here. With the help of AWS Repp has come with cloud-based tracking solutions. It helps keep track of patients and assets that reside in the vicinity and it makes use of IoT to do so. It also updates, electronic health records considering the data from sensors that capture the movements of patients in the room.

AWS offers Server-less IoT infrastructure to this achieve this and help save as much as it can, for speeding up the overall process at the hospital

McDonald’s

It is certain that most of us know what McDonald’s is? McDonald’s is a highly popular Burger and Fast chain across the globe. They have more than 37000 outlets across the globe and serve more than 60 million people every day. This gives you some idea as to the volume of customers they handle. It is no different for home delivery they provide.

However, having a home delivery platform for such a big vendor. Amazon Web Services ensured their home delivery platform was set up in just 4 months. It is a cloud-native microservices platform. It can scale up to 20000 orders per second and the latency is less than 100 seconds. This platform ensures high integration with delivery platforms and ROI even for minimally charged orders.

WeWork

Here is a case study where an application was moved from one service AWS to the other service on AWS. WeWork has built a tool for Project management called FieldLens. Initially, this was set up on Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute. This was a monolith project that functioned well for 2 and a half years. However, it needed expansion and improvement. This came in the form of Docker and AWS Elastic Container Service. On moving this project to containers the performance improved immensely.

Talking of numbers FieldLens, now hosts 80,000 users and 110,000 projects that use containers, and are deployed through AWS Codepipeline and secured using AWS Service. It offers high integration and scalability.

There are plenty of use cases and applications that Amazon Web Services offers. And there are many customers that have invested billions in this cloud platform and continue to do so on a monthly basis. That tell you how reliable this cloud platform is. To note a few popular customers, here are some names that you may want to know about:

Popular Customers of Amazon Web Services

  1. McDonald’s
  2. Netflix
  3. Unilever
  4. Samsung
  5. MI
  6. Airbnb
  7. BMW
  8. ESPN

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