Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides reliable, scalable, and economical cloud computing services.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a US cloud computing provider that was founded in 2006 as a subsidiary of the online mail order company Amazon.com. Numerous popular services such as Dropbox, Netflix, Foursquare or Reddit rely on Amazon Web Services. In 2017, Gartner ranked AWS as the leading international provider in cloud computing.

Components

Server

The EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) are virtual servers running either a Linux distribution or Microsoft Windows Server. They have no fixed contract term and are billed by the hour or even by the second. There are several tariffs to choose from, which differ based on the available RAM and compute units, which correspond to virtual processors. Compared to other providers, virtual machine instances are not persistent. This means that the contents of the RAM are deleted when the instance is stopped.

Storage

S3 (Simple Storage Service) is a file hosting service that can theoretically store any amount of data and is billed based on usage. Access is via HTTP/HTTPS. Amazon first introduced the concept of buckets and objects, which resembles directories and files and has become a standard that other providers are emulating. Amazon also offers network drives with Elastic File System and file archiving with Glacier. Amazon promises a “99.9999999” percent data shelf life.

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provides block-level storage that can be attached to Amazon EC2 instances.

To facilitate the transfer of large amounts of data, AWS provides rentable disk storage through its Snowball service, to which large amounts of data can be copied and returned via package service. Transferring very large amounts of data (several hundred terabytes to petabytes) to the cloud is thus much faster.

Network

CloudFront is a content delivery network that can deliver content from other AWS services, such as EC2 or S3, in a globally distributed manner to reduce access time. The service is limited to the HTTP(S) protocol. Depending on configuration, individual files or entire domains can be delivered via CloudFront, optionally encrypted via SSL. In addition, Amazon operates a domain name service under the name Route 53, which enables the reciprocal translation of IP addresses and domains.

Database

Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL compatible relational database engine that combines the speed and availability of sophisticated commercial databases and the ease of use and cost effectiveness of open source databases. Amazon Aurora is up to five times faster than standard MySQL databases and three times faster than standard PostgreSQL databases.

Amazon DynamoDB is a key-value and document database that provides single-digit millisecond performance for arbitrarily large data sets. It is a fully managed multi-region multimaster database with built-in security, backup and recovery, and in-memory caching for Internet-scale applications. DynamoDB can handle more than 10 trillion queries per day and support spikes of more than 20 million queries per second.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) provides cost-effective and scalable capacity while automating time-consuming administrative tasks such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups. Amazon RDS is available on multiple database instance types - optimized for storage, performance, or I/O - and offers six familiar database engines to choose from, including Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle Database, and SQL Server. The AWS Database Migration Service can be used to migrate or replicate your existing databases to Amazon RDS.

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a fast, scalable, highly available, and fully managed document database service that supports MongoDB workloads. Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) was built from the ground up to provide the performance, scalability, and availability needed to run mission-critical MongoDB workloads at scale.

Development

With Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon offers a PaaS for Java, Python, Docker and other platforms. In addition, Simple Workflow Service (SWS), Simple Email Service (SES), Simple Queue Service (SQS) or Simple Notification Service (SNS) are further services for developers. The latter is suitable, for example, to send notifications about certain events of other AWS services via email or SMS. Furthermore, applications can be deployed on Amazon Web Services in the so-called AWS Marketplace, where they can be booked by third parties.

Directory

AWS Identity and Access Management (called IAM) is a directory service for managing users and resources in an organization. Without Amazon IAM, login to any AWS services is limited to the personal Amazon account, which grants administrative rights and may be a security risk in production use. Identity and Access Management can be used to create users, group them, and control their access to virtually any AWS service, such as EC2 or S3.

Management

In recent years, Amazon has developed numerous web services that serve to manage the core offering. For example, Amazon CloudWatch introduced the possibility to monitor virtual servers on EC2 and, if necessary, to automatically adjust the selected tariff and its resources based on the utilization (scalability). Since the beginning of 2012, a dedicated network connection to Amazon Web Services can be established with Amazon Direct Connect, which is implemented via third-party web hosts and is intended to facilitate the transfer of large volumes of data and improve IT security and data protection.