Exploring Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a collection of cloud services hosted by Amazon company , The most central and well-known of these services are Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3. It was officially launched in 2006 and until now has attained a significant growth.

We will discuss some of the most vastly used services in AWS

Amazon EC2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)

Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, secure, fast, inexpensive infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.

Amazon Cloudfront (CDN)

Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) offered by Amazon Web Services. CloudFront operates on a pay-as-you-go basis. The service was launched in beta on November 18, 2008.

Amazon Route 53

Amazon Route 53 (Route 53) is part of Amazon.com‘s cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS). Route 53 provides scalable and highly available Domain Name Service (DNS). The name (Route 53) is a reference to TCP or UDP port 53, where DNS server requests are addressed.^[1] In addition to being able to route users to various AWS services, including EC2 instances, Route 53 also enables AWS customers to route users to non-AWS infrastructure. Route 53’s servers are distributed throughout the world.

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES)

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is a highly scalable and cost-effective bulk and transactional email-sending service for businesses and developers. Amazon SES eliminates the complexity and expense of building an in-house email solution or licensing, installing, and operating a third-party email service. The service integrates with other AWS services, making it easy to send emails from applications being hosted on services such as Amazon EC2. With Amazon SES there is no long-term commitment, minimum spend or negotiation required – businesses can utilize a free usage tier and after that enjoy low fees for the number of emails sent plus data transfer fees.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while managing time-consuming database administration tasks, freeing you up to focus on your applications and business.

Amazon RDS gives you access to the capabilities of a familiar MySQL, Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server database engine. This means that the code, applications, and tools you already use today with your existing databases can be used with Amazon RDS. Amazon RDS automatically patches the database software and backs up your database, storing the backups for a user-defined retention period and enabling point-in-time recovery. You benefit from the flexibility of being able to scale the compute resources or storage capacity associated with your Database Instance (DB Instance) via a single API call.