What is Cloud Computing? Why AWS?
Cloud computing is a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the internet. These services are divided into three main categories: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS).
Cloud computing is named as such because the information being accessed is found remotely in the cloud or a virtual space. Companies that provide cloud services enable users to store files and applications on remote servers and then access all the data via the Internet. This means the user is not required to be in a specific place to gain access to it, allowing the user to work remotely.
Cloud computing takes all the heavy lifting involved in crunching and processing data away from the device you carry around or sit and work at. It also moves all of that work to huge computer clusters far away in cyberspace. The Internet becomes the cloud, and voilà—your data, work, and applications are available from any device with which you can connect to the Internet, anywhere in the world.
Cloud computing can be both public and private. Public cloud services provide their services over the Internet for a fee. Private cloud services, on the other hand, only provide services to a certain number of people. These services are a system of networks that supply hosted services. There is also a hybrid option, which combines elements of both the public and private services.
Cloud computing has two meanings. The most common refers to running workloads remotely over the internet in a commercial provider’s data center, also known as the “public cloud” model. Popular public cloud offerings—such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Salesforce’s CRM system, and Microsoft Azure—all exemplify this familiar notion of cloud computing. Today, most businesses take a multi-cloud approach, which simply means they use more than one public cloud service.
The second meaning of cloud computing describes how it works: a virtualized pool of resources, from raw, compute power to application functionality, available on demand. When customers procure cloud services, the provider fulfills those requests using advanced automation rather than manual provisioning. The key advantage is agility: the ability to apply abstracted compute, storage, and network resources to workloads as needed and tap into an abundance of pre-built services.
IaaS (infrastructure as a service)
At a basic level, IaaS public cloud providers offer storage and compute services on a pay-per-use basis. But the full array of services offered by all major public cloud providers is staggering: highly scalable databases, virtual private networks, big data analytics, developer tools, machine learning, application monitoring, and so on. Amazon Web Services was the
PaaS (platform as a service)
PaaS provides sets of services and workflows that specifically target developers, who can use shared tools, processes, and APIs to accelerate the development, testing, and deployment of applications. Salesforce’s Heroku and Force.com are popular public cloud PaaS offerings; Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry and Red Hat’s OpenShift can be deployed on-premises or accessed through the major public clouds. For enterprises, PaaS can ensure that developers have ready access to resources, follow certain processes, and use only a specific array of services, while operators maintain the underlying infrastructure.
How Does Cloud Computing Work?
The cloud is a decentralized place to share information through satellite networks. Every cloud application has a host, and the hosting company is responsible for maintaining the massive data centers that provide the security, storage capacity and computing power needed to maintain all of the information users send to the cloud.
The most prominent companies hosting the cloud are major players like Amazon (Amazon Web Services), Microsoft (Azure), Apple (iCloud), and Google (Google Drive), but there’s also a plethora of other players, large and small. These hosting companies can sell the rights to use their clouds and store data on their networks, while also offering the end-user an ecosystem that can communicate between devices and programs (e.g., download a song on your laptop and it’s instantly synced to the iTunes software on your iPhone).
Why AWS?
Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a cloud platform to a small-scale industry such as Quora as well as to large-scale industries such as D-link. Myriads of people are now using Amazon Web Services cloud products to build applications as the products build with AWS are reliable, flexible, and scalable.
Furthermore, AWS was the first to introduce pay as you go cloud computing model that scales to provide users with computing, storage, or throughput as needed.Amazon Web services help a user or an organization to build a sophisticated application, to compute power, deliver content, store database, or some other functionals.
Companies do have their private servers where they store data, but sometimes they face hardships to manage them. Moreover, there are chances that the server may crash and the whole work will be in halt. As the internet connection is fast nowadays any firm can import or export data quickly and won’t face a problem using cloud services. So, Amazon Web Services provide cloud storage so that company can access this any time.
The cloud storage provided by Amazon Web Services is safe, secure, and highly durable. With AWS you can build applications for colleagues, consumers, enterprise support, or e-commerce. The applications built with AWS are highly sophisticated and scalable.
Pro’s
AWS is trusted by many firms either it is small or it is big because of the features it provides. AWS helps companies with a wide variety of workloads such as game development, data processing, warehousing, achievement, development, and many more. If you start an organization you will need servers that will depend on your demand. AWS provides a feature that allows you to choose servers according to your choice. These AWS features will save your time, money, and potential.
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 for more resources if you need more than five Elastic IP addresses per region. and push notifications.
Organizations launch different projects and guess what capacity they will need. AWS helps them by providing this capacity at a minimum cost. Through this benefit, their workload is decreased and they can focus and built different ideas. The customers predict the capacity and they pay higher prices than that but AWS provides them the capacity at low-cost. The moment you feel like you should increase your capacity you can do it freely. Moreover, if you realize that you do not need so much storage you can get back to the previous storage and all you have to pay for what you use.
Amazon allows you to innovate and scale while keeping a secure environment and all you have to pay only for the services you use. AWS provides an end-to-end approach that secures and hardens your infrastructure. Amazon Web Service provides you with the security you need at a lower cost than in an on-premises environment.
Con’s
AWS is the fastest growing cloud provider, and it offers more than 70 different services. For just about any service that you could think of, there is probably already a specialized service on AWS where you can deploy your setup. And, the entire AWS infrastructure is at your disposal.
However, this doesn’t mean that you can do whatever you want. Some of the AWS limitations are obvious, but others are hidden and should be carefully considered before you get started.
One of the main features of all Cloud systems, including AWS, is scalability and the ability to increase resources up when necessary. So, what’s the problem?
The answer is quite simple. You don’t need that many resources. Most of the companies don’t need to have more than five Elastic IPs per region or more than 20 EC2 instances per region. The default limitations are set based on the needs of an average user. Increase these and you’ll pay more.
The good news is that you can submit a request AWS places default limits on several critical resources. These include:
EC2 Instance: Default Limit: 20 per region
EBS Volume: Default Limit: 5,000 volumes or aggregate size of 20 TiB
Elastic IP: Default Limit: 5 per region
Elastic Load Balancer: Default Limit: 10
High I/O Instance: Default Limit:5
Virtual Private Cloud: Default Limit: 5
Technology is developing each day, and it will surely be possible to send 100 emails per second using Amazon SES at a point in the future. It’s just not feasible right now.
The best way to protect your business against such limitations is to be aware of them. So, make sure you have all the relevant information before you make an unreasonable request. It’s much easier to work around technical limitations than trying to fix them.
Finally, I’d like to mention some of the concerns that often come up when considering a move to the cloud, such as downtime, security, privacy, limited control, and backup protection. It is natural to worry about such issues (they are crucial to your business, after all), but the entire Cloud computing process and system already takes care of most of them. Large and respectable companies, such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, stand behind these systems and I believe that we can trust them with our business since they use the same resources to run theirs.
Do check out a blog about the AWS Interview Questions and Answers
