Getting started with AWS
Tags: aws, cloud, cloudstorage, beginners
Published: 2024-01-16 20:32:09

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has become the most popular cloud platform used all around the world since it officially launched back in 2006. The cloud platform provides wider range of services such as platform as a service (Paas), Software as a service (Saas) and Infrastruture as a service (Iaas) helping industry titans like Netflix, Dropbox, and Reddit in it's growth. This cloud platform businesses to quickly build and deploy applications in the cloud. Now let's dive into what AWS actually is and what are the types of services that it provides.

## **Understanding AWS Cloud**
AWS allows users to rent a virtual computer on which they can run own computer applications known as compute power. One of the fundamental services provided by AWS. AWS offers over 200 cloud services including computing, storage, networking, database, analytics, application services, deployment, management, and tools for the cloud that help businesses to scale and grow.

**Some key benefits of using AWS are:**

- Flexible pay-as-you-go model - Pay only for what you use
- Scalability - Instantly spin up or down resources as your requirement changes.
- Global infrastructure - Deploy apps across geographic regions
- Security - elps you protect your data, accounts, and workloads from unauthorized access, DDoS protection and encryption
- Frequent updates - New features and services are updated regularly. So you can stay upto date to latest tech.
- No upfront costs or long-term commitments required. 
- Savings Plans and Reserved Instances allow you to purchase storages with discounts. 
- AWS also provides 24x7 customer and technical support.

**Major AWS Cloud Services**
Some of the major AWS cloud services include:
- Compute - This is the backbone of AWS which provides processing power to run applications. The primary compute service like EC2 provides scalable virtual servers to deploy apps. Auto Scaling automatically adjusts capacity based on your demand.

- Storage -  AWS provides reliable storage services like Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for storing large amounts of data. S3 offers unlimited object storage with high durability. EBS provides block storage volumes for EC2. Storage Gateway connects on-prem storage to cloud.

- Database - Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is a managed service which is easy to set up, operate and scale a relational databases. A financial services can use Amazon RDS to store customer's transaction and finance data then use SQL quiries to analyze customers behaviour and make data driven decision. 

- Networking - VPC for isolating resources in virtual network. Route 53 for DNS management. Direct Connect for private connectivity between on-prem and cloud. a company could use VPC to isolate application from public network which creates a private secure network.

- Analytics - EMR for big data processing with Spark, Hadoop, Hbase. QuickSight for business intelligence and visualization.   Amazon Redshift is a fully managed also can store and analyze extremely large volumes of data, typically on the order of petabytes. A healthcare research institute could use Amazon Redshift to analyze large datasets of patient information to identify trends and improve patient care.

- Security - Identity and Access Management (IAM) for access control. KMS for encryption key management. CloudTrail for logging and auditing. A business could use IAM to control which employees have access to certain AWS resources which provides them a better security for their applications and datas. 

- Management - CloudFormation for infrastructure provisioning using code. CloudWatch for monitoring and alerting.

- Developer Tools - CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, CodePipeline for CI/CD. X-Ray for analyzing app performance. AWS CodeStar enables you to quickly develop, build, and deploy applications on AWS giving software developers flexibility by writing them code to deploy a finished application.

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/quvqv1s5wde72hvapyg9.png)


## **You Can Also Get Started**

AWS offers a free tier for new users to experiment with certain services without incurring costs. The AWS free tier offers limited usage of key services like EC2, S3, RDS for 12 months. Create an AWS account, explore the management console and launch instances to gain hands-on experience with core AWS infrastructure and capabilities.