AWS Cloud services: a friendly introduction
Tags: cloud, aws, cloudcomputing, productivity
Published: 2023-06-26 10:58:28

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In today's digital landscape, cloud computing plays a big role in handling codebases, databases and digital assets for businesses and individuals. One of the leading players in the cloud computing game is Amazon Web Services (AWS for short). By making use of the many services AWS offers, businesses get access to a wide range of tools to scale and maintain their digital environments in the cloud ☁️

## 🤔 What is Amazon Web Services (AWS)? 

But, what is AWS exactly, you might ask. Well, AWS is a cloud computing product developed and maintained by Amazon with the aim to provide a wide range of secure and useful services to businesses so they can keep their web environments up and running, and easily maintainable and scalable. AWS offers all kinds of infrastructure services such as:

- computing power
- storage
- databases
- Machine Learning
- Artificial Intelligence

The list of services you get access to in AWS is actually pretty long, so you bet you have a lot to choose from to be creative.

## 🔑 What are the key features of AWS?

You might now ask what are the key features of AWS. Here are some of the most relevant ones:

1: Scalability - it is no lie that AWS provides a good ability to scale resources (up or down based on demand). Two of the most interesting features to mention are the **EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instances** and the **auto-scaling (based on traffic or other metrics)**.

2: Reliability - but, what does it mean to be, "reliable"? Well, I am sure no user likes when the website or content they want to access is not available or when the servers go down, right? AWS has got you covered here too. It provides multiple **availability zones** and data centers in several locations across the globe. This ensures that the content is accessible with the lowest latency, is less vulnerable to downtimes and failures, and therefore, more _reliable_.

3: Security - no user and business want an insecure web environment or unauthorised access to data, right? Imagine you were running a hospital database. Would you want the patient data to be accessed by some bad intentioned individual to spread on the internet? I suppose not. AWS has as one of their highest priorities the security of the instances and their whole cloud environment. It provides services and tools to configure security and encryption such as:

- Server-Side Encryption (SSE)
- Client-Side Encryption
- AWS Certificate Manager
- AWS CloudHSM
- Identity and Access Management (IAM)
- security groups
- Network ACLs (Access Lists)
...

4: Flexibility - one other interesting and motivating aspect of AWS is the ability to scale and innovate with the various services it provides and the scalability we mentioned earlier. However, there is much more juice in the glass 🧃:

- supports various programming languages and provides different SDKs for your specific code needs
- provides virtual servers, instances, storage solutions, big data analytics, ...

## 🏂 Key benefits of AWS

As you could see with the above mentioned, AWS provides a really nice and easy to scale policy. Hereby mentioned are some of its main benefits:

1: Cost-effectiveness - AWS provides several pricing tiers and models, but it also gives you the ability to save costs by defining how your instance will behave when demand grows or decreases, and you also don't have the need to pay rents for a physical data center and hardware as all you need is in the **cloud** ☁️ and at the tip of your fingers.

2: Global reach - one of the key benefits of deploying on AWS is the ability to provide content and services in a more reliable manner, with the least latency possible, regardless of their location. This is achieved with:

- availability zones
- edge locations
- Amazon S3
- Amazon DynamoDB

3: Innovation and Agility - innovating and scaling in AWS is one of the "tastiest" bits about this "juice" 🧃 You get the flexibility of working with various programming languages, frameworks, development environments, AI and ML tools, and so on. You can even process huge chunks of data and AWS will still not complain - as long as you use the right resources, of course 🤪

## 👏 Conclusion

These are some of the most important aspects for an introduction to AWS that I could think of, but bear with me as this is the beginning of this series about the AWS cloud services, because trust me, it is a very big topic and no single article can cover even the basics of the basics 😉

In general, I think the AWS gives us access to do more with our creativity and needs as developers and business owners. There are a lot of services to choose from, which means you are not limited to a short range of tools. It is easily scalable and you can be creative with the different tools and options to configure them.

### Thank you for reading!👋

After having gone through all of these bits and bytes of cloud computing in AWS, you should now be able to get started in learning more about it by setting up an account and exploring their platform. Congratulations 🙌 and I hope it was helpful for you!🙂

I'd like to thank you for reading my article and invite you to follow me on Dev.to, as well as my other platforms:

    GitHub: https://github.com/bcostaaa01
    Twitter: https://twitter.com/bruno2001costa

I look forward to seeing you on my next one!

Until then,
Happy Coding!👩‍💻