A recent Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) reported that AWS or Amazon Web Services is recognized as the most popular public cloud infrastructure platform, that comprises 41.5% of application workload in the public cloud. As far as revenues are concerned, Amazon Web Services dominates the public cloud market with revenue growing to $9 billion, a growth of 35% in Q3 of this past year.
The user base of AWS comprises mainly small and mid-size companies; still, 10% of the customers are enterprise-scale users, as reported by recent polls conducted by a private consulting firm. As stated by Amazon, the number of active AWS users has exceeded the 1,000,000 mark. This explains the dominance of AWS in the overall cloud services market. Even IT professionals are trying to explore their skills in AWS by taking up AWS certifications, like an AWS Solutions Architect certification.
After looking at the stats of how popular AWS is, you would surely like to know about AWS. Let’s have a look.
What is AWS?
A subsidiary of Amazon, Amazon Web Services or AWS is the world’s most comprehensive and widely adopted cloud platform, that offers over 175 fully-featured services from data centers across the globe. AWS provides cloud computing platforms and Application Programming Interfaces or APIs to companies, individuals, and governments on demand, on a metered pay-as-you-go basis.
Amazon Web Service offers cloud computing solutions that are flexible, scalable, reliable, cost-effective and easy-to-use. This platform is a combination of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), packages Software as a Service(SaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS). There is a wide range of business purpose cloud based-products offered by AWS. These products include databases, analytics, storage, networking, mobile, development tools, enterprise applications, all on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Applications Of AWS
Amazon Web Services finds its applications in various computing purposes such as:
• Search engines
• Social networking
• Website hosting
• Application hosting / SaaS hosting
• Content Delivery and Media distribution
• Storage, backup, and disaster recovery
• Development and test environments
• Mobile and Social Applications
• Media Sharing (Image/Video)
• Academic Computing
The companies that currently use AWS for their cloud solutions are Instagram, NetFlix, Dropbox, Etsy, Pinterest, Playfish, Talkbox, Ftopia, Zoopla, Smugmug, Reddit, Vodafone, SAP, Dow Jones, etc.
Benefits Of Using AWS
With so many companies using AWS for their cloud computing solutions and so much popularity, you might be wondering what is so good about Amazon Web Services. Read about the advantages of using AWS below:
• Easy Usability – it doesn’t matter that your application is an existing application or new SaaS-based application, AWS allows application providers, ISVs and vendors to host them securely and quickly. To access AWS’s application hosting platform, you can use the AWS Management Console or well-documented web services APIs.
• Flexibility – with AWS, you no longer need to make guesses on your infrastructure capacity needs. When you make decisions regarding capacity needs in advance of deployment of an application, usually you have limited resources or the extra ones that remain unused. AWS allows you to leverage auto-scaling for building a self-managing infrastructure that is aligned close to the actual needs on the basis of traffic or resource utilization. This means that you can access as little or as many resources as you need.
• Zero Capital Expenses Or CapEx: when you have AWS for cloud computing, you don’t need to worry about investing heavily in data centers and servers prior to knowing how you are going to utilize them. You are required to pay when you use the resources, also you pay according to how much you consume those resources. Hence it is entirely opposite to what people think of AWS as an expensive cloud computing platform.
• No-Commitment: AWS offers most of its services with no requirement of commitment, not even for a month. Whether you require a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for managing sites with heavy traffic, a server for hosting a small website, data warehousing service, scalable and reliable email service, or Hadoop cluster for your Big Data needs, everything is offered by AWS without any commitment. All services that are server-backed are charged on an hourly basis. This means that the moment you stop using the server, you won’t be charged for the next hour.
• AWS Is A Global Leader: Gartner recently reported that AWS currently has more than five times the computing capacity usage than the sum total of the rest of 14 service providers placed in the same Magic Quadrant. Amazon sees a global presence in more than 50 edge locations, 10 regions, and 36 availability zones. This implies that you can easily deploy your applications in multiple regions across the globe, with AWS.
• Application Programming Interface Or API: the most important feature offered by AWS is API. APIs help you in managing your infrastructure programmatically. It may include tracking backups, launching new instances, making pages, everything is possible through API.
• Security: AWS has a highly secure infrastructure, both physically and over the Internet. You can keep track of all the activities done by different users by leveraging Identity and Access Management (IAM) features and CloudTrail. To control access to instances for making it completely public or private or somewhere in between, you can configure the firewall rules accordingly. There are trained security guards 24*7 and access is authorized on a least-privilege basis.
Coming across so many advantages of AWS and its global presence, you may consider learning and getting certified in one of the certifications available in AWS.
Wrapping Up
AWS certifications recognize a candidate’s skills in using cloud computing and help professionals build effective, and innovative teams for the cloud using AWS. The certifications offered by AWS for different roles are Cloud Practitioner, Architect, Developer, and Operation roles. Specialty certifications are also offered by AWS.
You can take up online training courses available to prepare for these certifications. These Amazon Web Services training programs are often curated to suit the needs of learners and help you pass the AWS exams on your first trial.
Overall, AWS is a great option for your bootstrap website or other website development needs. Amazon Web Services will continue being a market leader for everything on the internet.