Amazon Web Services

Imagine that one of the world’s biggest online companies allowed you to rent fast, reliable cloud computing power, space and services, allowing you to do away with much of the physical hardware needed for your business, products, and services - that’s Amazon Web Services in a nutshell.

The success story of Amazon, going from founder Jeff Bezos selling books in his garage, to running the world’s largest online bookstore, to leveraging that computing power to sell computing resources and services is quite an eye opener - and really shows you how one business idea can over time morph into so much more - from books to billions in computing services.

What is Amazon Web Services?

Amazon Web Services, or AWS for short, is a cloud computing platform that offers paid on-demand services to customers. This services allows customers to set up virtual computers with customized server, hardware and software configurations, available to scale and configure at the click of the button.

The AWS platform contains many services to choose from including databasing, computing power, networking, memory, deployment services, IoT tools, and more. These include:

AWS EC2 - servers
Amazon S3 - block storage
AWS Relational Database Service - relational databases
Amazon Route 53 - domain name management
AWS OpsWorks - devops automation with chef
Amazon Simple Queue Service - a messaging queue
AWS IoT Service - for connecting IoT devices to the cloud
Amazon ElastiCache - in memory data store
AWS Lambda - for automatically scalable serverless running of code, where you pay for execution rather than server time, and don’t need to worry about managing servers
Elastic Load Balancing - for balancing traffic across EC2 servers
AWS CodeDeploy - for automatic code deployment to servers
Amazon Elasticsearch Service - for management of cloud hosted Elasticsearch
Amazon CloudFront - as a content delivery network

Companies using AWS

Companies of all sizes worldwide use AWS for their scalable solutions infrastructure as it is highly customizable and can be used for small, in-house products through to large scale, enterprise solutions - and everything in between. This includes tasks like building distributed software, projects that require fluid scaling up, and simple data warehousing. Companies that use AWS include:

Adobe - with enterprise software like Adobe LiveCycle Forms and Adobe CQ5, Adobe requires always available, high performing solutions for their customers. By using the AWS cloud, they can concentrate on their own software without having to worry about infrastructure, too.

BMW - BMW’s car-as-a-sensor service leverages incoming sensor data from its worldwide fleet of BMW 7 series car to provide on the fly map information to customers. Utilizing AWS services allows BMW to rapidly change load requirements without having to worry about manual configuration.

Heroku - while offering platform as a service themselves Heroku actually uses AWS under the hood.

CapitalOne, Docker, Comcast, GE, Johnson & Johnson, Expedia, Samsung, Atlassian, Netflix, Seaco, and more…

Most likely it would be much easier to list companies that do not use AWS, than these that use it.

Benefits of AWS

High performance computing power

Reliability

Multiple different security options

Fluid scalability

Uptime guarantees

High levels of configurability

Granular pricing

From our DevOps experience, AWS is easy to use, easy to configure, and flexible. We can choose from on-demand or dedicated hosts, databases of all sizes and performance levels, and pay only what we use for elastic load balancing, just for a few examples. This allows us to set up client projects succinctly and methodically. In some cases, such as one of our clients, switching over to AWS services can save a huge amount of money - read the full story in our blog.

Want to know more about how using Amazon Web Services could benefit your business? Interested in rolling over existing infrastructure to the cloud, for all the benefits mentioned above? Make sure to get in contact with our AWS experts and IT infrastructure professionals at iRonin for more info about our DevOps services.

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