AWS Tutorial: Introduction to Cloud Computing

AWS Tutorial

This AWS tutorial is designed for all the professionals who are interested to learn about Cloud Computing and will help you in career paths aimed for AWS Solution Architect, AWS Engineer, DevOps Engineer, Cloud Architect etc. In this AWS Tutorial today we will first try to understand what is AWS and then shall move ahead to learn about its services, at the end, I have also added a short video for a crisp summary but first let’s understand why are we learning about AWS, why is there a sudden need to know about cloud technologies.

Back in 2006-2007, companies were using their own private servers to create services like for storage, computing, etc. But now with internet speeds becoming better, companies big or small have started understanding the power of the cloud, therefore they are shifting their data to the cloud for improved performance, so that they can focus on core-competency. 

For example, Netflix is a popular video streaming service which the whole world uses today, back in 2008 Netflix suffered a major database corruption, and for three days there operations were halted. The problem was scaling, that is when they realized the need for a highly reliable, horizontally scalable, distributed systems in the cloud. Came in AWS, and since then their growth has been off the charts. 

Gartner says, By 2020, a Corporate “No-Cloud” Policy Will Be as Rare as a “No-Internet” Policy Today. Interesting, isn’t it?

Since every company has started to adopt the cloud services in one way or the other, and AWS being a major player in the cloud services industry, it makes sense to learn about AWS Cloud services. 

Build Your Cloud Skills with AWS

Having said that, What is AWS?

Amazon Web Services(AWS) is a Amazon.com subsidiary which offers cloud-computing services at very affordable rates, therefore making its customer base strong from small scale companies like Pinterest (which has just 5 employees) to big enterprises like D-Link. 

What is Cloud Computing?

It is the use of remote servers on the internet to store, manage and process data rather than a local server or personal computer. 

There are basically 3 categories in cloud computing:

• SaaS (Software as a Service)
  • It allows companies to use software without having to purchase them, which reduces the expenditure of the company drastically, since they are already installed on the cloud server they can be quickly deployed and therefore saves time.
• PaaS (Platform as a Service)
  • It allows developers to build applications, collaborate on projects without having to purchase or maintain infrastructure.
• IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)
  • It allows companies to rent servers, storage space, etc. from a cloud provider.

When we talk about AWS, it’s more of an IaaS, moving along, let’s take a deep dive into AWS and understand what all services it has to offer us, but before that lets understand why there is a lot of buzz in the industry about AWS which therefore led to this awesome AWS Tutorial!

Read more about What is Cloud Computing.

Global Cloud Computing Forecasts and Market Predictions

Here are a few interesting insights provided by the Industry Knowledge Leaders which gives us a very clear perspective as to why understanding and adoption of AWS is highly recommended for IT professionals:

Worldwide spending on public cloud services will grow at a 19.4% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from nearly $70B in 2015 to more than $141B in 2019.

-Forbes

By 2019, more than 30 percent of the 100 largest vendors’ new software investments will have shifted from cloud-first to cloud-only.

-Gartner

The Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market has been growing more than 40 percent in revenue per year since 2011, and it is projected to continue to grow more than 25 percent per year through 2019.

-Gartner

 Master AWS Architect Skills

Now, let’s move ahead in this AWS Tutorial and explore the different domains in which AWS offer services:

• Compute
  It is used to process data on the cloud by making use of powerful processors which serve multiple instances at a time.
• Storage and Content Delivery
  The storage as the name suggests, is used to store data in the cloud, this data can be stored anywhere but content delivery on the other hand is used to cache data nearer to the user so as to provide low latency.
• Database
  The database domain is used to provide reliable relational and non relational database instances managed by AWS.
• Networking
  It includes services which provide a variety of networking features such as security, faster access etc.
• Management Tools
  It includes services which can be used to manage and monitor your AWS instances.
• Security and Identity
  It includes services for user authentication or limiting access to a certain set of audience on your AWS resources.
• Application Services
  It includes simple services like notifications, emailing and queuing.

To include every customer need under the sun, amazon has further categorized services  under each domain. Let’s discuss each one of them.

• Compute
  

• AWS EC2
  It is a web service which provides re-sizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make the web scale computing easier for developers. To know more about the service you can refer to our AWS EC2 blog. To know more, please go through the AWS EC2 blog

• AWS Elastic Beanstalk
  Elastic Beanstalk lets you quickly deploy and manage applications in AWS without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. 

• AWS Elastic Load Balancing
  
  ELB automatically manages the workload on your instances and distributes them to other instances in case of an instance failure.

• AWS Lambda
  
  AWS Lambda is used to execute backend code without worrying about the underlying architecture, you just upload the code and it runs, it’s that simple! To know more, please go through the AWS Lambda Blog

• AWS Autoscaling
  

The Autoscaling feature is used to scale up and down automatically as and when required. To know more, please go through the AWS EC2/Autoscaling Blog

• Storage and Content Delivery

•  S3 AWS
  
  S3 stands for simple storage service, it is used for storing data in the form of objects in the AWS Cloud. To know more about S3, please go through the S3 AWS Blog

• Amazon CloudFront
  CloudFront is a content delivery network which is used to cache data to an edge location which reduces latency. To know more about Amazon Cloudfront, please go through the S3 AWS/CloudFront Blog

• Amazon EBS
  

Amazon Elastic Block Storage is a storage service wherein each block of storage acts like a separate hard drive. To know more about EBS, please refer our AWS EC2/EBS Blog

• Amazon Glacier
  Glacier is an archiving service offered by Amazon, which offers low cost data archiving. To know more about Amazon Glacier, please refer our S3 AWS/Glacier Blog

• AWS Import/Export Snowball
  
  It offers physical transfer of data between user’s location and AWS data centers, the device which is used to transfer the data is called Snowball. To know more about AWS Snowball, please refer out S3 AWS/Snowball Blog.

• AWS Storage Gateway
  It is used to provide seamless integration with data security features between your on premise software appliance and AWS Cloud. 

• Database

• Amazon Aurora
  

It is a relational database engine that combines the speed and reliability of high-end commercial databases and the cost effectiveness and simplicity of open-source databases. 

• Amazon RDS
  Amazon RDS is a managed relational database service which does routine database tasks  in 6 familiar databases like  Amazon Aurora, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and PostgreSQL. To know more, please refer our RDS AWS Blog.

• Amazon DynamoDB
  

It is a fully managed No-SQL database service. It is known for extremely low latencies and scalability.

• Amazon ElastiCache
  It is a web service that makes it easy to set up, manage and scale a distributed cache-in environment in the cloud.

• Amazon Redshift
  

Amazon Redshift is a fully managed petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud.

• Networking

• VPC AWS
  Amazon VPC lets you launch AWS resources in a virtual network that you define. It closely resembles a traditional network that you’d operate in your data center.

• AWS Direct Connect
  

It helps you establish a private connection between your premises and AWS, therefore giving better network performance and throughput than an Internet based connection.

• Amazon Route 53
  Route 53 is a highly scalable and highly available Domain Name System by Amazon AWS. The name is in reference to the TCP and UDP’s port 53 where DNS requests are addressed.

• Management Tools

• Amazon CloudWatch
  

It is a monitoring tool by AWS which is used to keep a track on the AWS resources and the applications you run on Amazon AWS.

• AWS CloudFormation
  It is a service which helps you setup and model your Amazon AWS resources so that you can spend less time managing these resources and more time focusing on the development.

• AWS CloudTrail
  

AWS CloudTrail is a logging service which records the API calls to your Amazon AWS account and delivers them to you.

• AWS Command Line Tool
  It is an all in one tool to manage all your AWS services, by downloading and configuring only one tool you can manage all the AWS services through the command line.

• AWS OpsWorks
  

It is a configuration management tool that helps configure and operate applications of all size and shapes using Chef.

• Trusted Advisor
  Trusted Advisor is a customized cloud monitoring tool, that analyzes your AWS environment and gives insights on the expense, performance improvement, security gaps and reliability.

• Security and Identity

• AWS Identity and Access Management(IAM)
  

It is an AWS service that helps you control access to your AWS resources for your users.

• AWS Key Management Service
  It is a managed service that helps you create and control encryption keys which is used to encrypt your data, and uses Hardware Security Modules to protect the security of your keys.

• Application Services

• Amazon SES
  

It is a cost effective emailing service which is built on the scalable and reliable infrastructure of Amazon.com

• Amazon SNS
  It is a web service offered by AWS that manages the delivery of messages to subscribed endpoints or clients.

• Amazon SQS
  

It is a fast, reliable and scalable message queuing service, it can be used to transmit any volume of data at any level of throughput, without losing any messages or without the use of any other service.

AWS Pricing

• AWS follows a pay per use model, meaning you only pay for what you use. For example, if you are using 10GB of space on S3 on AWS, you would be paying only for that 10GB, traditionally you have to buy an ‘x’ amount of storage say 20GB in advance, and even if you are using 10GB in the purchased space, you will be billed for the whole 20GB.
• You can get started with AWS for free, AWS runs a free usage tier in which you can use the AWS services in a very basic manner for free.

AWS Certification

Now what next after you know all these AWS services? 
AWS certifications are much sought after credentials in today’s IT world. You can plan for getting certified, and choose from a number of certifications offered by Amazon, not to worry, we have a detailed guide for you to choose the right certification.

The most in-demand certification is for the Associate Solution Architect.

AWS Jobs

Who is a solution architect?

A solution architect is typically a part of the solution development team, who translates functional requirements into an architecture.

With regards to AWS, a Solution Architect would design and define AWS architecture for existing systems, migrating them to cloud architectures as well as developing technical roadmaps for future AWS cloud implementations.

Now why would you become an AWS solution architect?

Fig.  AWS Solution Architect job postings from Indeed.com

You can clearly identify in the graph above, that the job postings are rising each year for an AWS Solution Architect.

So, how can you become an AWS Solution Architect?

To become a Solution Architect you will need extensive knowledge and hands-on exposure with AWS services.

Don’t worry edureka! is here to help you with every step on your journey, for becoming a AWS Solution Architect, therefore besides this AWS Tutorial, we have come up with a curriculum which covers exactly what you would need to crack the exam! You can have a look here at the course details for AWS training.

Become an AWS Cloud Architect

Furthermore, this AWS Tutorial blog will be updated frequently as we expand our blog section on AWS services, so stay tuned! 

Got a question for us? Please mention it in the comments section of this AWS Tutorial and we will get back to you.