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 delivered by our AWS Training expert 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. 

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!

WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF AWS?

AWS, the world’s most comprehensive and widely used cloud platform, delivers more than 175 fully-featured services from data centers all over the world, and being AWS certified is a big fish in a small pond. It suggests that Amazon Web Services’ talents and knowledge are in great demand, and may continue to be so in the future. AWS certification not only looks nice on your CV, but it also increases the pay range or quality you want. It boosts your credibility, which will help you advance in your job.

Pre-requisites:

Well, there is no such requirement that you should have basic knowledge about the subject. If you have an idea about it is well and good, but if you are totally new to this field you will have a clear understanding and in-depth knowledge about this concept. Do not hesitate just keep learning, because learning has no limitations.

Conclusion:

Hope you must have got a clear idea and got familiar with AWS. Now you just need to enter into the world of AWS and start your journey to success.

Features of AWS:

AWS Architecture:

Amazon Web Services architecture is a basic structure that highlights the essential AWS services, like Route 53, Elastic Load Balancing, EC2, security groups, CloudFront, Amazon S3 bucket.

• Amazon S3 also mentioned as Simple Storage Service may be a service offered by AWS that provides object storage to the users through an internet service interface. it’s described as the flat service environment because it is constructed to store, protect and retrieve data from the bucket at any time from anywhere on any device, i.e a user can create a bucket, which then stores objects within the cloud. By using S3 it is easy to store and retrieve data of various types using application programming interface calls.
• An Elastic IP address is a permanent public IP address that you may assign to any EC2 instance in a given area until you release it.

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud is a web service that has a cloud-computing platform for the users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications which incorporates an OS, apps, and configurations.
• An Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) has the power to scale load balancers and applications supported real-time traffic automatically. Due to elasticity, External traffic to the servers is balanced by Elastic Load Balancer.
• EBS Snapshots are a copy of your data that may be utilized for backup and recovery, data migration across regions and accounts, and backup compliance.
• Elastic Block Storage (EBS) is a type of EC2 storage volume that is durable at the block level.

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:

-Forbes

-Gartner

-Gartner

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.

Check out our AWS Certification Training in Top Cities

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 EC2It 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.

Pay-As-You-Go:
In contrast to typical IT cost models that involve up-front capital investments for hardware and software, pay as you go is a cost model for cloud services that includes both subscription-based and consumption-based models. Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) is another name for Pay & Go, Pay Per Usage, Pay Per Use or Pay-As-You-Use.

• Cloud computing services are divided into three types, each of which might employ a different pay-as-you-go approach.
  Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a term that refers to Customer’ pay by the hour, week, or month for the services they consume. Some cloud providers charge based on how much virtual machine (VM) space is used. This strategy eliminates the need for consumers to deploy their own gear and software. IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services are among the IaaS providers.
• PaaS (platform as a service): It can be priced by the application/user or by the GB of RAM utilized each hour. When you terminate a VM, Microsoft’s PaaS now uses a per-minute pricing mechanism that keeps the VM’s state and settings while stopping the meter. PaaS vendors include Google, Oracle Public Cloud, and Windows Azure.
• Software as a Service (SaaS) is a term that describes how software Features, storage capacity, or a per-user basis can all be used to determine to price. Salesforce.com, NetSuite, and Microsoft Dynamics are just a few of the vendors on the list.

Advantages of AWS

• Economical

AWS lets clients pay only for the services they use, making it considerably more cost-effective. Furthermore, if we want to build a real server, we will have to pay for the installation and configuration of pricey hardware. As a result, it is preferable to use cloud services from cloud service providers, particularly AWS, which are both cost-effective and reliable.

• Reliability

AWS is extremely dependable since it operates 24/7 all year. If one of the servers fails, the hosted apps and services will continue to function since they can simply be shifted to another server.

• Limitless Storage Capacity

There is no limit to the amount of data that may be store. Users are often concerned about storage capacity, but AWS provides nearly limitless storage, so users do not have to pay any additional fees for storage. They can store as much as they wish.

• Recovery and backup

When compared to storing data on a physical device, AWS makes it easier to store, backup, and recover data. Almost all cloud service providers now provide the ability to restore all data in the event of a data loss, making it acceptable and helpful for any company.

• Easier Information Access

Access to Information Is Made Easier. Users may access their information from anywhere in the globe after enrolling on the AWS cloud service offering platform, as long as they have a strong Internet connection. These features, however, differ depending on the type of account or plan selected.

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 an AWS Solution Architect, therefore besides this AWS Tutorial, we have come up with a curriculum that covers exactly what you would need to crack the exam! You can have a look at the AWS Cloud Certification for further details.

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.