Amazon Web Services Part A

This is the 1st installment in my blog post series on Amazon Web Services based on what I learn on the video training course by Infinite Skills on this cloud computing service. Cloud computing is at a stage electricity was at over a hundred years when factories needed to run their own generators to provide power to machinery. This machinery was very expensive and anything but cost effective with any repairs having to be done by specialists who were also expensive. Nowadays we have electricity boards that provide almost infinite power at low cost and we don't have the hassle of repairing generators. In the same way cloud computing offers huge computing power at low cost and in many instances does away with having to build servers and buy associated software. AWS is the biggest cloud provider in the world and is years ahead of its closest rivals. There is even a free tier with any of Amazon's services letting you try before you buy and you are only charged for what you use with things like storage used being averaged out for the whole month allowing for surges in demand. Generally you limit how much you use EC2 or elastic compute cloud which is the most expensive and typically 70% of your bill. Generally Amazon automate what services they provide you in a way that minimizes your bill. There are over 30 services provided by AWS with lots of new ones coming out all the time. Amazon gets a good deal on the hardware they buy for their server farms and do their best to pass these savings on to their clients. They call their server farms availability zones or AZ's and they have them in different geographic zones with the default one you use being in Virginia, USA and a company will typically use at least 2 of these AZ's in case one goes down. Amazon do have very tight security at these locations and operates redundancy which means everything is backed up to several servers so if one goes down there is no outage. EC2 is a virtual server with you needing to provide your own operating system and software. They charge for EC2 hourly. Simple storage service or S3 is your main storage and is used where something needs to be written once and read multiple times. You could run everything with in EC2 but it would relatively be very expensive. You are generally better off letting Amazon sort what services you have to use and charge you accordingly. Some companies even write their own applications to do a similar job to the services with in AWS although you need a very good reason if you do that.