Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the leading public cloud providers that offers various cloud computing services, networking, storage and more for users to utilize them from anywhere in the world. It offers great flexibility to host legacy and modern applications. AWS also helps customers build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for a variety of applications and workloads. AWS had a partnership with VMware to host VMware on AWS to move workloads from on-prem to the cloud using existing VMware environments. The AWS-RedHat partnership offers OpenShift on the AWS cloud to host containers.
In simple words AWS allows you to do the following things that we have done in data centers for the last two decades. They are scaling for the world and making services around the world in a few clicks.
AWS Terminologies
1. Region
AWS had set up data centres around the globe. For specific geographical areas, AWS had set up one or more data centers. This geographical area is called a region. For example, to target customers around North Virginia, AWS had set up a region called us-east-1. At present AWS operates in 26 geographic regions. This allows customers to choose the nearest region for ultra low latency applications. AWS is also planning to increase the regions in the upcoming years.
2. Availability Zone
In each region, AWS will have one or more data centers and each data centre represents an availability zone. Availability Zones are distinct locations within an AWS Region that are engineered to be isolated from failures of other Availability Zones. It provides low-latency network connectivity to other Availability Zones in the same AWS Region.
3. Edge Location
Edge locations help to speed up the content delivery to the end users. In some cases, users might not be nearer to the hosted regions and one has to face latency issues due to distance. In such cases, the Edge location can be selected near the user’s location, to cache the data and serve faster to the client. Note that both availability zones and edge locations are AWS data centers but Edge locations will be primarily used for caching.
4. Local Zone
AWS keeps trying to bring infrastructure much closer to the clients/users to cut down on latency. Local zone is one such option where AWS infrastructure will be deployed with required compute, storage, database, and other selected services closer to the large population, industry, and IT centers. This brings latency to single-digit milliseconds. The following diagram illustrates the local zone. Oregon is a region (us-west2) and Los Angeles (us-west-2-lax-1) is a local zone.
5. Wavelength
AWS wavelength targets 5G users and telecom providers. To achieve ultra-low latency for the mobile applications, AWS had set up wavelength zones within the telecom provider’s data centers at the edge of the 5G network. So that application traffic can reach EC2 instances which are running the wavelength zone without leaving the mobile provider network.
6. Outposts
AWS Outposts is primarily for customers who can’t keep their data in the public cloud due to various compliance requirements. Outposts is a pool of computing and storage resources racked and deployed in the customer data canter. Unlike other rack servers, these servers and storage can be managed using AWS native console with the same setup of tools and services. It will act like an AWS cloud extension. Since outposts will be placed in the customer’s data center, it will reduce the latency and speed up the data processing needs.
AWS services mostly fall in any one of the following categories which consist of IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and PaaS (Platform as a Service) solutions.
- Compute
- Storage
- Databases
- Migration & Transfer
- Networking & Content Delivery
- Developer Tools
- Management and Governance Services
- Analytics
- Security, Identity, and Compliance
- Application Integration Services
- Frontend and Mobile Services
- Business Productivity
- Desktop & App Streaming
- Artificial Intelligence
- Customer Engagement
- Game Development
- Internet of Things
In the upcoming article, we will explore each service in AWS and how to kick-start yourself into the AWS world.
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