Leveraging AWS for your Company’s Cloud Needs

Cloud storage can be defined as an offsite, remote storage location offered by various organizations to reduce the cost of storing and effectively accessing data. This storage can be accessed by people with the right authorization with the help of the Internet. It is an up-andcoming technology preferred by many businesses due to the cost savings and security it offers.

Why should your company use Cloud?

Over the past few years, Cloud Computing has evolved miraculously. From just a few Unicorns using the cloud to cloud engineers being among the first 10 employees of any startup, cloud computing has come a long way. This huge boom has also come with a huge development in the field. And among the leaders of cloud technology is AWS.

Why AWS?

Amazon Web Service (AWS) is among the pioneers who understood the potential of cloud computing and invested heavily in it. AWS started offering its services in 2004, with fairly limited services, such as primary storage, computing, and database. From there, in a mere span of 18 years, AWS slowly became the cloud provider everyone talks about.

As of 2022, AWS provides 227 services in various categories, not limited to the cloud, such as Analytics, Frontend Tools, Database Tools, and Blockchain. In terms of availability, AWS has 87 available Zones spanning 27 geographic regions.

Top Services provided by AWS:

A complete list of all services AWS provides can be found in AWS's official documentation, but here are some of the top ones −

Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2)

Launched in 2006, EC2 is the service that allows full server-side processing and a flexible, pay-as-you-go plan for renting Virtual Machines on-demand.

Database Management Systems

AWS provides multiple different Databases Management Systems, so the user can select what best fits their needs.

Relational DBMS

Use Case: E-commerce

Solution: Amazon Aurora is the solution provided by Amazon to deal with Relational data. Aurora supports MySQL and PostgreSQL syntax. AWS also offers 5 other engines, Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB. You also have the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), a fully managed NoSQL DBMS that takes minutes to set up, with fully automatic scaling. Another Service is Amazon Redshift, an analytical tool to analyze all your SQL data.

Key-value based DBMS

Use Case: Gaming Applications

Solution: Amazon provides Dynamo DB as a fully managed NoSQL key-value Database.

Document-based DBMS

Use Case: Content Management Systems

Solution: Another DBMS Amazon provides is the Amazon DocumentDB. DocumentDB is fully compatible with MongoDB, which makes it easier for developers to shift to it.

Wide Column DBMS

Use Case: Equipment Management

Solution: Amazon Keyspaces, an Apache Cassandra-compatible database service, provides best-in-class management capabilities for Wide Column DBs.

Graph DBMS

Use Case: Social Networking Applications

Solution: Amazon Neptune, a fully managed graph database service for applications that prefer graph DBs.

Cache-based DBMS

Use Case: Session Management to provide a better User Experience.

Solution: Amazon ElastiCache, an AWS solution for this, or one can use Amazon MemoryDB, which is compatible with Redis, the most used DataBase in such cases.

Blockchain

Use Case: Decentralized Applications

Solution: Amazon has developed Amazon Quantum Ledger Database for maintaining immutable, cryptographically verifiable data

Time series

Use Case: IoT apps

Solution: Amazon Timestream is a serverless time series database specifically for IoT and operational applications.

Serverless Services

AWS also offers serverless technologies for building and running applications without managing servers. Going Serverless further reduces the overhead cost, which is already reduced by using Cloud Services, to almost an absolute zero, and with the pay-as-you-go model. Most modern applications use this technology to increase agility. Some services provided by AWS for serverless computing are −

• AWS Lambda − Lambda is an event-driven service that only assigns computing power to a function when a particular event is triggered.

• AWS Fargate − Fargate is a compute engine that is compatible with Amazon Elastic Container Service as well as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service

• Amazon EventBridge − EventBridge, uses Event Buses that lets user filter, transform, and route events, all while being serverless.

• Amazon SQS − SQS or Simple Queue Service is a queueing service that enables users to decouple and scale their serverless apps.

Identity and Access Management

AWS IAM is a service where you can share your cloud services and resources with your team with certain restrictions. IAM allows you to specify different roles to different Identities and only lets them access the data and services you allow them to.

Conclusion

Many of the world’s leading companies trust AWS with their data, and the services AWS provides are the best in class, ranging from simple Databases to fully functional Backends as a Service (BaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). AWS can make your life easier; whether you own a small startup or an MNC, if you’re not already, you should consider shifting to AWS.