Summary: The post elaborates on the world’s largest cloud service provider- Amazon Web Services -which is known for its cost-effective and innovative cloud solutions that allow businesses to scale up their day-to-day operations and store data on a highly secure database. Your growing business needs unmatched and reliable cloud-based solutions to manage bandwidth requirements and AWS services are known for their highly efficient and innovative cloud solutions. We have discussed various types of AWS products and services along with their usages so that you can pick up the most appropriate AWS service for your growing business needs.
A Quick Guide to AWS Development (Amazon Web Services)
For a growing and flourishing business, it’s very imperative to adapt to a Big Data application that supports volume, velocity, and variety of data. Fortunately, AWS services cover all these aspects very precisely.
Currently, Amazon stands out among the top 4 public cloud computing companies in the world and supports more than 7500 government agencies and 5000 educational institutions. Amazon has come to be known for its reliable and optimum cloud computing solutions that help businesses scale up their operations. Its cloud service has also become the most targeted investment opportunity for retail and IT giants around the world. That’s a major reason why AWS cloud service segments are expected to generate revenue of USD 177 billion (SaaS), USD 110 billion (PaaS), and USD 120 billion (IaaS) respectively by the end of 2022.
So, if you haven’t already invested into AWS, here’s a quick guide to help you get on this bandwagon with ease.
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How Much Does AWS Services Cost?
If you are looking for an exact price for AWS Services, that depends on the size and nature of your business. As discussed, AWS services are highly flexible with a cost-effective pricing structure that goes on a pay-as-you-go model.
For instance, Amazon EC2 comes with a free trial for up to 12 months where you get a limit of 750 compute hours per month and anything beyond that is chargeable. Similarly, for every AWS product, there are specific payment models and types of instances that you can choose from.
The best way to calculate the price for your AWS services is to use the official AWS pricing calculator. It is a comprehensive tool that allows you to pick and choose services based on particular use cases and configure costs accordingly.
Some Popular Services Offered by AWS
AWS is a perfect blend of diversified cloud services that can adapt to businesses of all sizes and disseminate innovative cloud solutions. Each service can be configured in different ways based on your unique business requirements. Here are some most commonly used AWS services that you can consider.
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Amazon EC2 (IaaS)
Amazon EC2 stands for Elastic Compute Cloud and is one of the most widely used cloud services around the globe. It simply allows you to create a virtual machine with your own set of configurations. EC2 can even expand or shrink resources depending on the server load that your organization faces. Amazon EC2 is suitable for all types of businesses irrespective of their size.
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Amazon Elastic Beanstalk (PaaS)
It’s a pre-configured EC2 server that takes up your application code and environment configurations to automatically deploy AWS resources to run your web application. Whatever programming language your web app may have used, AWS EBS supports code deployment as soon as they are uploaded.
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Amazon LightSail
It’s certainly one of the easiest ways to get started with AWS services for any business. This Virtual Private Server VPS is completely packed with all the necessary components that you may need to launch your project instantly. It simply eliminates the need for developers to spend much time installing software and frameworks.
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Amazon Lambda
This compute service allows you to run code on available infrastructure without any need for managing infrastructure. It can effectively handle the complete administration of computing resources, including server, operating system maintenance, scaling, code monitoring, and logging. A user needs to pay for the total compute time used while nothing is charged when you run codes on it.
Storage Services
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Amazon S3
Amazon Simple Storage Service, also known as Amazon S3, is the most widely used storage service by worldwide businesses. The level of data availability, scalability, security, and performance that it offers are major reasons why Amazon S3 has become much more popular among global businesses for storing their data securely and flexibly. You can easily store and retrieve data for any of your web apps, mobile apps, or IoT sensors using S3.
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Amazon Glacier
This is another storage service by Amazon that is primarily used for archiving data and long-term backup. S3 is an object-based storage service and you can quickly retrieve the data that you want while AWS Glacier is meant for long-term retrieval and archival purposes.
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Amazon EBS
Amazon EBS stands for Elastic Block Store which offers block-level storage volumes with EC2 instances. You can mount these block-level storage volumes as devices on the instances that you want and these volumes persist independently.
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Amazon Elastic File System
This is another scalable storage solution by Amazon that is widely used for various general-purpose workloads. You can simply attach Amazon EFS to multiple instances and in-use servers where it acts as a common resource for applications supporting data storage in different environments.
Database Services
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Amazon RDS
This stands for Amazon Relational Database Services. RDS is quite easy to set up & operate and makes it very convenient to scale up your database requirements on the cloud. This is a much more cost-effective way to resize and manage database administration.
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Amazon Redshift
It is a fully-managed cloud-based data warehouse that supports large-scale data storage and analysis. You can even use this when migrating a large-scale database depending on your requirements. This can help you make clever business decisions based on available data and its thorough analysis.
AWS IAM-How it Works & Features
AWS Identity and Access Management is a web service that allows you to have secure access to AWS resources. Its primary purpose is to authenticate permissions to use resources. AWS IAM gives you shared access to your AWS account and you can set permissions for different users trying to use different resources. Using IAM features, you can also provide credentials for applications running on EC2 instances.
Components of IAM
- User: This is an identity with associated credentials and permission attached to it.
- Group: Multiple IAM users with specified permissions. Any permission applied to the group will apply to individual users as well.
- Policies: This is required to set permissions and access control for AWS resources.
- Roles: It simply represents what actions are accepted and rejected by an entity in the AWS console.
IAM Features
- Shared Access To AWS Accounts
- Permissions
- Multi Factor Authentication
- Identity Federation
- Free To Use
- Password Policy
How Can AWS Help Your Business grow?
AWS is known for its exceptional support and services through which a business, irrespective of its size and scale, can easily access cloud resources to grow bigger and better. You can boost your online presence with Elastic Beanstalk to create web apps, host websites, and anything that is required to build a phenomenal website.
It also allows you to configure app features through user authentication, data storage, backend logic, and with content delivery & analytics. Test your apps on real devices using AWS services and ensure smooth and optimum performance of apps. It also offers utterly secured and highly flexible data storage where you can scale Big Data apps with serverless computing and IoT processing.
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Amazon Machine Learning-Make Better Informed Decisions
This is an optimum way to make much more informed decisions using the available data on AWS. Machine Learning Algorithms detect the type of patterns in the data and create synchronized models based on which you can make predictions on various crucial aspects of your business.
Amazon Athena is a query service that you can use for data analytics in Amazon S3. It is serverless and uses standard SQL & Presto to collaborate with various types of data format.
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Amazon Elasticsearch-Automate Your Administrative Tasks
This service helps businesses with everything related to domain setup, and once it’s done, Elasticsearch starts automating your common administrative tasks like performing backups, monitoring instances, and reinforcing software. When you integrate Elasticsearch with Amazon CloudWatch, it starts delivering metrics on which you can easily evaluate your domains with an option to make modifications in Domain instances and storage settings.
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AWS Support-A Complete Troubleshoot
You get exceptional 24×7 technical support by the customer support team of AWS. The team is much responsive and offers detailed help on any technical or operational issues pertaining to Cloud. It covers a wide range of issues and you can simply opt for a specific tier based on your cloud-usage requirements. However, it doesn’t include code development, debugging, and administrative tasks.
Most Rejoiced Benefits of Using AWS Services
Let’s have a look at some amazing benefits that worldwide businesses have started leveraging out of AWS services.
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Intact Data Security
Cyber security is becoming a common concern for most businesses these days and to encounter it, you must adopt an IT infrastructure that is utterly secure and highly flexible. AWS defines cloud security at its best and offers unparalleled software, hardware, networking, and physical facilities for businesses to scale up their operations as and when required.
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Cost-effective Solutions
AWS services charge you as per your Cloud usage and capacity where you can simply upgrade or downgrade resources depending on your business requirements. It perfectly enables start-ups to leverage cloud services by eliminating the need for physical servers.
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Highly Scalable
Expansion & growth are integral parts of any business; hence, AWS products and services are compatible with most programming languages so that you can optimize these services and resources as per your growing business requirements.
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Performance-oriented Resources
When it comes to performance, AWS services have no match. AWS is much faster than internal servers offering easy execution of cloud services. It includes umpteen data centers allowing users to request data from their nearest geolocation to improve efficiency.
Endnote
To make optimum use of technology as a service, businesses need to keep updating themselves with latest technological innovations and adopt the best suitable technology that will help them take their business to the next level. This article was an attempt to help you on that front. After considering all these popular AWS products and services, I hope you can choose the right service for AWS development.
Guest article written by: 
Nathan Smith is a tech explorer and a senior amazon web services consultant at Technoscore who constantly keeps bringing the latest technological innovations and trends to enable businesses to leverage the true potential of Technology. His foresightedness and experience in business applications help readers to get acquainted with some latest and upcoming tech solutions that can transform the entire business scenario.