Introduction to AWS

Before diving deep into Amazon S3 services, let’s go through a brief discussion of what Amazon Web Services (AWS) is.

AWS is like a rental service

This is a budget-friendly approach with other benefits as well (like being free from the hustle of maintaining the rooms).

Similarly, if we need an operating system (OS) with a large RAM and large storage space, but we’re not sure about how much space we exactly need to run a single application and may not need it for long. In this case, buying an entire computing device doesn’t make sense.

In that case, we’ll look for someone who can rent us the devices we need for as long as we need. Like a hotel, we’ll pay only for what we use. We won’t have to pay maintenance costs either. AWS allows us to do this and is the perfect solution to our needs.

Although we won’t rent physical devices, we can use AWS’s services through the internet. Our code can run on infrastructure that AWS will provide, such as large RAM and ample storage space. We’ll only have to pay AWS for the amount of time we use its services, be it one hour, one month, and so on. Thus, AWS can be defined as a rental service that provides cloud services based on a pay-as-you-go model.

Top cloud service providers

There are multiple other cloud service providers other than AWS. Some of them are listed below:

• Microsoft Azure
• Google Cloud Platform
• Alibaba Cloud
• IBM Cloud
• Oracle Cloud
• Salesforce

Cloud participants

Using cloud computing technology can involve multiple levels.

Cloud service providers

Cloud service providers are big firms such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Alibaba, and so on. They provide the cloud infrastructure as services or resources to be utilized.

Consumer

Consumer are developers or teams who utilize the service provided by cloud service providers to host applications.

End user

End users are those who visit or use the applications that are hosted by consumers. End users don’t need to know how the application is working or what is going on at the back-end. Their interest lies only in using the application.

Understanding these terms with examples

Imagine that a family wants to arrange a birthday party for their child in a restaurant so that everything is well managed. They book a restaurant. The decorations, the food, etc., are managed by the restaurant staff. The family only needs to pay according to the decorations they want and the varieties of dishes they want to include in their party.

The family plans to host the event in the evening. They invite the guests. The guests come, praise the decoration, enjoy the food and music. They don’t worry about facts like who made the food, who played the music, or how much time, effort, and materials were involved in the decoration. The event was a success.

Here the restaurant acts as cloud service providers providing their resources to be used according to need and budget. The family acts as consumers who hosted their event like an application using resources provided by other parties. The guests act as end users who enjoyed the event without worrying about the back-end work involved.

How the cloud works

How the cloud works can be split into two parts: the front-end and the back-end.

Back-end

The back-end is managed by the service providers. They manage data centers in various geographical regions. These data centers are created and managed by technical experts.

These data centers make it possible for the service providers to provide its client with numerous facilities like:

• Storage
• Computation
• Security
• Traffic management
• Database operations
• Backups and data recovery
• Worldwide availability

The data centers are connected through thick data cables to ensure a high quality of connectivity.

Front-end

The frontend consists of consumers hosting their websites or applications using the required amount of resources. These hosted websites are available for access by end users globally.

We might think we only need an instance to host an application. However, we require much more than an instance. We need the following:

• A computing engine to run our application.
• Sometimes more than one instance is required when the traffic increases, because the load on the CPU increases. In such cases, depending on a single instance may lead to losing numerous clients.
• When using multiple instances, we also need a load balancer (a load balancer is an instance that distributes the traffic to all available instances, thus decreasing the load on a single server).
• Databases to store the information of our clients like their username, email IDs, passwords, etc.
• Storage devices to store the image or video files we might use on our websites.

There are numerous devices involved according to the need of the application. At this point, maybe you’re wondering how you can use these resources without actually having them.

Well, we’re here to learn!. AWS and all other cloud service providers have data centers. Data centers are centralized locations of an organization for storing, processing, and other such operations for the organization to run smoothly. These data centers are established at several geographical locations.

These data centers are connected through thick data cables both underground and underwater.