AWS tutorial includes everything you need to know about how to get started with one of the best cloud computing platforms. From its basic definition, uses, and benefits to the AWS service list, we have covered the essential basics of Amazon Web Services.
Many small and large enterprises are moving to the cloud for business operations. From data storage and web deployment to any other IT-related development, businesses are shifting from on-premise solutions to cloud platforms.
In the market of cloud computing platforms, Amazon Web Services ranks as the top contender. Many companies like Netflix, LinkedIn, Twitch, and Facebook use AWS cloud services thanks to multiple AWS services and tools.
Whether you are a beginner planning to learn AWS or a business owner wanting to leverage the platform’s benefits, this AWS tutorial for beginners and experts is for you. Here we cover basic to advanced information about AWS (Amazon Web Services), its architecture, tools, and more.
What is AWS or Amazon Web Services?
AWS stands for Amazon Web Services, a cloud platform service provided by Amazon. It uses distributed IT infrastructure to provide different on-demand IT resources. The cloud computing platform offers various services, including Infrastructure as a Service, packaged Software as a Service, and Platform as a Service.
Amazon Web Services has an expansive global infrastructure of 99 availability zones across 31 regions. Data Bridge Market Research predicts that the cloud platform will reach USD 2.19 billion by 2028, with a CAGR of 15.3%.
Advantages of Using AWS for SMBs
Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud storage solution provides multiple advantages for all businesses and individuals. Here are the top 5 advantages of AWS for beginners and professionals.
Scalability: One of the best benefits of AWS for beginners is its high scalability, flexibility, and storage solutions. The cloud platform is highly scalable, making it efficient for startups and well-established businesses with heavy traffic.
Robust Security: Compared to other cloud platforms in the market, AWS offers robust security features like 24*7 access to data experts, an in-built firewall, and AWS IAM. The AWS Key Management System provides a centralized solution to create and manage encryption keys.
Flexibility: AWS helps you to choose a programming language, database, and operating system to build a solution that meets your organization’s needs. The customization and flexibility of AWS for beginners is the main reason why many businesses prefer Amazon Web Services compared to others.
Reliability: Thanks to Amazon’s massive reach and expert team, the cloud platform offers secure and reliable data connections. Hence, businesses can rest assured that they will get unparalleled support to build their data infrastructure.
No Contract: One of the best parts of the cloud platform is the AWS pricing model. You don’t have to be bound by any commitment or contract while using the services. Anyone can start and end the AWS services anytime.
AWS pricing model includes a pay-as-you-go and commitment plan. The pay-as-you-go model ensures that the users will only be charged for servers and services they use and for how long. Alternatively, AWS offers a discounted price when the user commits to a machine for a specific period. If you want to learn about the AWS pricing model in detail, check out our AWS vs Azure cost comparison guide.
AWS Architecture: Diagram, Components, and Benefits
AWS comes with handy options such as individual server mapping, configuration server, cost-effective pricing, etc. It has excellent scalability, ensuring businesses can scale the resources up and down according to their needs.
But what is the AWS architecture diagram? Simply put, it is a visual representation of complete architecture connected by various Amazon Web Services.
First, in this AWS tutorial, we will describe the AWS architecture diagram and what it represents:
The above diagram about the architecture of AWS represents the basic structure of cloud services provided by Amazon. The basic AWS services include Route S3, Amazon EC2, Amazon S3 bucket, Elastic Load Balancer, CloudFront, etc.
Key AWS Components
Let us briefly explain the key components of AWS architecture in this AWS tutorial.
- Load Balancing: It facilitates application enhancement and server efficiency. The traffic is easily distributed to E2 instances and dynamic additions across various AWS availability zones.
- Elastic Load Balancing: These components allow businesses to smoothly collapse or expand load balancing capacity.
- Amazon CloudFront: The component is responsible for content delivery on the website. In this case, the content type includes streaming, static, or dynamic content stored in global network locations.
- Elastic Load Balancer: ELB component is the tool that helps deliver traffic to the web servers. With the help of Elastic Load Balancer, you can increase performance and dynamic growth.
- Security Management: AWS offers a security grouping feature that makes it secure for businesses. AWS helps users deploy their work to a secure environment, making it highly efficient.
- ElastiCache: The handy tool of AWS helps manage the memory cache in the cloud. Its main objective is to clear the cache and reduce the server load.
The AWS S3 helps companies store and retrieve various data types using Application Programming Interface calls. Additionally, the Amazon CloudFront distribution helps maintain the edge locations across the globe and minimize latency.
Uses & Benefits of AWS Architecture
AWS architecture is an end-to-end process of planning, designing, and implementing AWS resources in the cloud infrastructure. Different components of AWS are connected in a structured flow for a seamless data flow. In this AWS tutorial, let us know discuss a few benefits and uses of AWS architecture.
- The fully loaded automated features of AWS reduce the workload.
- The high scalability of AWS ensures businesses can scale up and down with the demand.
- AWS provides end-to-end security and privacy by ensuring client data security on three pillars — confidentiality, availability, and integrity.
Many businesses use AWS tutorial to migrate data from their traditional, on-premise database to the cloud like AWS, Azure, and GCP. Even though they are the best cloud platforms of 2023, AWS, Azure, and GCP have some differences. If you want to migrate your data to the cloud, contact the Inferenz experts. We have a dedicated team of cloud migration specialists who can prepare an end-to-end cloud migration strategy.
AWS Tutorial: Top 20 AWS Services List 2023
Amazon is the preeminent cloud vendor offering more solutions and services than other cloud service providers like Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. Let us explore the AWS cloud services in our detailed AWS tutorial to help you get started with the platform.
Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)
EC2, provided by the Amazon cloud platform, provides secure and resizable computing capacity to businesses. Using Amazon EC2, businesses can deploy applications without investing in hardware options and launch virtual servers.
The primary objective of Amazon EC2 is to ensure usability and easy access to developers for web-scale cloud computing. Hence, it allows total control of computing resources.
Amazon RDS (Relational Database Services)
Amazon RDS helps streamline database configuration, scaling, and management in the cloud. You can automate tedious tasks such as patching, backups, hardware provisioning, and data arrangement.
RDS is available on different database instances, providing six familiar database engines, like Microsoft SQL Server, Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and MySQL. You can use AWS Database Migration Service to migrate or reproduce existing databases to Amazon RDS.
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
Amazon Simple Storage Service facilitates object storage, offering security, scalability, data availability, security, and performance. You can use Amazon S3 to store and protect large datasets for various use cases like websites, backups, applications, etc.
The intuitive management features of Amazon S3 enable easy data organization and configurable access controls.
Amazon Lambda
The goal of AWS Lambda is to run code without the need to own or manage servers. You can operate any app or backend utility without administration.
All you need to do is upload the code; the rest of the complete process is done by AWS Lambda with the help of extensive availability and precise software scaling.
Amazon Glacier
These are the secure, affordable, and flexible Amazon S3 cloud storage classes for prolonged backup and data caching. The primary objective of Amazon Glacier is to ensure comprehensive security and compliance capabilities.
Amazon SNS (Simple Notification Service)
It is a fully managed messaging solution offering low-cost infrastructure for bulk message delivery. With the help of Amazon SNS, users can chat app-to-person or system-to-system between decoupled microservice apps.
Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud)
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud provides an isolated AWS Cloud to deploy AWS resources at scale. Using this AWS service, the user has full control over their environment.
You can choose your IP address range, arrangement of network access points and route tables, and subset creation. AWS also offers flexible dashboard management controls to easily customize VPC’s network configuration.
Amazon Kinesis
With the help of Amazon Kinesis, you can gain timely insights. This AWS service collects, processes, and analyzes data in real-time, assisting you to react quickly. Furthermore, it offers cost-efficient processing of streaming data at scale.
Amazon Inspector
AWS Inspector provides automated security assessment to improve compliance and security of apps deployed on the cloud platform. The service automates the process of security audits, revealing exposures, variations, and deviations.
Whenever each assessment on the cloud is completed, the Inspector displays a comprehensive security findings list prioritized by threat level.
Amazon Auto-Scaling
The AWS auto-scaling service ensures seamless monitoring of apps and automatically tunes capacity for predictable performance. The AWS tool seamlessly configures application scaling abilities for various resources across multiple services.
The feature-rich and user-friendly interface of the auto-scaling service helps you quickly build scaling plans for multiple assets. These resources include DynamoDB tables and indexes, EC2 tasks, Spot Fleets, Amazon EC2 instances, and Amazon Aurora Replicas.
Amazon Lightsail
If you are a beginner and want a virtual private server, consider Amazon Lightsail. It is an easy on-ramp service for users, offering tools for a speedy product launch at a predictable price.
The service includes resources such as SSD-based storage, DNS management, data transfer, and a static IP.
Amazon IAM
The AWS IAM (Identity and Access Management) provides resource access and management in a secure and compliant manner. You can use the service to create and manage users and groups by modifying permission settings for individual resources. The best part about Amazon IAM is that you don’t have to pay any additional costs. You will only be charged for the services you use.
DynamoDB
The document database with key-value structuring provides single-digit millisecond performance at scale. It has an in-built security system with a fully managed, durable database and in-memory archiving for web-scale applications.
The DynamoSB can easily manage over 10 trillion requests daily and support thresholds of around 20 million requests per second.
Amazon SQS (Simple Queue Service)
It is a fully managed querying facility enabling users to decouple and scale distributed systems, microservices, and serverless apps. The primary goal of SQS is to resolve the hardships of managing and operating message-oriented middleware.
SQS allows users to send, store, and receive messages between various software without worrying about losing message data. In this AWS service, users get two classes of message queues — standard and FIFO. While standard queues offer maximum throughput, FIFO queues ensure the one-time processing of the messages.
Amazon Chime
Chime communication service allows you to chat, meet, and place business calls — all in one place. You can use the same infrastructure and operations of Amazon Chime with video calling, audio calling, and screen sharing capabilities integrated directly into Amazon Chime SDK.
The Amazon Chime Voice Connector ensures enterprises can migrate their telephony workloads to AWS, ensuring inbound and outbound calling functionality.
CodeCatalyst
This AWS service comes with a slew of CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Development) tools. It works as a collaborative tool and can be connected to other AWS projects on an account. Using the tool, teams can introduce new members to any project or view all activity from a single dashboard.
Web Application Firewall
AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) works as an online application firewall to protect your APIs or web applications from typical web exploits and bots. Hence, the WAF eliminates security compromises, resource consumption, and availability issues.
AWS Management Console
The AWS provides everything you need to run an application on a single interface. You can access anything and everything related to providing training to build applications, train learning algorithms, and inspect certifications in this management console.
AWS QuickSight
Amazon’s QuickSight aims to provide quick and easy data access to all members, so they can make better decisions. The cloud-based service works by disturbing the timely information among team members in an easy-to-read format.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
The user-friendly service simplifies and streamlines the deployment and scaling of web and mobile applications built with Java, Python, Node.js, .NET, PHP, Ruby, Go, and Docker.
Using AWS Elastic Beanstalk, users can deploy applications on servers, including Passenger, NGINX, Apache, and Internet Information Services (IIS).
Applications of AWS for Beginners
Next, in this AWS tutorial for beginners and professionals, we will learn the main applications of the cloud platform service.
Real-Time Data Analytics
For businesses, it is important to track the website’s performance in real-time and gather valuable insights. However, it can be painstaking to track websites manually. With AWS’s real-time data analytics feature, you can easily track website activities, such as the number of visits, who is visiting, and what they are doing.
Artificial Intelligence
AWS provides small and large enterprises with comprehensive artificial intelligence and machine learning services. The cloud computing platform resolves tough challenges for beginner developers.
It allows them to select pre-trained AI services for language, recommendations, computer vision, and forecasting. You can use Amazon’s SageMaker to easily build, train, and deploy machine learning models.
Internet of Things (IoT)
AWS IoT helps developers build IoT solutions for many devices that don’t require an Internet connection to work.
The comprehensive security features of IoT services from Amazon help businesses scale. It helps them deploy preventative security measures and protect against security issues.
Scalable Blockchain Networks
AWS offers a straightforward infrastructure for blockchain network development. The high-performance, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable databases eliminate the need to set up a blockchain network or struggle with complex audit tables.
The blockchain service process also involves easy setup, deployment, and management. Hence, the AWS tutorial for beginners ensures users can save money from costly implementation.
Migrate to AWS With Cloud Computing Experts
The cloud computing market is growing exponentially, as many businesses are shifting from traditional data storage solutions to cloud platforms. AWS cloud computing service is secure and helps businesses reduce their data infrastructure costs. Therefore, choosing the service will help you scale your business without spending out of pocket.
Whether you want to migrate data from the cloud or learn AWS, understanding the ins and outs of the cloud platform will assist you. Inferenz is one of the leading IT companies offering robust data and cloud migration solutions. Get in touch with Inferenz experts to go beyond basic AWS tutorials and choose AWS as your cloud platform.
