Development Solutions2022.07.12By: Miichisoft

What is AWS | An Easy-to-Understand Guide for Beginners

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS stands for Amazon Web Services. It uses cloud computing to let you rent a wide variety of services, such as storage, databases, and servers. This article introduces the basics of AWS, three reasons why AWS is chosen, and its advantages and disadvantages.

What is AWS

1. What is AWS ?

AWS (Amazon Web Services) is a comprehensive, evolving cloud computing service offered by Amazon, encompassing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). AWS offers far more services than any other cloud provider, ranging from infrastructure technologies such as compute, storage, and databases, to cutting-edge technologies such as machine learning, AI, data lakes and analytics, and IoT, with each service offering a rich set of features.

2. Top 3 AWS Services

2.1. Amazon EC2

Amazon EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) provides scalable compute capacity on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. With Amazon EC2, you can quickly develop and build applications and deploy them to AWS.

2.2. Amazon S3

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.

2.3. AWS Aurora

Amazon Aurora is a cloud-based relational database, developed by AWS (Amazon Web Services), that is compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL.

Differences Between Amazon RDS and AWS Aurora

The main difference between AWS Aurora and RDS is that the RDS architecture is like installing a database engine on Amazon EC2, with provisioning and maintenance handled by AWS, whereas Aurora's database storage is built to be highly reliable and fault-tolerant. Aurora's database storage is independent of the instance.

Many features, such as automatic failover and backups, are available with RDS. For database and log storage, RDS uses Amazon EBS volumes. You need to enable the Multi-AZ feature on an RDS instance to synchronously replicate to a replica in a different AZ.

With Aurora, data is replicated six times across three AZs. As a result, even if you only have a single Aurora instance, your data is still replicated six times.

RDS is a hosted database service that includes PostgreSQL, Aurora, MariaDB, and other relational database management systems. While hosting a database on RDS offers performance benefits for businesses, Aurora has even more tricks up its sleeve.

3. Advantages and Disadvantages of AWS

3.1. Advantages of AWS

(1) Reasonable pricing

AWS is designed to let application providers, ISVs, and vendors host applications quickly and securely, whether they are existing or new SaaS-based applications. You can access the AWS application hosting platform via the AWS Management Console or a well-documented web service API.

(2) Flexible

With AWS, you can choose your operating system, programming language, web application platform, and any other services you need. AWS lets you use a virtual environment to load the software and services your application needs — helping you migrate applications you're already using while also enabling you to build new solutions.

(3) High level of security

AWS takes an end-to-end approach to protecting and improving its infrastructure, including physical, operational, and software measures.

3.2. Disadvantages of AWS

(1) Wide variety of services

Because the service menu is so extensive and capable of almost anything, choosing and designing the right services requires specialized know-how.

(2) Fluctuating costs

While reducing initial costs to zero and paying as a variable cost is an advantage, it also creates the problem of unpredictable monthly bills.

4. Differences Between AWS and Google Cloud

Google Cloud is Google's suite of public cloud computing resources and services, while AWS is a secure cloud service developed and managed by Amazon
Google Cloud offers Google Cloud Storage, while AWS offers Amazon Simple Storage Service.
With Google Cloud services, data transfer is fully encrypted, whereas with AWS, data transfer uses a standard format.
Google Cloud volume sizes range from 1GB to 64TB, while AWS volume sizes range from 500GB to 16TB.
Google Cloud offers backup services, while AWS offers cloud-based disaster recovery services.

Both Google Cloud and AWS are excellent platforms. Before deciding, you need to understand what kind of features your organization needs and how much you are willing to pay for them. Remember that the right cloud service provider will help your organization achieve its business goals by strengthening its capabilities. Since AWS is a market leader in both functionality and reliability, our vote leans toward it.

5. Summary

As we have seen, AWS is a cloud service that offers a wide range of services with the advantages of zero-cost adoption, strong security, and high scalability. Be sure to try AWS for yourself and experience these benefits firsthand.

In June 2022 (2022/06), Miichisoft was certified as an AWS Partner in Vietnam under the AWS Select Tier Services Partners program. If you are interested in AWS services, please feel free to contact Miichisoft.

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