Learn the basics of AWS in less than 5mins.

If you are looking to start your career in cloud computing you need to be well versed with the services provided by any cloud computing platform.

While preparing for by AWS certification, I created my own notes on the subject, with the help from some videos, courses and AWS whitepapers I referred to.

Why choose AWS?

While there are many competitors in this field; AWS is the oldest and has the maximum market share, giving it an edge over the others.

Following is the list of Domains and services in AWS:

Compute:

EC2 (Elastic compute) : Is like a raw server on the cloud. You can use this server for anything eg: To host a web site. EC2 is a service that allows business subscribers to run application programs in the computing environment.

Migration:

Snowball: Is used for physically transferring petabyte-scale of data to and from AWS. As data transfer over the internet can be time consuming for large amount of data . How does this work? step 1. Raise a request for snowball device on aws management console. Step 2: A snowball device will we delivered to your addressed. Step 3: Copy your data onto the device and ship back to AWS.

AWS Snowball device

Security and identity compliance:

IAM(Identity and Access Management): Used for authenticating users and for defining users right to access a service on AWS.

User security with IAM

Storage:

S3(Simple storage service): Is an object based file system used for storing and accessing files as required. Here, files are treated as objects and the root folder is called as bucket. You can add your files into a bucket and access them in your application using an URL.

S3 bucket

Networking:

Route 53: Is a domain name system(DNS) used for redirecting traffic. For example: You buy a domain name, In the domain name setting use the name servers provided to you by Route53. Hence, when you enter a url it will be redirected to route53.

Route53(DNS)

Messaging:

SES(Simple Email service): Used to send emails in bulk to the customer.

Simple email service

Database:

RDS(Relational database service): Manages the database for you, this is not a database itself. For example: it can automatically commit your changes to the database.

RDS manages all relational databases

Management tools:

CloudWatch : Used to monitor your AWS resources.

CloudWatch mechanism

There are many more services under each domain. I haven’t covered them here, you need not use them all but you must at least have a basic understanding of what these services can do.

I hope this overview was helpful.