What Is Amazon Web Services (AWS) | Career | Certification | Services |

Hello and welcome back to yet another blog, and today we would be talking about one of the most in-demand, in-use, and the most popular, “Amazon Web Services”. So, in this article, first, we're going to learn about exactly what is AWS? Why is it so popular? And finally, we'll learn how and why we can start with AWS if it's something that you're interested in. So, let’s begin.

What Is Amazon Web Services (AWS)?

Amazon Web Services, also known as AWS, was launched in 2006 and is a global cloud platform that provides almost 212 fully-featured services. It is one of the most comprehensive cloud computing platforms and is adopted by a broad range of organizations. It provides services where users can access on-demand digital infrastructure capabilities, like computational power, storage, and digital services, as a plug-and-play system, to build as per their needs.

Four tenets of AWS!

It stands to deliver four tenets to the end-user.

1). IAAS (Infrastructure as a service), for example: - Caching, Databases, Servers, computation, ETL pipes.

2). PAAS (Platform as a service), for example: - Application Development, ML and AI Capabilities, Web, Streaming, Hosting.

3). SAAS (Software as a Service) For example: - ERM, CRM.

4). DAAS (Development and Data as a service) For example: - Data Lakes, Workflows, Workspaces.

How Popular is AWS?

Now let's see, how popular AWS is, and why most organizations are using it. AWS drives most companies, from Netflix, Adobe, Expedia, and so many other big or small companies, which are highly dependent on the AWS cloud service. Amazon Web Services stands at the topmost position as a cloud services provider. According to the Stamford Connecticut based research firm, the worldwide infrastructure as a service (IAAS) market, grew 31.3% in 2018, reaching 32.4 billion dollars, with Amazon Web Services once again being the top vendor, owning nearly half of the overall public cloud infrastructure market (47.8%).

As various reports show AWS is the leader, in the cloud market space in the world, it is also the biggest revenue generator for Amazon, across amazon.com, and several other businesses including e-Commerce. Being the leading cloud provider in the world, AWS is a natural fit for an established company or a startup to transition or build its business in a cloud-first world today.

There are eight reasons why organizations are using AWS.

1). The most popular cloud provider: - All reports metrics and global indices show AWS is the largest, most comprehensive services used in a significant number of regions in the world. It is the biggest, oldest, and most mature player in this space, and has the best portfolio of products and services, out of all of its competitors.

 2). Free Tier: - AWS provides users free signup and one year of free usage of almost 95% of their services, where users can try them out, and work on their MVP or cloud strategy. This also helps in easy integration, migration, and adoption for their services.

3). API's / SDK for all their services: - AWS provides API's for almost all their services, and hence helps in automating all of them. If you have to spin up hundreds of instances of ec2, it's a single API call. Developers find this very intuitive to use.

4). Cost-Effective: - One of the reasons why the cloud model is more successful over existing enterprise and legacy solutions are its cost factor. An on-demand computation infrastructure model is cheaper and more comfortable to scale and deploy, and its system dimensioning of digital resources is elastic. This model proves to be cost-effective, owing to its economies of scale and its massive leverage to big and small corporations and startups, setting up their digital strategy.

5). High Scalability and a global reach: - One of the tenets of all AWS services is that they scale to support billions of users and the scaling happens in the backend as a configuration change. Suppose you start with one server and it can support 1,000 users, if a million users sign up for your services to scale, all you have to do to put the server in Autoscale configuration and AWS will scale-out for you.

6). Disaster Recovery and Uptime: - AWS provides an SLA of 99.95% uptime, and availability of all its services and scheduled maintenance, without affecting its end-users. It's one of the most reliable systems in place and has very rarely seen outages.

7). Security: - AWS provides in-to-in hardening of security across networks, applications, firewalls, pen testing, hardware, and always seeks to work with the hacker community to secure its systems. security is a costly operation and only Amazon scale firms can afford to put such security systems in place.

8). Flexibility and Ease of Use: - AWS works around a service-oriented architecture with individual components, not only does this allow them to tie up their backend in a manner to create many solutions with a single sink, but allows the end-user flexibility to build around them. Cloud adoption statistics prove that cloud technology is the future, and, AWS is the clear market leader in cloud computing.

Career and AWS Certifications

If you want to have a career in AWS, or if you want to become an expert, you can start with a basic level, such as an AWS Certified Solutions Architect associate, and gradually move up the ladder, with next step certifications.

First of all, AWS certifications let you become part of the AWS community, through which you can network and get the attention of several recruiters.

Secondly, getting AWS certified, distinguishes your resume from other qualified candidates. AWS certification commands high-paying jobs.

The certification is a goal that is achievable in a short period without spending too much money. Specialty tracks in AWS help you grow in your current career and build expertise in niche technologies.

Lastly, the entire digital spectrum is being transformed, via the cloud model and AWS is leading the charge in it. Since 70% of the Internet is directly or indirectly supported by one of the many AWS services, knowing this ecosystem is a must-have for a digital professional in the 21st century.