What is Amazon Web Services (AWS)?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud computing platform that launched in 2006 with a handful of services, including Simple Queue Service (SQS), Simple Storage Service (S3), and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Since then, AWS has grown exponentially, launching more services and updates each year than most people can keep up with.

Most recently, AWS re:Invent—Amazon's annual conference—took place in Las Vegas. This event brings together AWS enthusiasts from around the world to educate and inform them about the latest features and services.

How does AWS work?

AWS offers a global-scale platform to build, test, and run workloads, whether for development or production. Its extensive infrastructure is organized into Regions, Availability Zones, and Edge Locations.

Regions: These are distinct geographic locations, such as US East (N. Virginia) or Asia Pacific (Singapore). Each Region operates independently to provide fault isolation, meet compliance requirements, and ensure fault tolerance.

Availability Zones: Each Region is made up of three or more Availability Zones, which are groupings of data centers with isolated power, networking, and cooling. These zones are connected by low-latency, high-speed links, allowing you to distribute applications for higher availability.

Edge Locations: Unlike Regions or Availability Zones, Edge Locations are part of the AWS global network and designed to bring services closer to the end users with services like CloudFront (AWS’s content delivery network) and Route 53 (a DNS service).  These services run at Edge Locations to provide fast and highly available responses.

While AWS also offers other infrastructure components like Local Zones, these are not covered in this blog.

What AWS services are most used?

AWS offers a vast array of services across different categories. Here are some of the most commonly used:

Compute: EC2, Elastic Beanstalk, Lambda to provide the compute capability to run your applications

Containers: Elastic Container Service (ECS), Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) for running microservices, which is where you break down components of an application and run them in their own separate environments

Storage: Elastic File System (EFS), Simple Storage Service (S3) which provides file and blob storage for your applications and environments

Networking: Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Direct Connect for secure private connectivity

Identity & Access Management: IAM which is a key service used to protect your cloud environments 

Databases: DynamoDB, Relational Database Service (RDS) for storing data in relational databases or where flexibility is needed for the data stored there is NoSQL with DynamoDB