Łukasz Kwaśniewicz
AWS is the world’s largest and most popular cloud. If you want to find out how she got to where she is today, we invite you to read on.
Most of us associate Amazon, with the online bookstore that dominates the Western market. However, books are only the beginning of their activities. Today, 23 years after their inception, they have become a huge, multi-industry corporation and its owner one of the world’s richest people. Well, contrary to appearances, it has a great deal. Amazon Web Services is the world’s largest provider of cloud computing, and Qlos is an expert at managing it.
Interested? Let’s start from the beginning. In 1994, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, left his job as vice president of a Wall Street-listed company to open an online bookstore. When he created the name, he was reportedly inspired by the fact that the Amazon is the largest river in the world and wanted his company to be so as well. In creating his business model, he took advantage of the fact that traditional bookstores, due to space constraints, could sell a limited number of titles, when he could offer virtually any book via the Internet. Bezos’ model and ideas have worked. Today, Amazon is one of the largest companies in the world, offering products/services in a wide variety of industries. The one we are most interested in is a cloud service called Amazon Web Services and which has become the most popular solution of its kind in the world.
Legend has it that it was a response to the growing interest in Amazon’s products, and specifically to server problems related to economies of scale. This forced engineers to develop an internal system that could “handle” the traffic generated by customers. What’s more, when an attempt was made to create a service that would allow third-party shopping pages (based on Amazon’s engine), it was noticed that Amazon’s systems were a huge mess. When creating the company, no one anticipated that the business would grow so much and many solutions were created ad hoc. Work was carried out in an unorganized manner, which prolonged work on many projects. Teams of developers created databases or disks for their own use, without thinking that their solutions could be used by others in the future. When, the search for a solution began. The result of trying to organize was a single, centralized platform that allowed each employee to use what their colleagues in other departments had previously done, without reinventing it.
When a meeting of executives devised how Amazon could be improved, they realized that in addition to their skills in selling and shipping products, they had considerable competence in managing server infrastructure and databases. The result of these insights, and the lessons learned from them, was the creation of Amazon Web Services in 2006 – the most profitable company of all within Amazon.
With the new service, customers gained full (24/7/365) access to a fully developed virtual cluster of computers for the first time, and most importantly, it was operated via a web browser. The virtual computers had similar parameters to the real ones (processors, operating memory, disk space). You could also choose an operating system for yourself on them and use preloaded applications like web servers and databases. AWS users, no longer had to buy expensive server solutions and pay a fortune for its maintenance. From now on, the servers used by Amazon itself were at everyone’s fingertips. And, most importantly, they were paid only for their actually used resources.
At the moment, AWS is more than 200 different services. The most well-known of these are:
Amazon EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) – is a service that provides scalable computing power in the cloud. What’s unique about it? Suppose you run a store that occasionally generates increased user traffic. These could include sales or Black Friday. With traditional solutions, your server at some point could reach its capacity limit and start responding more slowly, thus limiting users’ access to the site. The consequence of such unavailability may be lost customers who have not had the opportunity to make a purchase. Of course, based on historical data, you can try to predict customer occupancy at peak times and, based on this knowledge, provide a server to deal with it. The question is why? First, occupancy is not so easy to predict, and second, most of the time this server would not live up to its potential, generating unnecessary costs. With Amazon ‘s EC2 capabilities, resources would be augmented at critical times, allowing systems to be fully available, and payment would be for actual use.
Amazon S3 (Amazon Simple Storage Service) – allows you to store data in the cloud, which you can access from anywhere in the world. It allows you to maintain a virtually unlimited number of individual files ranging from 1b to as much as 5 terabytes in what is known as a “file storage system. buckets (the equivalent of a folder).
You already know what AWS is and how it was created. You even know what Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 are. You know the basics and the solution then it seems like a good idea for you. What you don’t know yet is that Qlos is an official Amazon Web Services partner. This means that we have the right knowledge and experience to help you realize its full potential. Our AWS-certified experts will advise you on how to make the most of the cloud and its capabilities. They will configure the appropriate services for you and even manage this cloud for you. So you don’t have to worry about not being able to set something up. Just a word and we will do it for you.
