Amazon Web Services is arguably the most popular cloud computing provider in the world. Since its inception, it has been conquering the cloud market, not only with the quality of its services, but also with its approach to customers. Because the history of AWS is surprising and not widespread, I would like to share it with you and give you some important details.
History
Can you imagine that the largest online shop started in a garage? It is said that the biggest and most perfect ideas happen right there. Jeff Bezos, the founder, quit his job and bet everything on a newly opened online bookstore. He wanted to fulfil his long-held dream. From the very beginning, he was sure that his business would become a leader among online shops and sales would grow on a huge scale. At first, only books were sold, but as time passed, the assortment expanded to include all possible articles from various industries.
It is interesting to note that after launching his business, Bezos had a ringtone set to go off whenever an order was placed. After just a week he had to turn it off due to too many orders. The result of the growing business was that systems became increasingly overloaded. The employees had very little private life and worked overtime. As a result, development teams began working on creating new databases and a place to store large amounts of data that would allow for scaling and utilisation of resources.
It was observed that the ideal solution, not only for Amazon but also for other external customers, would be an on-demand infrastructure with resources available at any time, subject to the current demand. As a result, the Amazon Web Services cloud platform was launched in March 2006. Not only did it solve Amazon’s existing problems, but customers were also given the option of purchasing an on-demand server service. According to the plans, everything would take place in the cloud space. Users would not need their own server rooms, would be able to use the resources 24/7/365, and finally would only need a web browser and internet access to take advantage of these services.
Time has shown that this was the winning move. Amazon Web Services is the most profitable sector for the entire company, with revenues exceeding $26 billion.
Accessibility
Different accessibility zones are proving to be the right solution. So far, 22 regions have been created, located on different continents. When creating an account, the user chooses the most suitable region. The data does not change its region, it always remains in the one chosen by the customer. To each of the regions the so called “Availability Zones” are assigned – they consist of one or more data centres usually located in various, independent locations. The zones are constructed in such a way so as to ensure service availability in the event of natural disasters or other serious incidents.
All data is located on physical servers that are protected by multiple systems and alarms.
Services
In 2019, AWS offered over 165 services covering a wide range of possibilities. Starting from storage and analytics activities and ending with the most developed technology zones such as Internet of Things (loT) or AI.
For several years now, the most popular services have been Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud – EC2 and Amazon Simple Storage Services – S3.
The first one, EC2, allows you to run your own application with scalable computing power. A good example of using the EC2 service are situations when an online shop expects a lot of traffic and there is a distinctive possibility of server overload. To give you an example, just think of planned, promotional marketing campaigns e.g. Black Friday, which bring thousands of customers to websites in a span of seconds. If we are not sure if our current infrastructure will withstand such heavy traffic, it is worth moving to the AWS cloud.
Amazon S3 is primarily used to store large amounts of different types of objects. With Amazon S3, you can not only store data, but also keep backups and recover data in case of failure. The entire service guarantees users a high level of scalability and 99.9% availability.
What role do Amazon Web Services partners play?
Partners are usually companies focusing their activity on IT services. Some of them offer platform and infrastructure configuration and management services enabling the operation of various types of internet applications, while others offer innovative solutions to facilitate and automate work.
AWS partners have one thing in common – they all strive to improve in the area of new solutions for AWS customers. Partners are guardians and advisors who control the correct functioning of the customer’s infrastructure and optimise its appropriate use in the customer’s business.
Using the services provided by AWS on your own is quite complicated, especially if you have no or insufficient administrative expertise.
By handing over your project to a partner, you can be sure that all the above details will be taken into account and no process will be omitted when migrating data to the cloud.
It is often the case that even the choice alone when to move the infrastructure to the cloud can be a challenging one, especially given the fact that we may choose between public, private and hybrid clouds. This is especially true for companies with a small IT department or companies that, for various reasons, do not have such department and specialists.
In cases like that, in order to provide customers with the highest quality of implementations and services, Amazon delegates AWS Partners.
