Amazon Web Services takes care of different people who have different needs when it comes to computerization and computer power. Majority of people who work on simple word processing and spreadsheet applications like Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel, use their computers to browse the Internet and watch YouTube videos, and/or occasionally play simple games like Solitaire need computers that can cost as less as Kshs 15,000 if refurbished or ex UK.
Then there are those who use their computers to perform graphics processing using various levels of Adobe applications or related programmes for image/video manipulation, use the computers for data manipulation at various levels, or for high level storage. The computers needed for these high level computation can be as cheap as Kshs 50,000 ex UK all the way to past Kshs 1 million for a server in an enterprise setup. As the cost of computation rises, the question of viability in investing in additional computer power becomes poignant.
In order to avoid engaging in time consuming cost justification for investing in additional computer power, third party computational service providers have sprung up with the leader in the industry being Amazon Web Services. Amazon Web Services is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) that offers on-demand cloud computing platforms to individuals, companies and governments. These services include compute power, database storage, content delivery and other functionality from Amazon’s own data centers.
AWS was first launched in 2006 and its most important features are the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), the Simple Storage Service (S3), the Relational Database Service (RDS) and Elastic Block Store (EBS). Amazon Web Services offers a wide range of products and services to businesses that are looking for a scalable, reliable, and cost-effective solutions. There are many use cases for AWS which include:
1) Data storage and management
2) Infrastructure as a Service
3) Platform as a Service
4) Software as a Service
5) Database as a Service
6) Internet of Things (IoT) applications and services
Data storage and management by Amazon is pretty forward. Companies with huge amounts of data that requires hundreds of terabytes will find it cost effective to store that data in Amazon instead of installing their own inhouse data centre. With distributed computing, data stored and managed by AWS is assured to always be there unless intentionally deleted.
Infrastructure as a service is an IT model in which computer infrastructure, such as servers, storage, networks, and software are centrally managed. It is an alternative to the traditional approach of purchasing and maintaining these resources on-premises. The benefits of this model include reduced capital expenditure, lower operational expenditures and improved scalability.
Platform as a service (PaaS) is a software that provides tools and infrastructure to develop, host, and run applications without the complexity of buying and managing the underlying hardware and software.
PaaS provides an environment where developers can focus on their application code. They don’t have to worry about the details of operating systems, database management systems, or web servers. This type of development is often called “no-code” or “low-code”.
A PaaS platform will typically provide an abstraction layer for common IT services like identity management, database management system, load balancing, caching, monitoring etc., so that developers only need to work with the API provided by these services.
Software as a service is a software distribution model in which the vendor (AWS in this case) makes applications available to customers over the internet, typically on a pay-per-use basis.
This model provides customers with the benefits of:
– Low cost of ownership
– Flexibility to pay for only what they need
– Easy installation and deployment
– Rapid application availability
The Database as a Service (DBaaS) is a cloud-based database service that allows users to offload the management and administration of their databases to third-party providers. It is typically offered as a service over the internet, where developers can access it via an API or web browser. Amazon Web Services offer different levels of services, such as: data storage, data security, data processing, and data analytics. The variety of services offered by DBaaS providers allow them to be used in many different types of industries. AWS serve many purposes for its customers that includes increased security for sensitive customer information by providing encryption for any data stored on their servers. They can also offer backup services to ensure that all customer information is backed.
The AWS Internet of Things (IoT) platform is a service that allows developers to build applications for the Internet of Things. It enables the connection of billions of devices and sensors to AWS, giving developers an easy way to create sophisticated IoT solutions.
In addition to the aforementioned products and services, AWS also offers support for machine learning, data science and analytics, and training modules most of which are free. AWS machine learning is a service that provides machine learning capabilities to developers. The service can be used to build and train custom machine learning models, as well as to generate predictions for the given data.
On data science, AWS provides a comprehensive set of data science tools and services to build, deploy, and manage machine learning solutions. The most popular tools in AWS data science are Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Redshift. Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to build machine learning models without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. It provides a drag-and-drop interface for building deep learning models with common deep learning frameworks such as TensorFlow, Keras, PyTorch, CNTK. It also supports custom machine learning algorithms with Python code or Apache MXNet code. Amazon Redshift is an analytics data warehouse that enables fast query speed and easy management of petabytes of data on inexpensive industry standard hardware.
With these core and add-on services, enterprises and individuals have no need to worry about investing in heavy computational power when they can simply subscribe to Amazon Web Services.
See also: Zalego Academy Joins the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Training Partner Program
