The AWS Overview

Cloud computing is the most discussed area these days and has created a huge footprint in IT. It is popularly known as cloud, and it is simply an on-demand provisioning of the IT resources on a pay-as-you-go basis. Most of us use cloud computing all day long without realizing it. When we sit at the PC and type a query into our favorite web search engine, the computer that we are using isn't playing much part in finding the answers for the query we submitted. Our computer is just no more than a messenger. The words of the query are swiftly shuttled over the internet, and through search engine providers, hundreds of thousands of clustered computers dig out the results and send them promptly back to us. The real work done by the search engine provider could be in any part of the world; most likely, we do not care. What we care about is the result we wanted for the query that we submitted. In the cloud environment, computing resources such as servers, storage, network, applications, and processes are managed by the cloud provider and seems to be centralized in nature for the user. The user uses these resources when needed. The user can also Scale-Out depending on the workload.

Organizations often adopt new technologies to enable the most efficient practices for the businesses to increase high availability, data reliability, and availability. As companies use more data types from many sources, complexity and risks are escalating. Organizations continue to introduce a new way to manage their data, as it is becoming critical for them to be competitive and be ahead in the game. With increasing datasets, structured and unstructured, companies are finding it difficult to provision the computing power to process the data and finding a way to enable an extreme provisioning of computing resources when needed, while minimizing the cost and maintaining security. Cloud computing is what organizations are finding as a solution to the on-demand provisioning of the resources, which enables then to stay in the game and be competitive.

In this chapter, we will discuss various benefits offered by cloud computing, common challenges that industries face in migrating to cloud, the AWS global infrastructure, security and compliance, and various AWS services. In addition, we will touch upon the signing up process and how you can get supported on AWS.