Let’s imagine how life would have been without Spotify. For those who are hearing about Spotify for the first time, Spotify is an online music service offering and it offers instant access to over 16 million licence to songs. Spotify now uses AWS cloud to store the data and share it with their customers.

Prior to AWS they had some issues. Back then users were often getting errors because Spotify could not keep up with the increased demand for storage every new day and that led to users getting upset and users canceling the subscription.

The problem Spotify was facing at that time was worse. Their users were present globally and were accessing it from everywhere and they had different latency in their applications. Spotify had a demanding situation where they need to frequently catalogue the songs released yesterday. today and in the future and this was changing every new day and the songs coming in rate was about 20,000 a day.

Back then they could not keep up with this requirement. Needless to say they were badly looking for a way to solve this problem and that’s when they got introduced to AWS. It was a perfect fit and match for their problem. AWS offered a dynamically increasing storage and that’s what they needed.

AWS also offered tools and techniques like storage lifecycle management and trusted advisor to properly utilize the resource so we always get the best out of the resource used. AWS address their concerns about easily being able to scale. You can scale the AWS environment very easily. How easily? one might ask, it’s just a few button clicks and AWS solved Spotify problem.

Let’s talk about how it can help you with your organization’s problem. Let’s talk about what is AWS first and then let’s bleed into how AWS’s became so successful and the different types of services that aws provides and what’s the future of cloud and areas and specific and finally we’ll talk about a use case where you will see how easy it is to create a web application with AWS.

What is AWS

AWS or Amazon Web Services is a secure cloud service platform. It is also pay-as-you-go type billing model where there is no upfront or capital costs. we’ll talk about how soon the service will be available in matter of seconds with AWS. You can also do Identity and Access Management that is authenticating and authorizing a user or a program on the fly.

Almost all the services are available on-demand. Most of them are available instantaneously. Amazon offers hundred-plus services and this list is growing every new week. Now that would make you wonder how AWS became so successful, it’s their customers.

Companies that has their IT environment in AWS.

Adobe

Adobe uses AWS to provide multi terabyte operating environments for its customers by integrating its system with AWS cloud. Adope can focus on deploying and operating its own software instead of trying to you know deploy and manage the infrastructure.

Airbnb

Airbnb is another company. It’s an community marketplace that allows property owners and travelers to connect each other for the purpose of renting unique vacation spaces around the world. The Airbnb community users activities are conducted on the website and through iPhones and Android applications Airbnb has a huge infrastructure in AWS and they are almost using all the services in AWS and are getting benefited from it.

Autodesk

Autodesk develops software for engineering designing and entertainment industries using services like Amazon RDS or rational database service and Amazon s3 or Amazon simple storage service. Autodesk can focus on deploying or developing its machine learning tools instead of spending that time on managing the infrastructure.

AOL

AOL or American online uses AWS and using a double layers they have been able to close data centers and decommission about 14,000 in house and co-located servers and move mission-critical workload to the cloud and extend its global reach and save millions of dollars on energy resources.

BitDefender

BitDefender is an internet security software firm and their portfolio of software’s include antivirus and anti-spyware products. BitDefender uses ec2 and they are currently running few hundred instances that handle about five terabytes of data. They also use elastic load balancer to load balance the connection coming in to those instances across availability zones and provide seamless global delivery of service because of that.

BMW Group

It uses AWS for its new connected car application that collects sensor data from BMW 7-series cars to give drivers dynamically updated map information. Canon’s offers imaging products division benefits from faster deployment times lower cost and global reach by using AWS to deliver cloud-based services such as mobile print the office imaging products division uses AWS such as Amazon s3 and Amazon route 53 Amazon CloudFront and Amazon I am for their testing development and production services.

Comcast

Comcast is the world’s largest cable company and the leading provider of internet service in the United States. Comcast uses AWS in a hybrid environment. Out of all the other cloud providers, Comcast chose AWS for its flexibility and scalable hybrid infrastructure.

Docker

Docker is a company that’s helping redefine the way developers build ship and run applications. This company focuses on making use of containers for this purpose and in AWS the service called the Amazon ec2 container service is helping them achieve it.

European Space Agency

Although much of ASA’s work is done by satellites, some of the program’s data storage and computing infrastructure is built on Amazon Web Services. They chose AWS because of its economical pay-as-you-go system as well as its quick startup time.

The Guardian newspaper

The Guardian newspaper uses AWS and it uses a wide range of aws services including Amazon Kenny is Amazon redshift that power an analytic dashboard which editors used to see how stories are trending in real time.

Financial Times

Financial Times is one of the world’s largest leading business news organization. They used Amazon redshift to perform their analysis. A funny thing happened, Amazon Redshift perform so quickly that some analysis thought it was malfunctioning. They were used to running queries overnight and they found that the results were indeed correct just as much faster. By using Amazon redshift, FT is supporting the same business functions with costs that are 80 percentage lower than what was before.

General Electric

General Electric or GE is at the moment as we speak migrating more than 9000 workloads including 300 desparate ERP systems to AWS while reducing its datacenter footprint from 34 to 4 over the next three years.

Similarly Howard Medical School, HTC, IMDB, Debbie, McDonald’s, NASA, Kellogg’s and lot more are using the services Amazon provides and are getting benefited from it.

This huge success and customer portfolio is just the tip of the iceberg.

Why people are adapting AWS

Security

People are adapting AWS because of the security and durability of the data and end-to-end privacy and encryption after data and storage.

Experience

We can also rely on AWS way of doing things by using the AWS tools and techniques and suggested best practices built upon the years of experience it has gained.

Flexibility

There is a greater flexibility in AWS that allows us to select the OS, language and database.

Easy to use

Swiftness in deploying we can host our applications quickly in AWS, be it a new application or migrating an existing application into AWS.

Scalability

The application can be easily scaled up or scaled down depending on the user requirement.

Cost saving

We only pay for the compute power storage and other resources you use and that too without any long-term commitments.

Types of services that AWS provides

The services that we talk about fall in any of the following categories like compute storage, database, security, customer engagement, desktop, machine learning, developers tools etc.

Now let’s look at some of them that are very commonly used

Within computer services we have
Amazon ec2
Amazon Elastic Beanstalk
Amazon light sale
Amazon lambda

Amazon EC2

Amazon ec2 provides compute capacity in the cloud. Now this capacity is secure and it is resizable based on the users requirement. If the requirement for the web traffic keeps changing then behind the scenes in the cloud ec2 can expand its environment to multiple instances and during no load it can shrink its environment to just one resource.

Elastic Beanstalk

Elastic Beanstalk helps us to scale and deploy web applications and it’s made with a number of programming languages. Elastic Beanstalk is also an easy-to-use service for deploying and scaling web applications and services deployed in java, .net, PHP, node.js, Python, Ruby, docker and lot other familiar services such as Apache, passenger and IAS. We can simply upload our code and elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment from capacity provisioning to load balancing to auto scaling to application health monitoring.

Amazon Lightsail

Amazon lightsail is a virtual private server which is easy to launch and easy to manage. Amazon Litesail is the easiest way to get started with AWS for developers who just need a private server. LightSail includes everything you need to launch your project quickly on a virtual machine like SSD based storage – a virtual machine, tools for data transfer, DNS management and a static IP and that do for a very low and predictable price.

AWS Lambda

AWS lambda has taken cloud computing services to a whole new level. It allows us to pay only for the compute time and no need for provisioning and managing servers. An AWS Lambda is a compute service that lets us run code without provisioning or managing servers. Lambda execute your code only when needed and scales automatically from few requests per day to thousands for second. You pay only for the compute time you consume. There is no charge when you code is not running.

Let’s look at some storage services that Amazon provides like Amazon s3, Amazon glacier, Amazon abs and Amazon Elastic file system.

Amazon S3

Amazon s3 is an object storage that can store and retrieve data from anywhere. Websites, mobile apps, IOT sensors and so on can easily use Amazon s3 to store and retrieve data. Its an object storage built to store and to try any amount of data from anywhere. With its features like flexibility and managing data and the durability it provides and the security that it provides. Amazon simple storage service or s3 is a storage for the internet.

Glacier

Glacier is a cloud storage service that’s used for archiving data and long-term backups. This glacier is an secure durable and extremely low cost cloud storage service for data archiving and long-term backups.

Amazon EBS

Amazon elastic block store provides block store volumes for the instances of ec2. Elastic block store is highly available and a reliable storage volume that can be attached to any running instance that is in the same availability zone. EBS volumes that are attached to the ec2 instances are exposed as storage volumes that persistent independently from the lifetime of the instance.

Amazon Elastic file system

Amazon Elastic file system or EFS provides an elastic file storage which can be used with AWS cloud service and resources that are on premises. An Amazon elastic file system is simple, scalable and elastic file storage for use with Amazon Cloud Services and for on-premises resources. Its easy to use and offers a simple interface that allows you to create and configure file systems quickly and easily. Amazon file system is built to elastically scale on demand without disturbing the application. Growing and shrinking automatically as you add and remove files to your application have the storage they need and when they need it.

Databases

Now let’s talk about databases. The two major database flavors are Amazon RDS and Amazon redshift.

Amazon RDS

It really eases the process involved in setting up operating and scaling a rational database in the cloud. Amazon RDS provides cost efficient and resizable capacity while automating time-consuming administrative tasks such as hardware, database, setup patching and backups. It sort of frees us from managing the hardware and sort of helps us to focus on the application. It’s also cost-effective and resizable and it’s also optimized for memory performance and input and output operations. It also automates most of the services like taking backups, monitoring etc.. It automates most of those services.

Amazon Redshift

Amazon redshift is a data warehousing service that enables users to analyze the data using SQL and other business intelligence tools. Amazon redshift is a fast and fully managed data warehouse that makes it simple and cost-effective and lays all your data using standard SQL and your existing business intelligence tools. It also allows you to run complex queries against terabyte of structured data using sophisticated query optimizations and most of the results they generally come back in seconds.

Lets have a look at some more services that AWS provides.

AWS application discovery

AWS application discovery services help enterprise customers plan migration projects by gathering information about their on premises data centers. Planning a data center migration can involve thousands of workloads. They are often deeply interdependent server utilization data and dependency mapping or important early first step in migration process and this allows SAP Legation discovery service collects and presents configuration usage and behavior data from your servers to help you better understand your workloads.

Route 53

Its a network and content delivery service. It’s an highly available and scalable cloud domain name system or DNS service. Amazon route 53 is fully compliant with ipv6 as well elastic load balancing. It’s also a network and content delivery service.

Elastic load balancing

Elastic load balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets such as Amazon ec2 instance containers and IP addresses. It can handle the varying load of your application traffic in a single available zone and also across availability zones and doubles its auto scaling. It monitors your application and automatically adjusts the capacity to maintain steady and predictable performer at a lowest possible cost using AWS auto-scaling. It’s easy to setup application scaling for multiple resources across multiple services in minutes. Auto scaling can be applied to web services and also for DB services.

AWS Identity and Access Management

It enables you to manage access to AWS services and resources securely using IAM. You can create and manage AWS users and groups and use permissions to allow and deny their access to AWS resources. Its a free service