Cloud computing and DevOps are the hottest technologies of 2022, and their popularity is not going to fade in the near future. As most companies have shifted there infrastructure to the cloud, learning cloud terminologies is a must for any IT professional or student who wants to step into this information technology field.
AWS and Azure are the top cloud providers currently in the market, and the services they provide are really impressive.
In this blog, we are going to take a close look at the fundamentals of Amazon Web Services (AWS). We will see what AWS is, how it came into existence, and how it revolutionized the information technology field.
This question seems silly, but it's completely relevant once we see how a simple definition of computer defines cloud computing. A computer is an electronic device that takes input from the user, processes the input, and generates output.For a computer to work, certain devices, mainly input devices,output devices, storage, the CPU, memory, and so on, are required. Similar to this, the cloud is built with the same set of devices or resources; the only thing that is different is that devices in a cloud environment are more powerful compared to a normal PC, and these devices are stored in a remote location called a Data Center. So we can conclude that the cloud is, in simple terms, a set of devices or resources that are highly powerful, and these devices are stored at a location generally termed a data center. We, as users, access them with the help of the internet.
AWS is a cloud provider. It is owned by Amazon, and they have several Data centers across the globe. We, as a customer, only use the resources in the data center; we will not buy them. For using these services, we have to pay a charge. Charges can be paid in a month, a year, or based on the usage of resources. Pay as you go is a term that is used to denote the payment based on how much we use a resource; if we use the resource less, we will pay a lower charge, and if we use the resource more, we have to pay more money. Till now, we've heard the term "resource" several times, but what is this resource?
A resource can be anything in cloud; it can be a server, storage , processor, RAM, etc. These are called resources in cloud terminology.
The infrastructure of AWS is complex. It spans across multiple regions of the world.We will divide the AWS Global infrastructure into the following parts:
1 Region: Regions are physical locations on earth where AWS has multiple data centers.There are now 26 regions in 2022, and they are expanding their infrastructure quickly. US-East, US-West, Asia Pacific, etc are examples of regions
2. Availability Zone(AZ): Inside each region there are multiple data centers.each of this data center is called as an availability zone. A region can have two more AZ .Each AZ is located at a distance so that an accident that occur in one AZ will not affect another and each of them have their own electricity and all other features and facilities.All the AZs are connected with high speed low latency network, So data travel between them quickly.
3. Edge Locations: Edge locations are endpoints to cache data.It is used for caching static content so that when users request a data from particular region instead of hitting the original server then data is served from cache or edge locations.It improves speed and access time. These are mainly used by websites to load the static content, so users can quickly load the page by accessing the cached data from nearest edge location.There are around 150 edge location as of today.
4.Regional Edge Cache: They have more caching facility that edge location.
5. Local Zone: This places storage, computer, database services close to end user so that users can get singly digit millisecond latency.AWS Local Zones provide a high-bandwidth, secure connection between local workloads and those running in the AWS Region, allowing you to seamlessly connect to the full range of in-region services through the same APIs and tool sets.
6. AWS Wave Length: AWS Wavelength enables developers to build applications that deliver single-digit millisecond latency to mobile devices and end-users. AWS developers can deploy their applications to Wavelength Zones, AWS infrastructure deployments that embed AWS compute and storage services within the telecommunications providers’ data centers at the edge of the 5G networks, and seamlessly access the breadth of AWS services in the region.
7. AWS Outputs: AWS Outposts is designed for connected environments and can be used to support workloads that need to remain on-premises due to low latency or local data processing needs.
AWS data centers are located all around the globe, and our data can be in any of these data centers.AWS also allows us to choose the region and AZ to store our data and applications, which is actually a good thing so that we can have control over our resources.This is a high-level overview of AWS infrastructure.AWS is complex and has hundreds of services for small and large businesses. and they process Petabytes of data every day.It's powerful, flexible, and user-friendly.
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