Flying Through Clouds: AWS
Amazon is one of the fastest growing companies in the world today, but most people aren’t aware that one of the largest drivers of that growth exists outside of its retail offering. In fact, it’s something that is out of the scope of the average consumer — cloud computing through AWS.
Back in the day you couldn’t pick up the phone while the internet was running, and you couldn’t flush while taking a shower (or risk the anger of the shower’s occupant). Data centers have undergone a similar evolution.
Everyone today knows what a cloud is — a sky-drive that lets you store and centralize everything digitally — but few know what that actually means.
To store everything and figure out processing, you have to have a data center. Companies big and small have to own and manage data centers that have unique manual hardware challenges in order to keep up with compute, and storage demands — I wrote about it some months ago here.
AWS was the first of its kind — a cloud-computing service that abstracted the entire hardware process away from companies. Instead of managing a data center yourself, you could move everything on to the cloud and have Amazon take care of your compute, storage and processing needs for you.
Cloud-computing performs Infrastructure as a Service, which provides:
On demand cloud service
Ubiquitous access
Resource pooling
Rapid elasticity
Payment only for the servers that you use
This solves a number of issues. For one, in addition to storage, Amazon’s EC2 service enables you to run virtual machines for your processing needs, virtualizing hardware (as opposed to containers, which virtualize software, enabling you to isolate programs from one another, for example). It helps level the playing field between enterprise and small businesses, who can’t afford costly data centers. It also makes things easier to scale on the infrastructure side for all parties. In addition, as a secure public cloud, it can work in concert with a private cloud for a hybrid cloud solution, in case a company wants to keep some information on its own servers.
AWS also has new and unique solutions, like the Amazon Data Exchange and the AWS Marketplace. The data exchange gives you an easy way to access data from other companies for your data science needs. The AWS Marketplace functions as a platform for different independent software vendors (ISVs) to build tools that AWS users can use, across different categories like machine learning. These ML tools can easily be used to perform critical ML functions directly for your business, in a safe and secure manner. As the first mover in the industry, AWS has some of the most developed and sophisticated evolutions of its cloud-computing platform to understand and directly provide value to you, the customer.
Above is a basic breakdown of AWS and its main advantages. In the future, we’ll dive deeper and get a bit more curious about its different features.
