Amazon Web Services - Products overview

Following are the list of products Amazon web services offers. 

Compute

• EC2: A service which allows user to rent servers with different configurations. You can choose the instance based on memory, diskspace, speed and other attributes and you pay on a per hour basis. You can shut down the instance at any time, and you pay for what you use. There are preconfigured machine images available that you can choose from different OS available ranging from Ubuntu, Windows and other OSs. 

• ECS: EC2 container services make developer/network person life easy by making it easy to deploy, manage and scale Docker containers. 

• Lamda: A compute service that executes developer’s code in response to events. The developer don’t need to have a developer environment, he can directly code in the AWS browser console or upload code. The events to respond can be “whenever an artifact has been uploaded into S3”. The main advantage is you donate have to worry about the infrastructure at all. You pay pay for the time taken for the code to get executed. Its a new approach to event driven computing. 

Storage

• S3: S3 is storage solution, you pay for the storage and the bandwidth. S3 is very reliable and 99.99% available. With S3, you might want to store static content of a web site or data generated out of a project in a storage service so that it is available globally. S3 is often used with other AWS products such as EC2. Its very easy to use. Following are different ways by which you can store and retrieve data. 

• Using Command line interface. 
• using AWS console. 
• Using AWS SDK. 

• Elastic File system: is a new sharable file storage service that provides multiple EC2 instances to access a fully managed file system using NFSv4 protocol. You will be able to access using the CLI, console and AWS SDK. 

• Glacier:  a low cost data archival storage for storing less frequently used data but for a much lower cost than S3. This service is effective for archiving. You have to use if you don’t want to access daily. The retrieval time is slow but cheaper. 

• Cloudfront: is a content delivery service. You can use Cloudfront console / API to easily distribute content to end users with low latency, high data transfer speeds. You can use HTTP/HTTPS or RTMP to stream the content stored in cloud front. 

Network: 

• VPC: This service lets you configure your instance in a virtual network that you define. You have complete control over your networking environment. You can control which port to open to which group and can leverage multiple layers of security. 

• Direct Connect: This service helps you in establishing a dedicated connection from your office infrastructure to AWS environment. This can reduce the network cost and increase the bandwidth throughput. 

• Route 54: This is a domain naming service from Amazon which helps you in mapping your domain name to the instance you have. 

Database

• RDS: A service which helps in setting up and managing an RDBMS, scaling them in a easy and cost efficient way. 

• DynamoDB: A no-sql database solution from Amazon which developers can use to store the content in a faster manner. Its a fully managed service which stores in document and key-value pair format. 

• ElasticCache: An in memory caching engine that makes it easy to deploy, operate and scale an in memory cache in the cloud. It supports memcached and redis. 

Analytics

• Redshift: a data warehouse solution from AWS to analyse all your data using existing BI tools. 

• EMR: This is a managed hadoop environment which can be used out of the box to run hadoop jobs. With this service you don’t have to worry about the environment. You just have to upload the job file, input and output folders in S3. You can define the no. of instances you need - EMR will run the job - output the job content in the S3 file you define. EMR can also terminate the instances once the job is complete. 

• Kinesis: Kinesis is a managed cloud service from Amazon to process real time data over large distributed data streams. The data can be captured from variety of stores such as web site click streams, social feeds, financial data transactions, sensor data, IT logs and location tracking events. 

• Data pipeline: AWS Data Pipeline is a cloud-based data workflow service that helps you process and move data between different AWS services and on-premise data sources.

• Amazon Machine learning: using this service, developers of any skill level can use the ML apis. It provides visualization tools and wizards that guides you through the process of creating ML models. This is highly scalable and is capable of predicting billions of predictions daily. 

Enterprise applications

• Amazon Workspaces: a managed desktop computing service in the cloud. Using this the network engineers can easily provision cloud based desktops that the users can use their iPads, desktops, laptops to access the content. 

• WorkMail: an email and calendering service from AWS for existing desktop and mobile email clients. 

• Workdocs: A fully managed solution to store electronic documents with more features such as security, access provision, share and edit features. 

Application

• SQS: A simple managed message queuing service that is fast reliable and scalable. It makes it simple and cost effective solution to send and receive messages to SQS. 

• SWF: a workflow services which can be used to co-ordinate between application components. 

• SES: a cost effective email sending service. The service can be used via AWS SDK that comes in different languages. 

• SNS: with SNS you can send notifications to mobile phones - Apple APNS, GCIM for google, windows and other major mobile platforms. 

• CloudSearch: With this service, you can quickly build a cost-effective solution to setup, manage and scale a search solution for your web site. 

• AppStream: With this service, you can stream your existing application from the cloud, reaching more users without code modifications. 

Deployment & management

• Elastic Beanstalk: A PAAS solution from AWS to help users deploy their application from their desktop in a easier way. There are Eclipse plugins available which you can use to move the artifact/scale up in AWS with a click of a button in the eclipse. 

• OpsWorks: An application management service that helps you in deploy and operate applications of all shapes and sizes. With this you can automate server scaling, software configuration, database setups. This also provides operation to automatic instance scaling, instance monitoring etc., With this you create your entire application as stacks on top of layers. These layers are blueprints that helps you in deploying in a easy way. 

• Cloud Formation: provides network engineers templates so that they can easily create and manage a collection of related AWS resources. 

• Code Deploy: a service that automates code deploy to any instance. helps you rapidly release new resources. 

• Code Pipeline:  a continuous delivery service for faster and reliable application updates. 

• Code commit: a service that makes it easy for companies to host private GIT repositories. It eliminates the need to manage your own code versioning system. 

Security & Administration

• CloudWatch: A monitoring tool for AWS products. 
• Config: lets you have the full visibility of all AWS resources. 
• CloudTrail: service that records AWS API calls you have made and provides the log files for analysis. It stores information such as IP address of the caller, request parameters etc., 
• IAM: fine grained granular control of AWS services
• Directory: A managed directory service. 
• KMS: encryiption and key management service for the cloud.