By Kelly Dent
If you’re thinking about migrating to the cloud or just want to know more about what AWS is and what is does, then you’ve come to the right place.
In this post, we’re going back to basics with everything you need to know about AWS as a beginner. Covering how AWS works, what you can do with it, who uses it, and more, this essential guide is the go-to resource for cloud novices looking to learn more about what AWS has to offer.
AWS is an acronym for Amazon Web Services.
AWS is a cloud service provider and a subsidiary of Amazon. It offers secure, scalable computing power, database storage, content delivery, and other cloud services to help businesses run and grow more efficiently.
Amazon introduced AWS in March 2006, making it the very first major cloud vendor available on the market.
Businesses of any and every size use AWS to build sophisticated applications with far better flexibility, scalability, and reliability than more traditional methods.
AWS works by providing over 200 fully featured services across the globe, making it the most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform on the market. The AWS Cloud offers infrastructure services, such as computing power, storage options, networking, and databases; as well as emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and Internet of Things (IoT).
It’s available on-demand, in seconds, with pay-as-you-go pricing. This means that businesses can get access to the resources necessary to stay on top of any organizational or market changes quickly.
Key features available through the AWS cloud include increased security, database engines, server configurations, encryption, and powerful big data tools that allow companies to focus on their core business instead of worrying about infrastructure.
Security in the cloud far surpasses that offered by its traditional, on-premises counterpart. Broad security certification and accreditation, data encryption at rest and in-transit, hardware security modules and strong physical security all contribute to a more secure way to manage your business’s IT infrastructure.
The capabilities assist businesses in satisfying any compliance, governance, and regulatory requirements.
The AWS community is big, and it’s only getting bigger.
Right now, AWS has millions of active customers globally. Covering virtually every industry and serving customers of all sizes and requirements, everyone from startups and SMEs to enterprises and public sector organizations are using AWS for every use case imaginable.
Enterprise-scale users (including giants like Netflix, Twitch, Facebook, BBC, ESPN, Airbnb, McDonald’s, and Ticketmaster) make up at least 10% of the total.
That’s not forgetting about the extensive AWS Partner Network (APN). This is made up of thousands of specialist system integrators and tens of thousands of independent software vendors (ISVs).
According to Gartner’s latest estimations, AWS is currently the most popular cloud provider with a 33% market share. With cloud uptake continuing to rise, AWS looks set to continue growing at a rapid rate, reporting $5.715bn of operating profit in Q2 of 2022 alone. That’s a 36% increase year-on-year.
To date, Amazon has reported over one million AWS users with the majority operating as part of small to medium-sized businesses. Enterprise-scale users (including giants like Netflix, Unilever, Kellogg’s, Airbnb, Nokia, Slack, The Financial Times, and Pinterest) make up approximately 10% of the total.
The AWS community is big, and it’s only getting bigger.
Right now, AWS has millions of active customers globally. Covering virtually every industry and serving customers of all sizes and requirements, everyone from startups and SMEs to enterprises and public sector organizations are using AWS for every use case imaginable.
Enterprise-scale users (including giants like Netflix, Twitch, Facebook, BBC, ESPN, Airbnb, McDonald’s, and Ticketmaster) make up at least 10% of the total.
That’s not forgetting about the extensive AWS Partner Network (APN). This is made up of thousands of specialist system integrators and tens of thousands of independent software vendors (ISVs).
According to Gartner’s latest estimations, AWS is currently the most popular cloud provider with a 33% market share. With cloud uptake continuing to rise, AWS looks set to continue growing at a rapid rate, reporting $5.715bn of operating profit in Q2 of 2022 alone. That’s a 36% increase year-on-year.
There’s so much you can do with AWS thanks to the range of benefits the service offers:
AWS offers excellent start-up support and services, including AWS Activate, a program offering training and hands-on ways to get the resources required to build, launch and grow a brand-new business. Using AWS, start-ups, as well as bigger enterprises, can boost their online presence through Elastic Beanstalk, a product that allows users to create web apps, host websites, and create and register a domain for your website.
In an increasingly mobile-first world, having a phone presence is key. AWS is well-equipped to help create those all-important apps; it allows users to configure app features by developing user authentication, data storage, backend logic, push notifications, content delivery, and analytics. Users can also test their apps on real devices to improve performance.
In terms of storage, AWS offers companies of any size highly flexible options, providing the amount of storage required precisely when it’s needed. AWS supports big data; companies can quickly and easily scale any big data apps including data warehousing, clickstream analytics, fraud detection, recommendation engines, serverless computing, and IoT processing.
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What certifications are available? How much do these cost and how are they taken? There are 11 AWS certifications currently available ranging from foundation level to full specialization:
Certification | Level | Cost | Format | Length |
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner | Foundation | $100 | Multiple choice, multiple answer | 90 mins |
AWS Certified Developer | Associate | $150 | Multiple choice, multiple answer | 130 mins, 65 questions |
AWS Certified SysOps Administrator | Associate | $150 | Multiple choice, multiple answer | 180 mins, 65 questions |
AWS Certified Solutions Architect | Associate | $150 | Multiple choice, multiple answer | 130 mins, 65 questions |
AWS Certified DevOps Engineer | Professional | $300 | Multiple choice, multiple answer | 180 mins, 75 questions |
AWS Certified Solutions Architect | Professional | $300 | Multiple choice, multiple answer | 180 mins, 75 questions |
AWS Certified Database | Specialization | $300 | Multiple choice, multiple answer | 180 mins, 65 questions |
AWS Certified Advanced Networking | Specialization | $300 | Multiple choice, multiple answer | 170 mins, 65 questions |
AWS Certified Security | Specialization | $300 | Multiple choice, multiple answer | 170 mins, 65 questions |
AWS Data Analytics | Specialization | $300 | Multiple choice, multiple answer | 180 mins, 65 questions |
AWS Certified Machine Learning | Specialization | $300 | Multiple choice, multiple answer | 180 mins, 65 questions |
Azure is the public cloud computing platform offered by Microsoft. It’s estimated to have a 21% market share, making it Amazon’s closest competitor in the cloud service market in 2022.
Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure are similar in that they offer many of the same capabilities; however, one may suit a specific business’s needs more than the other.
Azure is the public cloud computing platform for Microsoft and has only been in the race since 2010. Despite being late to the party, it has established itself as a powerhouse of cloud services. AWS, as the name suggests, is the cloud computing platform for Amazon which has been leading the cloud computing race for more than ten years with its wide range of compelling offerings.
AWS | Azure |
On-demand cloud computing platform and a subdivision of Amazon | Public cloud platform for Microsoft |
Continuously looking to strengthen its Hybrid cloud offerings | Excels in the Hybrid cloud market allowing companies to integrate onsite servers with cloud instances |
Greater reach in terms of government cloud offerings | Lesser reach in terms of government cloud offerings |
26 regions and 84 availability zones located worldwide | Over 60 regions around the world |
More flexible pricing model | Less flexible pricing model |
The time needed to implement AWS varies from case to case depending on the scale of the project and the requirements of the company in question.
In the Jefferson Frank Careers and Hiring Guide: AWS Edition we asked organizations how long their migration to AWS took, and found that:
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With over 200 services on offer, let’s explore some of AWS’ most popular products and services.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a web service that gives users resizable cloud compute capacity, making web-scale computing easier for developers.
Using EC2, customers are able to rent out the virtual machines (VMs) they need in order to run applications that would typically have been executed on traditional servers. This widely-used product essentially does the same thing as its traditional on-premises counterpart, with a significant reduction in costs and maximized flexibility, performance, and capacity.
EC2’s interface is quite straightforward and easy to use, allowing users to acquire, configure, and pay for exactly the capacity they need as and when they need it, with minimal friction. The service gives users total control over computing resources and reduces the time required to boot a new server instance to just a few minutes.
If there’s a spike in computing requirements, EC2 responds instantaneously, giving you control over how many resources are used at any given time. In contrast, traditional hosting services allocate a fixed number of resources for a pre-determined amount of time, meaning that you would typically experience a limited ability to respond when usage levels change unexpectedly or experience significant peaks.
Amazon EC2 is available to try for free for 12 months, with a limit of 750 compute hours per month. Beyond that, costs are typically calculated per second, with a minimum of 60 seconds as standard.
That being said, there are four other specific payment models and instance types that users can choose from: on-demand, reserved instances, and spot instances. Customers can also opt for dedicated hosts if dedicated physical servers are required for their EC2 instances:
Instance type |
Recommended for |
On-demand | Cases where low cost and flexibility are required, without a long-term commitment or payment upfront |
Irregular, short-term or erratic workloads which must not be interrupted | |
Testing applications for the first time | |
Spot | Applications with flexible start/end times |
Applications that are only worthwhile when compute costs are low | |
Urgent need for a large amount of additional compute capacity | |
Reserved | Steady-state usage |
Applications that might need reserved capacity | |
Users who can commit to EC2 usage over 1-3 years to reduce overall costs | |
Dedicated | Users with more stringent compliance requirements |
Previously, smaller developers wouldn’t have had the capital needed to get their hands on massive compute resources. They certainly wouldn’t have had the resources or capacity required to handle any unexpected load spikes, either. Enter Amazon EC2.
EC2 makes it possible for any developer to use Amazon’s vast resources with no investment up-front and absolutely no compromise on performance. Developers are free to work and experiment, safe in the knowledge that no matter how fast their businesses may grow, scaling up to meet their needs will always be cost-effective and straightforward.
It usually takes less than 10 minutes. The amount of time taken to boot up depends on a few factors including the size of the Amazon Machine Image (AMI), the number of instances being launched, and how recently that AMI has been launched. It’s worth knowing that launching an AMI for the first time could take a little longer to boot.
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An Amazon Machine Instance (AMI) is a master image used in the creation of EC instances (virtual servers) in the AWS cloud. Machine images can be described as templates that are configured with an operating system and other software. These determine the user’s operating environment.
Developers use AWS Elastic Beanstalk to quickly launch and manage applications in the cloud. It automatically handles capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring when it comes to deployment.
Amazon Lightsail is used in order to set up a simple virtual private server (VPS). Lightsail provides the compute, storage, and networking capacity and capabilities necessary to deploy and manage cloud-based websites and web applications.
One of the best things about Lightsail is that it includes everything a developer needs to launch a project quickly: a virtual machine, SSD-based storage, data transfer, DNS management, and a static IP—it’s essentially a VPS starter kit.
AWS Lambda is a highly popular product used to run code for virtually any type of application or backend service, without provisioning or managing servers. Customers only need to pay for the compute time consumed, and there is absolutely no charge when the code is not running.
Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) is a load-balancing service for AWS deployments. It automatically distributes incoming application traffic and scales resources to meet traffic demands.
Amazon Redshift is a data warehouse that uses SQL and standard Business Intelligence tools to analyze data. It allows users to run complex analytic queries against petabytes of structured data, with most results returning in a matter of seconds.
Amazon SNS (Simple Notification Service) is a fully-managed messaging solution that enables users to chat directly with customers through system-to-system or app-to-person communication.
Machine learning is a type of technology that helps users make better-informed decisions by utilizing historical data. Machine learning algorithms identify patterns in data and create mathematical models using those patterns. The models can then be used to make future predictions based on current data.
Sure! AWS offers Amazon Machine Learning, a service that allows users to build predictive apps, including fraud detection, demand forecasting, and click prediction. It uses algorithms that help create machine learning models by identifying patterns in existing data and using them to make predictions based on any new data that comes in.
Amazon Machine Learning operates using an industry-standard logistic regression algorithm to generate models that can be trained on datasets up to 100GB in size. Data can be read across three types of data stores:
Data from other products can generally be exported for use in Amazon Machine Learning via Amazon S3. The product also offers powerful model evaluation features.
AWS Sagemaker is a comprehensive management service allowing users to build, train and deploy highly scalable machine learning models at speed.
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Amazon Athena is an interactive query service you can use to analyze data in Amazon S3. Athena is serverless and uses standard SQL and Presto. It works with a number of different data formats, including CSV, JSON, ORC, Apache Parquet, and Avro.
Amazon EMR is a web service that allows users to process massive amounts of data in an easy and cost-effective way. It uses a hosted Hadoop framework running on the web-scale infrastructure of Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3.
Amazon EMR makes it possible for customers to access exactly the capacity required to carry out data-intensive tasks for applications such as web indexing, data mining, log file analysis, machine learning, financial analysis, scientific simulation, and bioinformatics research.
Amazon RDS (Relational Database Services) simplifies database configuration, management, and scaling in the cloud. It allows you to automate tasks in a cost-effective manner that’s proportionate to your needs.
Amazon CloudSearch is a fully-managed service that makes it easy to set up, manage, and scale a search solution for your website or application.
Amazon CloudSearch provides several benefits over running your own self-managed search service including easy configuration, auto-scaling for data and traffic, self-healing clusters, and high availability with Multi-AZ. Through the AWS Management Console, users can create a search domain and upload the data to be made searchable, and Amazon CloudSearch automatically provides the required resources and deploys a highly tuned search index.
Amazon Elasticsearch Service helps you with every aspect of domain setup, from provisioning infrastructure capacity in the network environment you request right up to the installation of the Elasticsearch software.
Once your domain is up and running, Elasticsearch automates common administrative tasks, such as performing backups, monitoring instances and patching software, ultimately saving you time. It integrates with Amazon CloudWatch, producing metrics that show you the state of your domains, with the option to modify domain instance and storage settings to make tailoring your domain as straightforward as possible.
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams enables you to build custom applications that process or analyze streaming data for specialized needs.
Through Amazon Kinesis, you can add various types of data such as clickstreams, application logs, and social media to a data stream from countless sources, and that data is made available in seconds.
Amazon Redshift is a fast, fully managed data warehouse used to analyze data via standard SQL and any existing Business Intelligence (BI) tools. It allows you to run complex analytic queries against massive amounts of structured data, with most results returning in seconds.
Redshift is praised for its lightning-fast querying, with queries distributed and parallelized across multiple physical resources. It scales easily, and automatically patches and backs up the data warehouse.
Amazon QuickSight is a cloud-powered business analytics service that allows employees within an organization to build visualizations, perform ad-hoc analysis, and quickly get business insights from their data, anytime, on any device.
AWS Data Pipeline is a web service used to schedule regular data movement and data processing activities in the cloud. It integrates with on-premises apps, as well as cloud-based storage, to allow users to access data as required. Based on a schedule you define, your pipeline regularly performs processing activities such as distributed data copy, SQL transforms, MapReduce applications, or custom scripts against destinations such as Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, or Amazon DynamoDB.
AWS Glue is a fully-managed, pay-as-you-go, extract, transform, and load (ETL) service that automates the time-consuming steps of data preparation for analytics.
AWS Glue automatically discovers and profiles data via the Glue Data Catalog, recommends and generates ETL code to transform source data into target schemas, and runs the ETL jobs on a fully managed, scale-out Apache Spark environment to load data into its destination. It also allows users to set up, orchestrate, and monitor complex data flows.
Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) is used within Amazon EC2. It’s a simple, scalable and high-performance block-storage service for throughput and transaction workloads.
Amazon S3 is a type of object storage that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, from anywhere on the Internet, whenever it’s needed. In short, object storage is a type of data storage structure that handles data as ‘objects’ rather than in a file hierarchy or in the form of blocks. The data, metadata, and a unique identifier code is usually contained within an object.
Using Amazon S3, users are able to build applications that also utilize Internet storage. Since Amazon S3 is highly scalable and customers only pay for what’s used, there is the option to start small and grow the application as desired, with absolutely no compromise on performance or reliability.
You can store an unlimited amount of data, with individual S3 objects ranging from 0 bytes to a maximum of 5 terabytes. The largest object that can be uploaded in a single PUT is 5 gigabytes. For objects larger than 100 megabytes, you should consider using the Multipart Upload capability.
There are four storage classes:
More detailed information regarding the different storage classes can be found on AWS’ official site.
Amazon S3 is a simple key-based object store. When data is stored, you’re given a unique object key that can be used to retrieve the data at a later time. Alternatively, customers can utilize S3 Object Tagging to organize data across all S3 buckets.
The S3 Standard storage class is designed for 99.99% availability, while the S3 Standard-IA storage class and S3 One Zone-IA are designed for 99.9% and 99.5% availability respectively.
The cost of implementing AWS cloud services depends on the scale and nature of a company’s day-to-day needs.
A key advantage that comes with migrating to AWS cloud services is that it offers a highly-flexible and cost-effective pricing structure. This helps to make cloud computing accessible to businesses of any size.
AWS pricing operates on a pay-as-you-go model across all its services; users only pay for what they need for as long as it’s needed. There are no termination fees associated with stopping an AWS service when it is no longer required. The best way to calculate estimated costs is by using Amazon’s AWS price calculators.
AWS has a free tier up to specified limits for each service. This allows customers the chance to try out all AWS has to offer without having to commit financially and is comprised of three different offerings: a 12-month Free Tier, an Always Free offer, and short-term trials.
All AWS services are available on demand without any long-term contracts. AWS operates on a pay-as-you-go pricing model which allows you to adapt to fluctuating business needs; you’re free to adapt services according to your requirements, no matter how quickly things change. This, in turn, allows you to focus on your business more effectively and efficiently.
AWS Support offers one-on-one, fast-response support and detailed help on technical and operational issues in the cloud. Customers can opt for a tier suited to their specific requirements, with each tier providing the necessary building blocks without asking the customer to make long-term commitments or adding extras that are not useful in that case.
Your AWS Support covers a wide range of performance and production issues for AWS products and services, along with other key stack components, including:
AWS Support does not include code development, debugging custom software, or performing system administration tasks.
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