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A Quick overview of AWS

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AWS (Amazon Web Services) is a leading Cloud services provider. The product (service) offerings from AWS are enormous. For newbies, it may be difficult to understand what each Service is used for. In this short article I will give you a high level overview of the various AWS Services.

Instead of typing pages of information, I’ve compiled and distilled the core information and presented here in a tabular format. In this way, it can also act as a quick reference.

Product/Service

Category

Usage

EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) Compute It is THE cloud computing power. An EC2 instance can be thought of a virtual server that runs OS of your choice with resizable hardware resources. With ELB (Elastic Load Balancing), Load is automatically distributed to multiple EC2 instances
Lambda Compute Run code of virtually any type of application without prior provisioning of servers.
EC2 Container Service Compute Run scalable container service that supports Docker containers.
Elastic Beanstalk Compute Deploy applications (written in Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, .net, node.js, Go) on servers like nginx, apache, IIS
VI Import/Export Compute Export and import Virtual machine images.
S3 (Simple Storage Service) Storage Store data. Highly scalable and safe storage
Glacier Storage Store data for long term archiving
EBS (Elastic Block Store) Storage Highly available block-level storage volume.
EFS (Elastic File System) Storage Shared File storage service
Storage Gateway Storage Connect on-premise applications with cloud storage seamlessly.
Cloud Front Content Delivery Content delivery web service. Provides low latency and high transfer rates
Import/export snowball Content delivery Transfer large amount of data (petabyte scale) in and out of AWS
RDS (Relational Database Service) Database Fully managed RDBMS service that can provide instances of Oracle,SQL Server, MySQL,PostgreSQL,AuroraDB,MariaDB
Aurora Database MySQL compatible fast, reliable RDBMS
Database Migration Service Database Migrate on-premise Database to Cloud
DynamoDB Database NoSQL Database service (Document based data model or key-value data model)
RedShift Database Petabyte scale Data Warehouse
ElasticCache Database In-memory cache (Memcached and Redis)
VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) Networking User defined virtual network within AWS Cloud
Direct Connect Networking Dedicated network link between on-premise and AWS Cloud
Route 53 Networking Reliable DNS (Domain Name System)
CodeCommit Dev Tools Fully Managed Source Control service (Private GIT repositories)
CodeDeploy Dev Tools Automate code deployment to any instance
CodePipeline Dev Tools Delivery service for Application updates
CloudWatch Management Tools Collect and track metrics from AWS resources. Create alerts.
CloudFormation Management Tools Create and manage collection of AWS resources. GUI available.
CloudTrail Management Tools Record audit trail of AWS calls
AWS Config Management Tools Provides resource inventory, configuration and history. Config Rules enable maintaining the configuration.
OpsWorks Management Tools Chef instance for managing application configuration.
Service Catalog Management Tools Create and manage catalogs of IT services
Trusted Advisor Management Tools Automatically inspects and recommends changes to improve cost effectiveness, performance and security
IAM (Identity and Access Management) Security Create and manage users and roles to control access to AWS resources
KMS (Key management Service) Security Create and control Security Keys. Uses HSMs (Hardware Security Modules)
Directory Service Security Connects AWS resources to existing Active Directory or lets you create a new standalone directory in the Cloud
Inspector Security Automated Security assessment service.
WAF (Web Application Firewall) Security Protects Web Applications from common exploits.
CloudHSM (Hardware Security module) Security Dedicated HSM appliance within cloud
EMR (Elastic MapReduce) Analytics Managed apache Hadoop framework for processing big data
QuickSight Analytics BI (Business Intelligence) service
Data Pipeline Analytics Reliably move data between AWS services and on-premise data sources
Elastic Search Service Analytics Managed Elastic Search service
Kinesis Analytics Load, Analyze and Stream data from the cloud (Two services: Amazon Kinesis Firehose, Amazon Kinesis Streams
ML (Machine Learning) Machine Learning Visualization and Wizards for Machine Learning models and algorithms
IoT (Internet of Things) IoT Gather and process data from connected devises and manage interaction with AWS resources
Mobile Hub Mobile Services Build mobile apps on AWS
Cognito Mobile Services Save mobile user data in AWS
Device Farm Mobile Services Mobile App testing service
Mobile Analytics Mobile Services Measure App usage and revenue
SNS (Simple Notification Service) Mobile Services Full managed Pub-Sub messaging service
Mobile SDK Mobile Services Build mobile apps (ios, android, fireos)
API Gateway Application Services Create, Publish, Manage, Monitor and Secure APIs.
AppStream Application Services Deliver windows applications to any device without any code changes
CloudSearch Application Services Search solution for Applications and websites in the cloud
Elastic Transcoder Application Services Convert media types from one format to another
SES (Simple Email Service) Application Services Email Service
SQS (Simple Queue Service) Application Services Message Queueing Service (No limit in volume or throughput)
SWF (Simple WorkFlow) Application Services Build and run background jobs
Workspaces Enterprise Applications Managed desktop service in the cloud.
WorkDocs Enterprise Applications Enterprise storage and sharing service for documents
WorkMail Enterprise Applications Business email and calendaring service in the cloud.

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