What is AWS? - Amazon Web Services

There are a lot of great ways to host your projects these days: AWS, Google App Engine, Heroku, and Digital Ocean just to name a few. When you are starting out, deciding which one to use can be challenging. It’s critical to choose the right one, as making an uneducated decision will negatively affect your project and changing your hosting can be a difficult task. I will explain the value proposition of Amazon Web Services and its features.

AWS provides both Infrastructure As A Service (IAAS) and Platform As A Service (PAAS) offerings, which means that Amazon provides the complete set of infrastructure and platform tools at scale. The IAAS offerings cover servers, the associated operating systems, and storage. The PAAS offerings include email, message queues, databases, and web service hosts, to name just a few. All the infrastructure tools you are likely to need are available and ready to be customized to your particular needs.

AWS provides its users with a vast array of features, which should make it easier to build things quickly and efficiently. All the features are scalable and are all available on one platform. Let’s jump in and discuss some of the best features AWS has to offer its customers. Storing large amounts of data can be a hassle. If you were building the infrastructure to host the solution, you would probably want to dedicate a server just to house your data you would need to secure the server, handle user permissions and create an API, which would be a lot of work to build from scratch. However, Amazon had this problem a long time ago, and they built an extremely robust solution, Simple Storage Service or S3, where companies like Netflix store their data (maybe one more company, so). The same story is true for content delivery networks, database replication, messaging, load balancing and tons of other features.

Another great thing about AWS is how unbelievably fast you can spin up and down your instances as needed; you can even set them to scale up and down automatically in response to load. If you are prototyping, which many companies do in their early stages, the ability to rapidly spin up new virtual servers and then crush them while only paying pennies for usage by the hour can save you time and money. You can set up development and testing environments that are extremely close to production at a fraction of the cost compared to other service companies. With AWS, you are also able to adjust the amount of servers you are using to match demand easily. Now no system is 100 percent secure, but AWS has a top notch security system. They have multi-factor authentication, identity, and access management, and they are also PCI compliant which all means they can keep your project safe and secure.

We have listed many of the impressive features of AWS and hope you have found it informative. At Seamgen, we use AWS as our go to for hosting many of our projects. We like AWS for many of the reasons we wrote about and more. In a later blog, we will break down Heroku and its many great features. Have questions or comments? Contact Seamgen!