AWS Tutorial

What is computing?

Computing is the process of using computer technology to complete a given goal-oriented task. Computing may encompass the design and development of software and hardware systems for a broad range of purposes - often structuring, processing and managing any kind of information - to aid in the pursuit of scientific studies, making intelligent systems, and creating and using different media for entertainment and communication.

What is cloud computing?

According to National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a U.S. government agency, Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.

What is the advantage of using cloud?

1. No need to maintain data center in a room with servers, networking gear, and maybe storage. No need to maintain consistent temperature and humidity to maintain the efficiency and reliability of the hardware components within the servers and other pieces of kit. No need to maintain continues power supply and no need of keeping power backups. Power cost can be saved. 

2. No special technical engineers needed to install and maintain data centers. 

3. No dedicated staff required for installing operating systems, applying latest patches, administration and maintenance. 

4. No specialist engineers required to manage the hosting. 

5. No need to wait around to procure more hardware to scale if any requirement comes immediately. 

Models of cloud computing services

There are three models of cloud computing services providing below three types of functionalities:

1. Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) 

2. Platform as a Service (PaaS) 

3. Software as a Service (SaaS) 

Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas): Offers users the basic building blocks of computing like processing, network connectivity, storage, virtual machines, containers and other resources. It offers low-cost services for IT resources over the internet and a pay-as-you-go pricing model. Under cloud computing, IT resources can be utilized on demand. So, you don't need to pay for unused resources or any upfront fees to provision any hardware in advance. Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine, and Microsoft Azure are examples for IaaS providers.

Platform as a Service (PaaS): Offers users development environments like Programming languages, Application frameworks, Databases, repositories and other tools on a pay-as-per use basis and access them using the Internet connection. AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Google App Engine, and Heroku are examples for PaaS providers. The PaaS provider takes care of backing up the data and managing the collection of backups, for example, thus relieving the user of having to complete further burdensome administrative tasks.

Software as a Service (SaaS): With the help IaaS and PaaS services software applications are hosted and made running in the cloud. These software applications are offered to users as services. With SaaS, all application functionality is delivered over a network in a pretty package. End-users do not need to install any software on their devices to access these services. The user need do nothing more than use the application. Amazon WorkSpaces, Google Apps for Work, and Microsoft Office 365, Mail Services, Document Management services etc. are examples for SaaS.

Private public and hybrid cloud computing

Public cloud computing: Public cloud computing can be used by anyone. Amazon is the first and largest public cloud computing provider.

Private cloud computing: These are private to IT organizations and their internal users. These are hosted in their own on-premise data centres.

Hybrid cloud computing: Organizations using both private and public cloud computing or from a data centres part of cloud is private and part of cloud is public.

What is serverless architecture?

An application which has to be run on server should run on server. There is no serverless concept, we call it serverless because we don’t maintain servers but maintained by third party providers like AWS. Who are new to serverless computing will consider serverless applications to be simply “in the cloud.” While most serverless applications are hosted in the cloud, it’s a misperception that these applications are entirely serverless. The applications still run-on servers that are simply managed by another party. Two of the most popular examples of this are AWS Lambda and Azure functions.