Business application architecture has evolved greatly in recent years and each step in this evolution brought up new perspectives and new challenges. One of the world’s largest online retail platforms Amazon.com invested millions of dollars and more than 15 years of research into building and managing the large-scale, reliable, and efficient IT infrastructure. In 2006 company launched Amazon Web Services to share experience and resources with other organizations.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform is a leading provider of cloud computing services. It allows organizations to shorten time to market and reduce costs by managing shared computing and storage resources rather than building and managing infrastructure on their own.
Development, management, and operation of applications requires a lot of different technologies, so cloud computing provides a simple way to access them. IT enabled capabilities such as compute power, storage, databases, messaging, and others, are delivered as a service to external customers over the Internet.
AWS architecture
Amazon Web Services own and maintain the network-connected hardware required for their capabilities. Actually, AWS is located in 19 geographical "regions" all over the world. A region is a highly available data center location that houses cloud computing resources. Each region is completely independent and contains multiple, isolated locations known as Availability Zones. They are isolated from failures in other Availability Zones and provide inexpensive, low-latency links to zones in the same region. In order to protect applications from a failure on a single location, a customer can launch instances in separate Availability Zones.
AWS services are accessed via HTTP, using the REST architectural style and SOAP protocol. One of the biggest benefits is cost-effectiveness of this solution. AWS resources delivery uses ‘pay-as-you-go’ pricing, meaning that customers pay only for what they use, without any up-front expenses or long-term commitments. Although, the way usage is measured for billing varies from service to service.
With Amazon Web Services organizations have flexibility to use and mix the operating systems, databases, programming models, and architectures that suit their business needs. Also they can use scalable and elastic AWS resources: fast addition or subtraction of the application resources will equalize demands and costs. Most of concerns of web services users are connected with security. AWS platform builds services in accordance with security best practices to ensure end-to-end security and end-to-end privacy.
Develop and maintain with AWS
AWS is a collection of remote computing services that provision organizations with compute power, databases, storage, and other resources in minutes and provide the flexibility to choose the development platform or programming model that will benefit each particular project. It is much faster and cheaper than building a physical server farm.
Using a large computing capacity of AWS customers can access as many resources as they need, almost instantly, and pay only for the usage. Taking into account a utility-style pricing and business model, Amazon Web Services deliver an enterprise-grade IT infrastructure in a reliable, secure, and cost-effective manner. The most central and well-known of the platform’s services are Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon SES and Amazon RDS. Visit aws.amazon.com to get more details on functionity and scope of Amazon Web Services.