Amazon Web Services, or AWS, is a cloud-computing platform offered by Amazon.com Inc. Some of the company’s primary competitors in this space include Microsoft Corporation and Alphabet Inc. If you want to know more about this platform and how it can help your small business, here are the important details to know.
What Is Amazon Web Services Exactly?
Amazon Web Services offers various cloud-computing services, covering everything from storage and computing to networking and mobile needs.
The company breaks down its cloud computing offerings into ten different service categories. They include:
- Storage
- Networking
- Database
- Developer Tools
- Database
- Analytics
- Deployment
- Application Services
- Management Tools
- Security
Through these services, any business can rent cloud computing resources on a pay-per-usage, metered basis. The company has several different pricing tiers with varying computing capacity and third-party software integration. With more than 100 services, there are over 70 individual pricing plans available, depending on the needs of the business.
A Closer Look at Some of Their Offered Services
On AWS Storage
The company offers various storage services, including compute-optimized storage, general-purpose storage, and archival storage.
In addition to these three core services, AWS also offers its Storage Gateway product, designed to reduce the cost and complexity of storing data by moving it directly to the cloud. The storage gateway also provides an ability to access files using legacy applications.
Storage on AWS is an object storage platform. All data uploaded to the platform is stored in objects and are stored in their unaltered state. That includes all metadata and other details associated with the file.
The services offered here include:
- Amazon Simple Storage Service or S3 for short: This service offers secure, durable, and highly scalable object storage. Available from one gigabyte to an unlimited amount.
- Amazon Glacier: This is a long-term archive service for infrequently accessed data, with a three-month minimum and per-GB fees.
- Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS): EBS is a block storage service provisioned in a virtual disk format. Cold storage. It is a low-cost storage utility that’s very scalable.
On AWS Networking
The networking offerings support a variety of different topologies, such as:
- VPC: Amazon Virtual Private Cloud or VPC is a virtual network that gives you a private, isolated section of the AWS cloud.
- CloudFront: This is a content delivery network that distributes data globally.
- Amazon Direct Connect: This option offers direct-connection services for on-premise equipment, like computers and storage.
- Amazon Route 53: This is a highly available and scalable route-by-way system, making it easy to get traffic to your instances.
- Elastic Load Balancing: This automatically redistributes traffic between your EC2 instances.
- Elastic IP: This is an IP address you can use to terminate network traffic.
Conclusion
Amazon Web Services aims to offer various services to help users build, launch, and run applications while reducing the applications’ cost, complexity, and time-to-launch. Through its many benefits, Amazon is helping to lower the barriers to entry for small businesses that want to expand into new markets but don’t have the resources to do so. It’s a win-win for both companies and consumers.
If you’re interested in creating a business-critical cloud, AWS has many features you can use to build your own. At BaseHost, we provide reliable, powerful, and effective web hosting services, along with Amazon Web Services, with small enterprises in mind. We’re excited to partner with you and see you grow! Contact us today.
