What is AWS and its impact in different Fields?

Wondering what is AWS and how it impacts our day-to-day life? So, in this blog I have cleared all your doubts about AWS and its impact in different fields.

What is AWS?

Amazon Web Services, Incorporation (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon providing ondemand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered pay-as-you-go basis. These cloud computing web services provide a variety of basic abstract technical infrastructure and distributed computing building blocks and tools. One of these services is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which allows users to have at their disposal a virtual cluster of computers, available all the time, through the Internet. AWS’s virtual computers emulate most of the attributes of a real computer, including hardware central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs) for processing; local/RAM memory; hard disk / SSD storage; a choice of operating systems; networking; and pre-loaded application software such as web servers, databases, and customer relationship management. The AWS technology is implemented at server farms throughout the world and maintained by the Amazon subsidiary. Fees are based on a combination of usage which is commonly known as a “Pay-as-you-go” model, hardware, operating system, software, or networking features chosen by the subscriber required availability, redundancy, security, and service options. Subscribers can pay for a single virtual AWS computer, a dedicated physical computer, or clusters of either. As part of the subscription agreement, Amazon provides security for subscribers’ systems. AWS operates from many global geographical regions including 6 in North America. Amazon markets AWS to subscribers as a way of obtaining large scale computing capacity more quickly and cheaply than building an actual physical server farm. All services are billed based on usage, but each service measures usage in varying ways. As of 2017, AWS owns 33% of all cloud while the next two competitors Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud have 18%, and 9% respectively.

Services that AWS offer

AWS offers a wide range of services that are utilised by various companies and fields. As of 2021, AWS comprises over 200 products and services including computing, storage, networking, database, analytics, application services, deployment, management, machine learning, mobile, developer tools, and tools for the Internet of Things. The most popular include Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Amazon Simple Storage Service, Amazon Connect, and AWS Lambda which is a serverless function enabling serverless ETL. Most services are not exposed directly to end users, but instead offer functionality through APIs for developers to use in their applications. Amazon Web Services’ offerings are accessed over HTTP, using the REST architectural style and SOAP protocol for older APIs and exclusively JSON for newer ones.

Impact of AWS

As of January 2021, AWS has distinct operations in 25 geographical regions, 7 in North

America, 1 in South America, 6 in Europe, 1 in the Middle East, 1 in Africa and 8 in Asia Pacific. AWS is about to launch 15 more of their availability zones and again separately five more zones in Australia, India, Indonesia, Spain, and Switzerland. Each region is wholly contained within a single country and all its data and services stay within the designated region. Each region has multiple “Availability Zones”, which consist of one or more discrete data centres, each with redundant power, networking, and connectivity, housed in separate facilities. Availability Zones do not automatically provide additional scalability or redundancy within a region since they are intentionally isolated from each other to prevent outages from spreading between Zones. Several services can operate across Availability Zones such as DynamoDB while others can be configured to replicate across Zones to spread demand and avoid downtime from failures. As of December 2014, Amazon Web Services operated an estimated 1.4 million servers across 28 availability zones. The global network of AWS Edge locations consists of 54 points of presence worldwide, including locations in the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America. In 2014, AWS claimed its aim was to achieve 100% renewable energy usage in the future. In the United States, AWS’s partnerships with renewable energy providers include Community Energy of Virginia, to support the US East region. Pattern Development, in January 2015, to construct and operate Amazon Wind Farm Fowler Ridge, Iberdrola Renewables, LLC, in July 2015, to construct and operate Amazon Wind Farm US East, EDP Renewables North America, in November 2015, to construct and operate Amazon Wind Farm US Central and Tesla Motors, to apply battery storage technology to address power needs in the Northern California region of The United States.

There are some significances in the history of AWS such as,

Until March 14, 2006, there were more than 150,000 developers who have signed up to use Amazon Web Services since its inception. On May 13, 2013, AWS was awarded an Agency

Authority to Operate from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under the

Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program. In October 2013, it was revealed that

AWS was awarded a $600M contract with the CIA. During August 2014, AWS received Department of Defence-Wide provisional authorization for all U.S. Regions. During the 2015 reinvent keynote, AWS disclosed that they have more than a million active customers every month in 190 countries, including nearly 2,000 government agencies, 5,000 education institutions and more than 17,500 non-profits. On April 5, 2017, AWS and DXC Technology announced an expanded alliance to increase access of AWS features for enterprise clients in existing data centres.

Significant Companies that use AWS

The companies that are using AWS till date:

Aon, Adobe, Airbnb, Alcatel-Lucent, AOL, Acquia, AdRoll, AEG, Alert Logic, Autodesk,

Bitdefender, BMW, British Gas, Baidu, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Canon, Capital One, Channel

4, Chef, Citrix, Coinbase, Comcast, Coursera, Disney, Docker, Dow Jones, European Space

Agency, ESPN, Expedia, Financial Times, FINRA, General Electric, GoSquared, Guardian

News & Media, Harvard Medical School, Hearst Corporation, Hitachi, HTC, IMDb,

International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, International Civil Aviation Organization, ITV, iZettle, Johnson & Johnson, JustGiving, JWT, Kaplan, Kellogg’s, Lamborghini, Lonely Planet, Lyft, Made.com, McDonalds, NASA, NASDAQ OMX, National Rail Enquiries,

National Trust, Netflix, News International, News UK, Nokia, Nordstrom, Novartis, Pfizer,

Philips, Pinterest, Quantas, Reddit, Sage, Samsung, SAP, Schneider Electric, Scribd,

Securitas Direct, Siemens, Slack, Sony, SoundCloud, Spotify, Square Enix, Tata Motors,

The Weather Company, Twitch, Turner Broadcasting, Ticketmaster, Time Inc., Trainline, Ubisoft, UCAS, Unilever, US Department of State, USDA Food and Nutrition Service, UK Ministry of Justice, Vodafone Italy, WeTransfer, WIX, Xiaomi, Yelp, Zynga and Zillow.

The Big Clients of AWS

Clearly, AWS is the cloud computing platform of choice for businesses across a range of industries. But who are the biggest, and how much money are they spending on these services? According to Intricately, the top ten AWS users based on EC2 monthly spend are:

• Netflix: $19 million

• Twitch: $15 million

• LinkedIn: $13 million

• Facebook: $11 million

• Turner Broadcasting: $10 million

• BBC: $9 million

• Baidu: $9 million

• ESPN: $8 million

• Adobe: $8 million

• Twitter: $7 million

Games that store their cloud information in AWS servers

More than 90 percent of the world’s largest game companies use Amazon Web Services, which offloads online gaming infrastructure tasks to Amazon’s giant cloud computing resources.

The major companies include:

• Epic Games

• Riot Games

• Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG)

• Ubisoft Games

• Gameloft

• Activision

• Rovio Games (Angry Birds)

• Miniclip

• Nexon

• Krafton

Finally, AWS provide more cloud services rather than any other services. If there is no AWS cloud then there would be no possibility of watching movies online, playing games online and majorly organising data in local computers would be a hectic task for any other company. Using cloud reduces time to access anything from anywhere. Cloud computing reduces our work off downloading many things for just small work. Cloud games may become more and more significant in the future as 5G Network begin to work at a great pace.