AWS Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is surely one of the greatest inventions and is a great building block to deploy different types of applications to the cloud. For those who are unaware of the miracles of the AWS and willing to know what is Amazon Web Services, AWS is a gift to the mankind that Amazon provided in order to make the cloud computing one step ahead. Cloud computing has become a necessity for businesses that provide a flexible, cost-effective, and on-demand storage service. Further, it provides a different level of command and control over the information and data based on the users’ preference. These types of cloud computing services are called the service deployment models.

Initially launched in 2006 to take care of the online retail operations of Amazon, AWS is currently one of the major draw cards of the cloud computing technologies, which provides a Cloud Hosting Service.

AWS, today, is undoubtedly the largest and globally renowned technology that provides cloud computing products and services. What makes AWS the most successful and profitable service is its size and presence in the computing world. AWS’s existence is so large that it can be divided into two main products viz. EC2, Amazon’s virtual machine service and S3, Amazon’s storage system. Furthermore, some of the major services AWS provides include Amazon Cloud Front, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB, and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). AWS offers some amazing services to its users that include the remote computing, servers, networking, security, storage, email, and mobile development etc. Let us take a sneak peek into the AWS services list here:

Amazon reported Amazon Web Services (AWS) revenue of $10.8 billion for Q2 2020, compared to $8.3 billion for Q2 2019. AWS revenue grew 29% in the quarter. 

Across the business, Amazon’s quarterly sales increased to $88.9 billion, beating predictions of $81.5 billion. The net income of $5.2 billion was the highest in a single quarter yet for the giant, driven by online shopping during COVID-19 – though note that the company is careful to note the $4 billion in costs related to COVID-19. And AWS? It made up 12.1% of Amazon’s revenue for the quarter – and 64% of its profit.

AWS only continues to grow, and bolster the retail giant time after time. One thing to keep in mind: you’ll see a couple of headlines pointing out that revenue growth is down, quoting that 29% number and comparing it to previous quarters’ growth rates, which peaked at 81% in 2015. However, that metric is of questionable value as AWS continues to increase revenue at this enormous scale, dominating the market

 in 2018, a market share breakdown from analyst Canalys, which reported AWS in the lead owning about a third of the market, Microsoft in second with about 15 percent, and Google sitting around 5 percent.

In 2019, they reported an overall growth in the cloud infrastructure market of 42%. By provider, AWS had the biggest sales gain with a $2.3 billion YOY increase, but Canalys reported Azure and Google Cloud with bigger percentage increases.

As of July 2020, Canalys reports AWS with 31% of the market, Azure at 20%, Google Cloud at 6%, Alibaba Cloud close behind at 5%, and other clouds with 37%. 

 Bezos has said, “AWS had the unusual advantage of a seven-year head start before facing like-minded competition. As a result, the AWS services are by far the most evolved and most functionality-rich.” AWS have 24 launched regions each with multiple availability zones, 3 announced regions, 77 availability zones in 245 countries. 

Let's see some real life examples how they are using AWS cloud for their business growth :

>>> NETFLIX

Netflix on AWS

Netflix is the world’s leading internet television network, with more than 100 million members in more than 190 countries enjoying 125 million hours of TV shows and movies each day. Netflix uses AWS for nearly all its computing and storage needs, including databases, analytics, recommendation engines, video transcoding, and more—hundreds of functions that in total use more than 100,000 server instances on AWS.

Netflix Realizes Multi-Region Resiliency Using Amazon Route 53

What happens when you need to move 89 million viewers to a different AWS region? Netflix's infrastructure, built on AWS, makes it possible to be extremely resilient, even when the company is running services in many AWS Regions simultaneously.

Benefits of AWS

• Processes and enriches multiple terabytes each day, representing billions of events, with sub-second response times for analytics queries
• Highly cost efficient compared to competing solutions
• Freedom to experiment with system architecture to arrive at the most effective solution
• Data ingestion initiated with just a few simple API calls
• Highly elastic solution with close to 1,000 Amazon Kinesis shards working in parallel

>>> BYJU'S

BYJU’S is India’s largest education company and the creator of India’s most popular K-12 learning app, which offers highly adaptive, engaging, and effective learning programs for students. Reinventing how students learn in the age of mobile devices, the BYJU’S approach combines world-class teachers, proven pedagogical methods, innovative technology, and data science to deliver personalized learning across grades.

Prakash Ramachandran , Chief Technology Officer, BYJU’S said "we now have more than 15 million students using the BYJU’S mobile app, and we could not support that number without being on AWS. As our user and subscriber base continues to expand, we are extremely confident in our ability to support and manage that growth."

Migrating to AWS to Host a Popular Website and Analyze App and Web User Data :

BYJU’S chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the cloud platform for its website and mobile app. “Many of our team members had used AWS previously, so we were familiar with the technology, and we knew it could help us scale easily,” says Ramachandran. “AWS is also very simple to configure. In just a few weeks, we moved the BYJU’S website, our apps, and a video pipeline to AWS.”

BYJU’S runs its website and mobile apps on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. The company uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for PostgreSQL as its primary database service, and it stores presentations and other educational content in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets.

For data analytics, BYJU’S takes advantage of the Amazon Redshift fully managed data warehouse to analyze app and website user data through the company’s existing business-intelligence software tools. Using Amazon Redshift, BYJU’S can evaluate student feedback and capitalize on those insights to provide a more personalized learning experience. “We can discover more accurately how students are actually using the app or if they’re watching a learning video all the way through, for example,” says Ramachandran. “Based on the results, we can more directly map learning content to individual students’ needs or preferences.”

Benefits of AWS

• Offers a complete learning experience that integrates classes, assessments, and personalized assignments, along with in-depth analysis and recommendations
• Scales to meet the demands of more than 15 million students globally
• Takes advantage of newer technologies to create innovative new products
• Uses deeper data analysis to personalize learning

>>> OYO 

Indian startup OYO Rooms—valued at $5 billion—claims to be the third-largest hospitality company in the world. The company partners with budget hotels that standardize rooms to OYO Rooms’ specifications—down to the thickness of the mattress—and provides end-to-end technology for hotel partners to run their operations efficiently. In turn, hotel partners gain access to OYO Rooms’ software, which include an internal audit app used to audit properties and capture customer feedback, and Orbis, a BI tool used to understand demand patterns and develop offers based on these patterns. OYO Rooms also offers a property management system for partners to manage check-ins and check-outs and conduct price adjustments according to demand.

To date, around 1.1 million people visit the OYO Rooms website daily, and more than 12,000 hotels in over 500 cities across 18 countries have partnered with the company.

Anil Goel, Group Chief Technology & Product Officer of OYO Rooms said “Scaling our technology stack to support growth and deliver a consistent and standardized experience to guests would be extremely difficult without the scale, services, and elasticity offered by AWS.”

Benefits of using AWS :

• Scales to support rapid annual growth
• Forecast to reduce infrastructure management time by 50%
• Automates deployment and provisioning
• Supports plans to provide analytic capabilities

AWS services used:

• AWS Elastic Beanstalk
• Amazon Relational Database Service
• Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes

AWS cloud becoming so powerful day by day and almost all the enterprises are using AWS cloud platform to run their business virtually. Shifting business to virtual platform and monitoring and managing the business efficiently is possible because of AWS cloud which provides 2500+ services and features.