Why AWS?

First, we will see the difference between AWS and Dedicated Server

What is a dedicated server?

• A dedicated server is a physical server situated in a data center. This dedicated server is utilized only by you and all its resources are used by you. The specifications of the servers are designed to suit your requirements.

What is AWS?

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a secure cloud services platform, offering compute power, database storage, content delivery and other functionality to help businesses scale and grow.
• In simple words AWS allows you to do the following things:-
• Running web and application servers in the cloud to host dynamic websites.
• Securely store all your files on the cloud so you can access them from anywhere.
• Using managed databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle or SQL Server to store information.
• Deliver static and dynamic files quickly around the world using a Content Delivery Network (CDN). Send bulk emails to your customers.

Scalability vs Price

• When you order a dedicated server or a group of servers to run a business or an application, you take into account your user base at present and in the future. As the users keep adding up, you keep on increasing the servers physically in your data centers. However, in AWS services you have to enroll for additional services to scale up. Although it is easier to scale up in AWS, the costs of scaling up also increase a great amount. Also, AWS charges extra for all of its services. As your business grows and your user base increases, you will need extra storage and database to keep track of all your users. All of this costs extra for AWS.

Infrastructure

• The key difference between AWS and dedicated server hosting is that in dedicated server hosting you propose your server model to hosting providers and the server is designed as per your requirement. For instance, if you are looking for a database server that handles a certain amount of data, the server is designed with a relative amount of RAM, storage, processor, etc. AWS is an infrastructure specific model and the user has to choose between different features to set up his own infrastructure. You should choose from multiple options to select the appropriate computing capacity, database, and storage among others. Although AWS is quite versatile, you have to be quite equipped with the knowledge of servers to build your own architecture.

Reliability

• AWS and dedicated servers are both reliable. AWS is a cloud computing service and any issues are resolved swiftly as a cluster of servers function together to perform specific tasks. Whereas, dedicated server hosting depends on the provider. A good hosting provider takes no time in hardware replacements or software troubleshooting.

Response Time

• It is generally observed that the dedicated servers offer less response time than AWS services. However, it depends on your hosting provider’s network and the geographical proximity of the data center with your user base.

AWS Advantages

• Easy to Use:- AWS’s platform is clearly expressed and even a neophyte can use it. There won’t be any problem with beginners as well as for experts. This is possible due to the AWS Management Console or well-documented web services.
• No Capacity Limits:- Organizations Launch different projects and guess what capacity they will need. AWS helps them by providing this capacity at a minimum cost. Through this benefit, their workload is decreased and they can focus and built different ideas. The customers predict the capacity and they pay higher prices than that but AWS provides them the capacity at low-cost. The moment you feel like you should increase your capacity you can do it freely. Moreover, if you realize that you are not in need of so much storage you can get back to the previous storage and all you have to pay for what you use.
• Provides Speed and Agility:- In the old world if we talk to an engineer, Enterpriser or a company about how long will it take to hire a server, the answer we will get is 1 week. But AWS provides us within minutes. All you have to do is select your requirement and you can proceed without talking to anyone as it is easy and flexible. With this, you can quickly deploy your application. AWS provides us with tools that help us to reduce the time we spend on a task such as Auto Scaling, AWS Tools and Elastic Load Balancing you can select them on the basis of your demand. These applications can be accessed at any time you need them.
• Secure and Reliable:- Amazon allows you to innovate and scale while keeping a secure environment and all you have to pay only for the services you use. AWS provides an end-to-end approach that secures and hardens your infrastructure. Amazon Web Service provides you with the security you need at a lower cost than in an on-premises environment.AWS provides security and also helps to protect privacy as it is stored in AWS data centers. AWS infrastructure is designed to keep your data safe no matter what size of your data is. It just scales with your AWS cloud usage. AWS manages the highest standard of security and this is the reason users rely on AWS.

AWS services

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

We can call them as Amazon virtual servers. Consider them as a computer where we can host our data. It will be available in different types on the basis of computing, memory, storage, and graphics. AWS EC2 instance is like we are renting a server from AWS on an hourly basis. The two main attractions of EC2 services are the Elastic Load Balancing and Auto Scaling.

• AWS Elastic load balancing

Elastic Load balancing will help us to distribute incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances. For example, if I have too much work to do then I will ask for help from some other person, exactly the same applies here. If a server can’t handle the traffic then we will add a replica of that server and balance the load between them using the load balancer.

• AWS Auto Scaling

Auto Scaling allows us to scale our Amazon EC2 capacity up or down automatically according to conditions that we define. With Auto Scaling, we can ensure that the number of Amazon EC2 instances we are using increases seamlessly during demand spikes to maintain performance and decreases automatically during demand lulls to minimize costs.

• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

This is where we create and manage our AWS users. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) enable us to securely control access to AWS services and resources for our users. Using IAM we can create and manage AWS users and groups and use permissions to allow and deny their permissions to AWS resources.

• AWS S3

We can use this service to store images and other files for websites. We can keep our backups and share files between our AWS services. One of the interesting uses this service is for hosting static websites. Also, many of the other AWS services write and read contents from S3.

• Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

We can call it our private network in Cloud. By using AWS VPC we can keep all our AWS services under the same network. Also, we will have an additional layer of security for all our AWS services. It is like we are hosting all our AWS services in a single rack.

• AWS Lambda

We are using it to run our scripts. Here we do not have to worry about the server where we are running our scripts. It is like we are asking AWS to spin a computer and it’s one and the only purpose will be running our script.

• AWS RDS

RDS is exclusively for hosting our databases. It is completely managed by AWS and we do not have to worry about anything else. Just create an RDS instance, upload our desired database then forget about all other complications because AWS is there to manage your database. Currently, they support AWS Aurora, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, or PostgreSQL database engine

• Route53

You can call it as AWS DNS. We can use it to buy a domain name and manage its DNS records.

• AWS SES

It is the email service offered by AWS. We can use it to relay our emails through AWS. It will assure us better reachability for our emails. Do not think about spamming, it will not be a good idea.

• AWS CloudFront

CloudFront is the CDN service in AWS. AWS has a global network of edge locations and regional edge caches that cache copies of our content close to our website viewers. They ensure that end-user requests are served by the closest edge location. As a result, viewer requests travel a short distance, improving performance for the viewers.

• AWS Elasticache

It’s the cache service offered by AWS. We can host both Redis and Memcache instances in this service. It will be the same as RDS. Let the AWS tech worry about the server.

• AWS WAF

Call it as the AWS firewall, we can use it to save our websites from attacks like DoS and DDoS. Also, we can use it to block bad request to our network

• AWS SNS

It is like the AWS message service. We can use it to send alerts to mobile devices, emails, ticketing systems etc.

• AWS Code Commit and Code Deploy

Call it as AWS GitHub, we can use these services for version control and deploy our codes to multiple EC2 instances.

• AWS CloudFormation

CloudFormation is an interesting service in AWS. It is an easy way to deploy your architecture in AWS. Here we will use CloudFormation scripts to deploy the servers. Forget the old way to create servers manually. Let’s automate it using CloudFormation.

• AWS CloudWatch

This service will be the one that will play the role of a watcher. It will alert us about the services that are misbehaving or getting disconnected. Also, we can keep track of all our server logs in Cloudwatch.

• AWS CloudTrail

It will keep track of the stuff that we are doing on the AWS control panel. It will update us who is doing what in our AWS panel.

• AWS Glacier

It is for achieving our data in S3. Like keeping a backup of your backup. Consider you have a lot of data in your S3 and you are not using it right now, but we will need it in near future so will move it to Glacier. Note that we can’t access that data immediately.

• AWS SQS

Call it as the queue service in AWS. We can store our data for future processing in a queue. It will come in handy when we design de-coupled architectures.

Conclusion

- Hence, we studied AWS Feature and why Amazon Web Services are popular nowadays. This will help people to grow their organization. In addition, AWS Features provides database and storage along with the security. I hope this article informative for you, leave your suggestions in the comment box.