What is AWS: An Introduction to Amazon Web Services

AWS Introduction

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the most complete and widely used cloud platform in the world. It provides over 200 fully functional services from data centers worldwide. Millions of clients, including the largest corporations, most successful governmental organizations, and fastest-growing startups, use AWS to save costs, increase agility, and accelerate innovation.

What is AWS (Amazon Web Services)?

Amazon Web Services(AWS) is a cloud service from Amazon that provides services in the form of building blocks. These building blocks can be used to create and deploy any application in the cloud.

These services or building blocks are designed to work together and result in sophisticated and highly scalable applications.

Learn more about AWS and its framework from the AWS Certification program.

What are the Services Offered by AWS?

Each type of service is categorized under a domain; the few domains which are widely used are:

• Compute
• Storage
• Database
• Migration
• Network and Content Delivery
• Management Tools
• Security & Identity Compliance
• Messaging

1. Compute Services

The Compute domain includes services related to compute workloads, it consists of the following services:

• EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)
• Lambda
• Elastic Beanstalk
• Amazon LightSail

2. Storage Services

The Storage domain includes services related data storage, it includes the following services:

• S3 (Simple Storage Service)
• Elastic Block Store
• Amazon Glacier
• AWS Snowball

3. Database Services

The Database domain is used for database-related workloads, and it includes the following services:

• Amazon Aurora
• Amazon RDS
• Amazon DynamoDB
• Amazon RedShift

4. Migration Services

The Migration domain is used for transferring data to or from the AWS Infrastructure, it includes the following services:

• AWS Database Migration Service
• AWS SnowBall
• For details, You can even check out the details of Migrating to AWS with the AWS Cloud Migration Certification.

5. Networking and Content Delivery Services

The Networking and Content Delivery domain is used to isolate your network infrastructure, and content delivery is used to deliver content faster. It includes the following services:

• Amazon Route 53
• AWS CloudFront

6. Management Tools

The Management Tools domain consists of services that are used to manage other services in AWS, it includes the following services:

• AWS CloudWatch
• AWS CloudFomation
• AWS CloudTrail

7. Security & Identity, Compliance Services

The Security & Identity Compliance domain consists of services which are used to manage to authenticate and provide security to your AWS resources. It consists of the following services:

• AWS IAM
• AWS KMS
• AWS Shield

8. Messaging Services

The Messaging domain consists of services that are used for queuing, notifying, or emailing messages. It consists of the following domains:

• Amazon SQS
• Amazon SNS
• Amazon SES
• Amazon Pinpoint

To learn more about AWS’s products, you can refer to our Amazon AWS Tutorial, which contains detailed information about all of these services.

Advantages of AWS

1. Easy to use

AWS is made to enable suppliers, ISVs, and application providers to swiftly and securely host your apps, whether they are SaaS-based or not. To access AWS’s application hosting platform, use the AWS Management Console or well-documented web services APIs.

2. Flexible

You can choose the web application platform, programming language, operating system, database, and other services you require with AWS. You get a virtual environment through AWS that you may fill with the programs and services your application needs. As a result, existing applications can be more easily migrated while still having alternatives for developing new solutions.

3. Cost-Effective

There are no long-term contracts or upfront payments; you simply pay for the computing power, storage, and other resources that you really utilize. Visit the AWS Economics Center for further details on comparing the expenses of other hosting options with those of AWS.

4. Reliable

You can benefit from a scalable, reliable, and secure global computing infrastructure with AWS, which serves as the virtual foundation for Amazon.com’s multi-billion dollar online company and has been refined for more than ten years.

5. Scalable and high-performance

Your application can scale up or down depending on demand using AWS technologies like Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing. You get immediate access to computation and storage resources thanks to Amazon’s extensive infrastructure.

6. Secure

Physical, operational, and software safeguards are all used by AWS to secure and harden our infrastructure. The AWS Security Center has more details.

This Edureka AWS eBook covers the most integral concepts and services of AWS that will help you get started in a step-by-step manner along with examples.

Explain the Applications of AWS

Businesses of any size and sector may create complex applications with AWS, from hyper-scale web applications to big data analytical apps. Here are a few of the typical AWS applications:

1. Storage and backup – For organizations, Amazon’s cloud storage is a convenient and practical offering. It can save important data and gives a variety of storage options based on needs. AWS provides storage, operating essential business applications, file indexing functionality, high-performance writing or reading, and archiving.
2. Enterprise IT – Amazon cloud services provide the perfect remedy for the cumbersome pace of enterprise IT. AWS makes it possible to build, test, and run auxiliary processes quickly in the cloud. It quickens the project’s launch and gives it an advantage over rivals.
3. Mobile, Web, and Social Applications – Unlike other cloud services, AWS can create and scale a wide range of applications, including SaaS, mobile, and e-commerce ones. On serverless platforms, new applications can be created without the use of an operating system or other systems. Scalable apps can also be developed on AWS using API-driven programming.
4. Big Data – AWS’s scalable storage makes it possible to conduct more frequent analytics. It is ideal for creating data lakes or warehouses because it doesn’t take up much space or require much work to index. Together, AWS and Big Data provide the strength and infrastructure required to support sophisticated intelligent applications.
5. Websites—The AWS cloud can host websites and domains, DNS, and CDNs.
6. Gaming – Online connectivity and a lot of processing power are needed for gaming applications. AWS makes it simple to access for the global gaming network and offers players the best global online gaming experience.

You have a fair idea now about what is AWS, and the services which are covered in AWS, let’s go ahead and straightaway apply this knowledge to build applications. You might feel that you don’t know much about AWS, but then,

Sometimes you have to run before you can walk!  

Keeping that in mind, let’s understand how one builds applications in AWS. You can get a better understanding of AWS and its services from the AWS Masters Program.

How to Build Applications in AWS?

First and foremost, you should analyze, what is your application about. Is it something that requires you to be worried about the underlying infrastructure? Is it something that requires a database? Is it something that will require monitoring?

So, once you know all the requirements of your application, you can pick the domain, and hence choose a service.

Like for example, if you want to deploy an application in AWS, which does not require you to worry about the underlying architecture, which service will you choose?

Well, in the compute section there is this service called Elastic Beanstalk. You just upload your application, and AWS does the rest for you. It’s that simple!

Of course, you wouldn’t know about any of these services without using them right? That’s why AWS came up with an amazing free-tier option.

Check out our AWS Certification Training in Top Cities

Who is eligible for a free tier?

Every customer receives the free tier option when he registers on AWS and is eligible for it for one year from the time he registers.

How shall this help?

You can try every application in AWS and learn! The more you practice, the more you learn what AWS is.

How to Sign Up on AWS?

Step 1: Go to aws.amazon.com and click on Create an AWS Account.

Step 2: Click on ‘I am a new customer’ option, enter your email address and at last click on Sign In.

Step 3: On the next page, fill-in all the relevant information and click on Create Account.

Step 4: On the next page, fill in your personal details and click on Create Account.

Step 5: You would be asked to enter your credit or debit card details on this page, once you do that, proceed by clicking on continue.

Step 6: Next Step would be to verify your phone number, enter the details and click on Call me Now.

Step 7: You will get a call from AWS and will be asked to enter a pin, next up you will be selecting your plan for AWS, but before that click on Next.

Step 8: You shall select a plan, which suits you, I will be going with a basic plan since this account would be for personal use.

Step 9: Congrats! Your AWS Account is ready to be used! Go sign in and play!

Now, since you have an AWS account at your disposal, why not do some hands-on? What say?

Let’s host a PHP website on EC2 and back it up with an RDS MySQL database. Not familiar with the services? Let me brief you up:

EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is an AWS compute service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud.

So in simple words you get a server with custom to compute capacity, this capacity can be adjusted according to your needs. Cool, right? Want to know more, AWS EC2 Blog.

Let’s discuss RDS now, so RDS is Relational Database Service, which includes different databases like MySQL, MongoDB etc. 

So basically, RDS manages these databases for you, How? Check out this blog on AWS RDS.

AWS Hands-On

We will be creating a small application on EC2-RDS infrastructure. By the end, you will have a PHP application on EC2, backed by a fully managed MySQL server.

Let’s start by deploying an EC2 instance first.

Step 1: Login to AWS Management Console.

Step 2: Select a region from the drop down.

Step 3: Click EC2 under Compute section. This will take you to EC2 dashboard.

Step 4:  Select Launch Instance and hence select an AMI, for our example, we will be selecting a Windows 2016 Server Instance which falls under free tier.

Step 5:  Once  you select your desired AMI, select your instance type, this is basically where you decide how much computing power you need to start, since ours is a small application, we shall suffice with the free tier.

Step 6: Configure all the details and then click on add storage.

Step 7: Here you will be configuring your storage devices, once done click on tag instance.

Step 8: Here you will be tagging your instance, this is how your instance will be identified. 

Step 9: Now you will be configuring your security group. 

Step 10: Check all your settings, once verified launch your instance!

Step 11: In the next step you will be prompted for a key pair, create one and download at a handy location.

Step 12: Select your instance and click on Connect.

Step 13: Once you click connect, you will be prompted with the following screen. Copy the public IP and then click on Get Password.

Step 14: Select the key-pair that you downloaded, then click decrypt password.

Step 15: Copy the password and the public IP, keep it handy for the next step.

Step 16: We have the Public IP and the password now, let’s connect to our instance! Open the remote desktop manager. Enter the public IP address and click on Connect.

Step 17: Enter the saved password here and click on OK.

Step 18: Congratulations! Windows Server on EC2 at your service!

Next, Let’s create an RDS instance for MySQL

Step 1: Select the RDS service from the AWS Management Console.

Step 2: Since we will be launching a MySQL instance, select the MySQL instance from the list of DBs. let’s go to Step 3.

Step 3 : Since we are creating this instance for demo purposes, we will be selecting Dev/Test option and click on Next Step.

Step 4 : 

On the next page you will be filling the following details:

• You can select your desired Db instance here
• You can select whether you want Multi-AZ enabled in your MySQL Db.
• You can select how much space you want to allocate to your Db instance, it can vary from 5GB to 6TB.
• In the end you will be setting your username and password for your Db Instance

Step 5 :

In the next step, you will be configuring Advanced Settings for your DB

• You will be selecting the VPC here, if you do not wish to launch your instance in a VPC you can leave the default settings and move ahead. 
• In the next section you can select which version of the Db you want to use, for our example we are using MySQL 5.6
• In the next section you can set your backup preferences, like the retention period etc.
• After that we will be setting the maintenance window, this is the time frame during which your Db instances will be updated.
• Once you fill all the details, you will be launching the Db instance!

Step 6 : 

Congratulations! On your first RDS Instance!!

Next, let’s configure your RDS instance to connect to your EC2 server.

Step 1: On your RDS Dashboard, select your RDS instance.

Step 2: You have to edit the Security Group here, Why? Because you want your EC2 instance to be able to connect to your RDS Instance, for that you have to add the IP address of your EC2 instance here.

Step 3: Select the Security group, then select the Inbound rules, then click on Edit.

Step 4: Select the MySQL/Aurora, and then enter the Public IP address of your EC2 instance in the second field. Any IP address that you enter here should be followed by a ‘/32’ to convert it into CIDR notation. In the end Click Save.

That’s it! Your RDS instance is ready to receive commands from your EC2 instance.

What next? You would need a MySQL Workbench or a server to connect to your RDS instance. I installed MySQL on the EC2 instance itself, you can do that on your localhost too. 

Note: If you are doing it on your localhost, be sure to add your IP address in the Security Group of your RDS instance, like we did in the above step.

Let’s connect to the RDS Instance Now!

Step 1: Open the command prompt and navigate to the bin folder of your MySQL.

Step 2: Next up, copy the endpoint from your RDS instance dashboard, you will be needing this in the next step to connect to your RDS instance. The endpoint is how your RDS instance gets identified. Following the endpoint is the port number ‘3306’ which you shall also need in the next step.

Step 3: Come back to the command prompt and type the following command, you will prompted for the password, enter the password that you entered while you created your RDS instance and you are set!

mysql -h xx.rds.amazonaws.com -P <port number> -u <username> -p

You can create your database and relevant tables here, I have already created mine, for your reference I am creating the sample ones here.

Your RDS service is set now!

Let’s move on, to the most exciting part of this What is AWS blog! Hosting your website!!

Step 1: On your EC2 instance, click on start and then Server Manager.

Step 2: Click on Add roles and features.

Step 3: Click on next on the first page, on the second page, select the following option and click Next.

Step 4: Select the server pool option and click on Next.

Step 5: Select the web server IIS from the list and click on Next.

Step 6: Select the .NET Frameworks mentioned here, and click next.

Step 7: This is the confirmation page, go through what is getting installed, and Click on Install.

Once IIS is installed, you will be able to see it on your server manager dashboard.

After this, install Microsoft Web Platform Installer from here.

Step 8: Open IIS now, double click the server, and click on the web platform installer from the Management Section.

We will be deploying a PHP web application, therefore we need PHP installed on this server, therefore we would be needing Web Platform Installer.

Step 9 : Search for PHP in the search bar of WPI, install the following package.

*Note: If your PHP Manager is failing to install, there are some values that you have to change in the registry.

Step 10: Once installed, you can view your PHP manager in IIS.

Your EC2 server is ready to host a website now!

Related Learning: AWS Well Architected Framework

Let’s upload your website to this EC2 server.

Step 1: First, copy all your files of your website to this folder in “C:/inetpub/wwwroot” on this server.

Step 2: Return to IIS, click on your server and then right click on Sites.

Step 3: In the ‘site name’ give a relevant name to your website, in the next step give the following physical path, and in the end click OK.

Your website is now live!

Step 4 : Enter the public IP address of your EC2 instance and voila! Your website is up and running. Enter the details and click on Add.

Step 5 : This shows that your RDS connection with your EC2 instance  is working well. So whatever you entered here, is getting stored on your RDS instance, and your website is stored on your EC2 instance. Click on Go Back.

Step 6 : On the main page, click on View Results. And you shall see this page.

These are the records which are present in your MySQL table.

Need the code for this application? Here you go:

index.php

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>

<h1>Registration Page</h1>


<form action="process.php" method="post">
<b> Name: </b> <input type="text" name="name">
<b> Email: </b> <input type="text" name="email">
<input type="Submit" value="add">
<a href="result.php">View Results</a>
</form>

</body>
</html>

process.php

<html>
<body>
<?php
$name=$_POST['name'];
echo '
';
$email=$_POST['email'];
$hostname='edureka-test.cx9qgfyl1dhy.us-west-2.rds.amazonaws.com';
$username='edureka';
$password='hemant1994';
$dbname='edu_test';
$usertable='test';
$yourfield='name';
$con=mysqli_connect($hostname,$username, $password) OR DIE ('Unable to connect to database! Please try again later.');
mysqli_select_db($con,$dbname);
$query = "insert into ".$usertable." values('".$name."','".$email."');";
mysqli_query($con,$query) or die("Not Updated!");
echo "Insertion Successful!!";
?>

<a href="index.php">Go Back</a>
</body>
</html>

result.php

<html>
<?php
$hostname='edureka-test.cx9qgfyl1dhy.us-west-2.rds.amazonaws.com';
$username='edureka';
$password='hemant1994';
$dbname='edu_test';
$usertable='test';
$yourfield1='name';
$yourfield2='email';
var_dump(function_exists('mysqli_connect'));
$con=mysqli_connect($hostname,$username, $password) OR DIE ('Unable to connect to database! Please try again later.');
mysqli_select_db($con,$dbname);
$query = 'SELECT * FROM test';
$result = mysqli_query($con,$query);
echo '<body><center>
<table>
<table border=3>
<tr>
<td><b>Name</b></td>
<td><b>Email</b></td>
</tr>

';
if($result) while($row = mysqli_fetch_array($result)){
$name = $row[$yourfield1];
$email= $row[$yourfield2];
echo '
';
echo '
<tr>
<td>' . $name . '</td>

' ;
echo ' 
<td> ' . $email . '</td>
</tr>

' ;
}
?>
</table>

<a href="index.php"> Go Back </a>
</body>
</html>

So this is it, guys! I hope you enjoyed this. If you are reading this, Congratulations! You are no longer a newbie in AWS! The things that you learned in the hands-on part of this blog are what is required in AWS Interview Questions. The more you practice the more you will learn. Edureka provides a curriculum that covers exactly what you would need to crack the Solution Architect Exam!

Got a question for us? Please mention it in the comments section of this What is AWS blog and we will get back to you.