AWS

General usage

AWS is the world’s largest and most comprehensive provider of cloud infrastructure and associated services. Its growth has largely been driven by the move from self-hosted IT infrastructure to cloud-based services. This has freed companies up to focus on their core activities and accelerated the development of web applications.

The AWS platform offers more than 200 products, services and tools that can be used together or separately to build web applications. AWS’s DevOps tools can for example be used in conjunction with non-AWS clouds or even dedicated servers.

Some of AWS’s benefits are:

• Easier deployment of infrastructure; all the necessary infrastructure components are in one place.
• You only pay for what you use.
• Scalability.  Add additional resources, like servers, as your company grows.
• Security. Infrastructure is monitored 24/7 and data is automatically encrypted. AWS supports 90 security standards and compliance certifications and is trusted by the US military and global banks.
• Reliability. Its distributed global network of data centres prevents data loss.
• Performance. Its network is optimised for low latency, with the largest footprint of data centres that bring servers closer to end users.

Common AWS products used for the development of web applications include:

Elastic Beanstalk automates the deployment and configuration of application code. This includes  scaling, application health monitoring, load balancing, and capacity provisioning. 

Amazon EC2 is a cloud computing platform made up of processors, storage, networking, and operating systems. AWS guarantees 99.99% uptime.

Amazon RDS is a relational database service that offers a choice of six database engines: Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle Database, and SQL Server.

Amazon S3 is a scalable data storage service.

Popularity

The AWS Partner Network includes thousands of developers who specialise in using AWS services to build applications for customers. AWS hosts more than half of the top 10,000 and more than a third of the top 100,000 sites in the world. According to Statista it is the leading provider of cloud infrastructure in 2021:

Marketplace benefits

AWS offers a quick way to scale growing marketplaces horizontally by adding multiple instances of the same infrastructure component, such as web servers. AWS tools like CloudWatch help to monitor marketplace infrastructure and identify areas for optimisation.

Airbnb migrated most of its cloud computing functions to AWS a year after it was founded to simplify the management and customisation of its infrastructure stack. This freed their team up to focus on growing the platform. The rest is history.