What is Amazon Web Service?
Many people associate Amazon as a large eCommerce giant in online shopping, entertainment and technology. But, Amazon also has a cloud division, known as Amazon Web Services (AWS). Presence of Amazon in cloud market is significant since it currently holds almost half of the market share in cloud market. Cloud industry is estimated to be of worth approximately $120 billion. Even big competitors like Google with their Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft with their Azure, have failed to replicate the success that AWS has got. Amazon Web Services offers large variety of cloud resources. It is a platform that offers flexible, reliable, scalable, easy-to-use and cost-effective cloud computing solutions. They’ve basically created a cloud resource for any problem statement. In this article, we will analyze AWS’s history and how it works, along with analyzing its future and its completion with Google and Microsoft.
History of AWS
The story of AWS began in 2002, when the AWS’s initial beta platform was released which offered SOAP and XML interfaces for the Amazon product catalogue. In 2003, an thing became evident that AWS’s infrastructure services gave them huge advantage over their competition. From there, an idea emerged to combine Infrastructure services with developer tools that could become like a pseudo-operating system for the internet. By isolating different parts of the infrastructure (compute power, storage, and database) as components to the operating system and having developer-friendly tools to manage them, it was possible to conceive of infrastructure (especially Amazon’s) as automated and standardized with web services that can call for more resources. In 2004, AWS teased few developments that were expected for the future through a blog post which acknowledged the world.
The AWS platform was released publicly on March 2006 with only three services: Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Queue Service (SQS). In 2009, two more services, Elastic Block Storage (EBS) and CloudFront was released to public.
Services and Global Infrastructure
In 2019, AWS offered 165 services which provided solutions for storage, database, networking, deployment, management and many more. AWS works on Pay-as-you go model. Which means, the charge is applied to the account according to the amount of usage of the service. The platform is developed with a combination of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and packaged software as a service (SaaS) offerings. Here are few of the frequently used services on Amazon Web Services:
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2): It is a virtual machine service provided by AWS. It is a compute service which acts as a main processing hub of your environment or infrastructure. Amazon offers various types of Linux or Windows virtual machines. These can be accessed by the user by simply connecting through a network connection. User can also select amount of storage and type of instance according to performance need.
- Simple Storage Service (S3): It provides object type storage through a web service interface. Amazon S3 can be employed to store any type of object which allows for uses like storage for Internet applications, backup and recovery, disaster recovery, data archives, data lakes for analytics, and hybrid cloud storage.
- Elastic Block Storage (EBS): Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) provides block level storage volumes for use with EC2 instances. EBS volumes behave like raw, unformatted block devices. You can mount these volumes as devices on your instances.
- Relation Database Service (RDS): Amazon Relational Database Service is a distributed relational database service by Amazon Web Services. It is a web service running “in the cloud” designed to simplify the setup, operation, and scaling of a relational database for use in applications.
AWS has distinct operations in 22 geographical “regions”: 7 in North America, 1 in South America, 5 in Europe, 1 In Middle-East and 8 in Asia Pacific. AWS has announced 3 new regions that will be coming online in Milan, Cape Town and Jakarta. Each region is wholly contained within a single country and all of its data and services stay within the designated region. Each region has multiple “Availability Zones”, which consist of one or more discrete data centers, each with redundant power, networking and connectivity, housed in separate facilities.
Cloud War with Google and Microsoft
In November 2019, Amazon challenged the decision by Pentagon in United States of allocating a $10 billion contract for cloud services to Microsoft Azure. Amazon stated that decision was unfair as it was not possible that the contract was awarded in favor of Microsoft due to better technology. This dispute between the two biggest giant showed how big the cloud war was. Cloud industry is estimated to be of $126 billion and is expected to grow up to $163 billion by just next year. That’s a lot of capital at stake. Hence why biggest tech companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon, each wants to have big chunk of this pie.
Amazon currently holds highest market share of 47.8%. While Microsoft holds second spot with 15.5%. Google on the other hand holds fourth spot with a market share of 4%. Google lags behind Alibaba, which have a market share of 7.7%. However, all companies apart from Amazon saw a growth of greater than 60% from 2017 to 2018. It clearly shows the potential in the completion. These statistics clearly indicate that Cloud War is the new battle ground in technology. With enormous growth potential in cloud industry, there is still long time to go in this battle.
