AWS and The Story behind it!!

Before jumping to the main topic that is AWS first we should know something about the cloud computing and its history because AWS is based on cloud computing

Cloud Computing

Most of us might be certainly asking ourselves the critical questions, why do we need cloud computing? Basically, we need cloud computing because of the numerous individual and business problems that we encounter today. These problems range from acquiring and maintaining expensive hardware and software resources that we use in our daily operations to streamlining these resources in the most efficient manner for our benefit and the benefit of the society at large. In handling these challenges, cloud computing offers numerous benefits that have surpassed our expectations and delivered more than we had previously thought.

Why is cloud computing important for business?

1. Efficiency

  • Accessibility; Cloud computing facilitates the access of applications and data from any location worldwide and from any device with an internet connection.
  • Cost savings; Cloud computing offers businesses with scalable computing resources hence saving them on the cost of acquiring and maintaining them. These resources are paid for on a pay-as-you-go basis which means businesses pay only for the resources they use. This has proven to be much cheaper than acquiring the resources on their own.
  • Security; Cloud providers especially those offering private cloud services, have strived to implement the best security standards and procedures in order to protect client’s data saved in the cloud.
  • Disaster recovery; Cloud computing offers the most efficient means for small, medium and even large enterprises to backup and restore their data and applications in a fast and reliable way.

2. Flexibility

  • Scalability; Cloud computing is the best option for businesses with fluctuating workloads since cloud infrastructure scales depending on the demands of the business.
  • Tools selection; Cloud computing allows businesses to select specific prebuilt tools and features to derive solutions tailored to their specific needs.
  • Cloud options; Cloud computing offers private cloud, public cloud and hybrid cloud solutions each with different features. Organizations can choose these options depending on what best serves their need.
  • Control choices; Businesses can determine their level of control with as-a-service options offered by the cloud provider. These options include SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS.

3. Strategic edge

  • Increased productivity; Cloud service providers acquire and manage underlying cloud infrastructure hence enabling businesses to focus their energies on their core business operations.
  • Automatic software updates; All the software applications that are accessed through the cloud are usually up-to-date. This enables businesses to access the latest features without having to maintain the system themselves.
  • Competitiveness; Businesses that employ cloud computing are able to maneuver more nimbly as compared to competitors who devote their energies to acquiring and maintaining IT resources.
  • Increased collaboration; With the capabilities of cloud computing, individuals from different places can collaborate in business projects without necessarily having to meet.

There are many cloud computing companies that are currently in market so here is my list of top 10 companies in market which provide best cloud facilities and services to the users or developers.
Here is a list of my top 10 cloud service providers:

  1. Amazon Web Services (AWS)
  2. Microsoft Azure
  3. Google Cloud
  4. Alibaba Cloud
  5. IBM Cloud
  6. Oracle
  7. Salesforce
  8. SAP
  9. Rackspace Cloud
  10. VMWare

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is an Amazon company that was launched in the year 2002. AWS is the most popular cloud service provider in the world.

Amazon on Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 165 fully-featured services from data centers globally. This service is used by millions of customers.

AWS’s revenue in the year 2018 was $25.6 billion with a profit of $7.2 billion. The revenue is expected to grow to $33 billion in 2019.

AWS Services

The following graphic is a list of the various categories of services available in AWS. The right side of the list includes AWS’s featured services.

AWS Security

AWS security offers services such as infrastructure security, DDoS mitigation, data encryption, inventory and configuration, monitoring and logging, identity and access control, and penetration testing.

Compliances

AWS global availability

AWS Certifications

There are many top start ups and organization that used the AWS cloud and became very successful. So, here are some case studies of few of them.

Case Studies

“Business opportunities are like buses, there’s always another one coming.” — Richard Branson

1. OLX

Empowering People with Innovative Services

India is among the top growth markets for OLX Autos globally. The company has a highly innovative technology team running its Panamera classifieds marketplace, which is active in 12 countries, on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. To unlock maximum value for its users, OLX Autos is committed to investing in its people and the latest technology.

“Using AWS has kept our environment running in a stable manner in the most cost-optimized way.”

Abhishek Tomar
Infrastructure Head, OLX Autos

Modernizing Complex Architecture

Abhishek Tomar, infrastructure head at OLX Autos, says, “Buyers and sellers could not search, see new ads, or create new listings during the outage. We realized that even if we experienced just one crash a year, it would still be better to offload the control and management plane to AWS. Our customers were not able to access our marketplace in the several hours that were spent resolving the issue, resulting in customer dissatisfaction.”

OLX Autos engineers needed to rapidly upgrade the site’s architecture and decided to perform a proof of concept for hosting a self-managed Kubernetes cluster versus using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). “We decided on Amazon EKS because it was more flexible than the OpenShift cluster,” says Nikhil Sharma, the chapter lead site reliability engineer (SRE) at OLX Autos who led the migration.

Seamlessly Migrating 124 Microservices

The AWS team presented a roadmap for potential new Panamera features using Amazon EKS in addition to other AWS services. OLX Autos then started building an Amazon EKS cluster and migrating selected workloads from OpenShift, with the rollout completed in just a few weeks. OLX Autos has now migrated all 124 of its microservices to Amazon EKS, which has improved efficiency and scalability while unlocking cost savings.

Gaining Productivity

With the AWS migration, the company has removed Puppet from its architecture and offloaded container management to AWS. By running on Amazon EKS, the OLX Autos website benefits from improved performance and scalability, and engineers can reallocate their time to higher value-added tasks.

Scaling in Minutes and Improving Uptime

OLX Autos has also offloaded the critical task of administering Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)/Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificates to AWS Certificate Manager. Previously, teams had to manually procure and deploy new certificates each year, but with AWS, new certificates are deployed with a few simple API calls. “It’s a relief that AWS will now be taking care of that,” says Tomar. “We don’t have to invest a single minute in checking and updating certificates, which could impact key timelines for our business.”

Unlocking Savings with Reserved Instances

OLX Autos has also benefited from the AWS container network interface (CNI) plug-in, which was blocked with its previous OpenShift configuration. The CNI plug-in has not only improved application latency, but OLX Autos also expects to save at least 10 percent on its overall monthly AWS bill with more efficient applications. Tomar says, “Using AWS has kept our environment running in a stable manner in the most cost-optimized way.”

About OLX Autos

Benefits of AWS

Saves 33% on compute costs

Improves application latency

Facilitates smooth migration of 124 microservices into production

Gains 3–4 days a month by eliminating software monitoring and maintenance

Reallocates IT team to value-added innovation tasks.

2. BYJU’S

BYJU’S Uses AWS to Deliver Cutting-Edge Content to 15 Million Students

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.

“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.”

Prakash Ramachandran
Chief Technology Officer, BYJU’S

The Challenge

Online Learning Company Looks to Learn and Grow

Meeting the mobile app’s fast rate of growth required BYJU’S to find a more scalable and cost-effective solution than its Heroku cloud platform. “When we launched the app, we saw a huge spike in the number of users within a few weeks,” says Prakash Ramachandran, chief technology officer at BYJU’S. “It was very apparent we wouldn’t be able to keep pace with that growth on Heroku.”

In addition to scalability, BYJU’S wanted to enhance its analytical capabilities. “We were very interested in getting student feedback about the educational content we present on the website and app, so we could make changes if we needed to,” says Ramachandran.

Why Amazon Web Services

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

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.”

Scaling to Support 15 Million Users

BYJU’S has already proven it can quickly scale to meet spikes in traffic during special online events. “For a recent event on our website, we were expecting a fourfold increase in traffic, but what we actually saw was a tenfold increase,” Ramachandran says. “All we had to do was essentially turn on a switch, and we had more instances on AWS to support the spike. It was very fast and simple.”

The Benefits

Gaining Better Insights into Student Behavior

BYJU’S continues to innovate by making use of newer AWS services to develop solutions. As an example, the organization recently launched a product in India that takes advantage of the Amazon Alexa intelligent personal assistant to deliver audio-based educational content on the Amazon Echo device. Using Alexa voice commands, students can find out additional information about a given topic or play educational videos or games within the BYJU’S app. “We are very excited about integrating services like Amazon Alexa into our new solutions,” says Ramachandran. “As we expand the business in India and look for new ways to reach students, we know that using AWS will help us develop interactive, engaging products and applications.”

About BYJU’S

Benefits of AWS

  • 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.

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