Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 200 fully-featured services from data centers globally. According to its official website, millions of customers are using AWS to lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster.
The way it’s architected is to be the most flexible and secure cloud computing environment available. Backed by a deep set of cloud security tools with 230 security, compliance, and governance services, its core infrastructure is built to meet the security requirements for the military, global banks, and other high-sensitive organizations. More on security, AWS supports 90 security standards and compliance certifications, and 117 AWS services that store customer data offer the ability for data encryption.
IT research and consultancy company Gartner, defines AWS as standardized, highly automated offerings in which infrastructure resources are complemented by integrated platform services.
More than 100 services comprise the AWS portfolio, including those for compute, databases, infrastructure management, application development, and security.
Below are just a few of the services provided by AWS as listed by TechTarget.
Databases, data management
The Amazon Relational Database Service which includes options for Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, and a proprietary high-performance database called Amazon Aurora, provides a relational database management system for AWS users. AWS also offers managed NoSQL databases through Amazon DynamoDB.
An AWS customer can use Amazon ElastiCache and DynamoDB Accelerator as in-memory and real-time data caches for applications. Amazon Redshift offers a data warehouse that enables data analysts to perform business intelligence tasks.
Management and monitoring
An admin can manage and track cloud resource configuration via AWS Config and AWS Config Rules. The tools can help an IT team avoid improperly configured and needlessly expensive cloud resource deployments.
AWS provides several automation tools in its portfolio. An AWS customer can monitor resource and application health and the AWS Personal Health Dashboard, as well as use AWS CloudTrail to retain user activity and API calls for auditing.
Big data management and analytics
AWS includes a variety of big data analytics and application services. This includes:
· Amazon Elastic MapReduce, which offers a Hadoop framework to process large amounts of data.
· Amazon Kinesis, which provides several tools to process and analyze streaming data.
· AWS Glue, which is a service that handles extract, transform, and load jobs.
· Amazon Elasticsearch Service enables a team to perform application monitoring, log analysis, and other tasks with the open-source Elasticsearch tool.
Artificial intelligence
AWS offers a range of AI model development and delivery platforms, as well as packaged AI-based applications. The Amazon AI suite of tools includes:
· Amazon Lex for voice and text chatbot technology;
· Amazon Polly for text-to-speech translation; and
· Amazon Rekognition for image and facial analysis.
AWS also provides technology for developers to build smart apps that rely on machine learning technology and complex algorithms.
With AWS Deep Learning Amazon Machine Images, developers can create and train custom AI models with clusters of graphics processing units or compute-optimized instances. AWS also includes deep learning development frameworks.
On the consumer side, AWS technologies power the Alexa Voice Services, and a developer can use the Alexa Skills Kit to build voice-based apps for Echo devices.
Internet of Things
AWS also has a variety of services that enable the internet of things (IoT) deployments. The AWS IoT service provides a back-end platform to manage IoT devices and data ingestion to other AWS storage and database services. The AWS IoT Button provides hardware for limited IoT functionality and AWS Greengrass brings AWS to compute capabilities to IoT devices.
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