From the course: AWS Certified Developer - Associate (DVA-C02) Cert Prep

Amazon Web Service (AWS) overview - Amazon Web Services (AWS) Tutorial

From the course: AWS Certified Developer - Associate (DVA-C02) Cert Prep

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Amazon Web Service (AWS) overview

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- [Instructor] In this lesson, we will learn the basics of Amazon Web Services. We will discuss what it is, when did it start, and why it is so popular in the tech industry today. First off, what is AWS? AWS is an acronym that stands for Amazon Web Services, and its name can give you an idea of what it is. Amazon Web Services is owned by Amazon Incorporated, the world's largest online retailer. This is why it is called Amazon Web Services in the first place. Take note that Amazon.com e-commerce website is different from AWS. The term web services refers to a software or a resource that you can access over the internet. A web service allows you to access a physical server that is running on a remote location and lets you do something with it. These physical servers are essentially considered as computing resources that enables you to do many other functions from storing files, fetching data, running a website, managing a virtual machine, processing a complex machine learning algorithm, and so much more. So, what really is it? Simply put, AWS is a cloud service provider. A cloud service provider is basically a third-party company that provides a cloud-based platform or cloud services to large companies, startups, or even individuals like you and me. So, instead of buying and maintaining your own physical servers, you can just rent out virtual servers that you can remotely access online to host and run your applications at a fraction of the cost. You can think of it as a car rental company that offers a wide range of vehicles that you can rent, like sedans, hatchbacks, minivans, SUVs, hybrid cars, electric cars, and many more. You can rent a specific car model or make of your choice and use it for a couple of days. For example, if you're just visiting a town for a week, it does not make sense to spend thousands of dollars to buy a new car that you'll only use for a couple of days. The most suitable course of action is to just rent a car of your choice and pay only for the hours that you actually spent using the vehicle. Or better yet, you can simply hail a cab or use Uber, Lyft, or any other ride-sharing service that you prefer to maximize your savings. This is similar to what a cloud service provider does, but instead of cars, you can rent out computing resources that you can access via the World Wide Web. These computing resources could be physical network devices, application servers, storage appliances, and other infrastructure that is managed by the cloud service provider, like AWS. AWS is one of the many cloud service providers that you can choose. Some companies adopt a multi-cloud strategy where they use two or more cloud computing platforms, such as Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Alibaba Cloud, IBM Cloud, and many others. Let's now move on to the history of AWS. In 2004, Amazon Web Services started out as a department within Amazon. Back then, AWS only refers to a collection of web APIs and tools to access the Amazon.com e-commerce catalog. These web APIs are primarily used by early Amazon customers for their internal processing and integration, rather than a public service. This is how AWS started before it would eventually become the world's leading infrastructure-as-a-service platform. Two years after, in 2006, AWS officially started its operations as a public cloud service provider. From then on, anyone can now access and use their web services. The first product that AWS publicly released is a storage service called Amazon S3. This is followed by a queuing service named Amazon SQS, which is also released in the same year. Today, AWS offers hundreds of fully-featured services that are available globally. It provides a highly reliable, scalable, and low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that powers hundreds of thousands of businesses around the world. It boasts a broad set of cloud-based products including compute, storage, database, analytics, networking, security, artificial intelligence, and many more. AWS is the world's leading cloud platform. It is used by millions of customers to run various workloads, optimize processes, lower costs, and scale their infrastructure in a matter of minutes. These are the reasons why AWS is so popular. As more and more businesses migrate their on-premises workloads to the AWS cloud, the demand for highly-scaled and certified AWS professionals will continue to rise over the coming years ahead.

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