Introduction to AWS (Amazon Web Services)

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 175 fully featured services from data centers globally. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—are using AWS to lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster.

AWS is a secure cloud services platform offering nearly everything businesses need to build sophisticated applications with flexibility, scalability, and reliability. It is a "pay-as-you-go" billing model with no upfront or capital costs. 

Amazon is so successful because it is secure, durable, flexible, easy to use, scalable and saves lots of cost.

Key Points about AWS

Most functionality: AWS has significantly more services, and more features within those services, than any other cloud provider–from infrastructure technologies like compute, storage, and databases–to emerging technologies, such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, data lakes and analytics, and Internet of Things. This makes it faster, easier, and more cost effective to move your existing applications to the cloud and build nearly anything you can imagine.

AWS also has the deepest functionality within those services. For example, AWS offers the widest variety of databases that are purpose-built for different types of applications so you can choose the right tool for the job to get the best cost and performance.

Largest community of customers and partners: AWS has the largest and most dynamic community, with millions of active customers and tens of thousands of partners globally. Customers across virtually every industry and of every size, including startups, enterprises, and public sector organizations, are running every imaginable use case on AWS. The AWS Partner Network (APN) includes thousands of systems integrators who specialize in AWS services and tens of thousands of independent software vendors (ISVs) who adapt their technology to work on AWS. 

Most secure: AWS is architected to be the most flexible and secure cloud computing environment available today. Their core infrastructure is built to satisfy the security requirements for the military, global banks, and other high-sensitivity organizations. This is backed by a deep set of cloud security tools, with 230 security, compliance, and governance services and features. AWS supports 90 security standards and compliance certifications, and all 117 AWS services that store customer data offer the ability to encrypt that data.

Fastest pace of innovation: With AWS, you can leverage the latest technologies to experiment and innovate more quickly. AWS is continually accelerating their pace of innovation to invent entirely new technologies you can use to transform your business. For example, in 2014, AWS pioneered the serverless computing space with the launch of AWS Lambda, which lets developers run their code without provisioning or managing servers. And AWS built Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed machine learning service that empowers everyday developers and scientists to use machine learning–without any previous experience.

Most proven operational expertise: AWS has unmatched experience, maturity, reliability, security, and performance that you can depend upon for your most important applications. For over 13 years, AWS has been delivering cloud services to millions of customers around the world running a wide variety of use cases. AWS has the most operational experience, at greater scale, of any cloud provider.

Global network of AWS Regions: AWS has the most extensive global cloud infrastructure. No other cloud provider offers as many Regions with multiple Availability Zones connected by low latency, high throughput, and highly redundant networking. AWS has 77 Availability Zones within 24 geographic regions around the world, and has announced plans for nine more Availability Zones and three more AWS Regions in Indonesia, Japan, and Spain. The AWS Region/Availability Zone model has been recognized by Gartner as the recommended approach for running enterprise applications that require high availability.

Cloud computing leadership: Gartner Research positions AWS in the Leaders Quadrant of the new Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Worldwide. Cloud IaaS, in the context of this Magic Quadrant, is defined as "a standardized, highly automated offering, where compute resources, complemented by storage and networking capabilities, are owned by a service provider and offered to the customer on demand.”

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