AWS Cloud Overview

AWS Cloud History

• AWS was launched in 2002 internally at amazon.com.
• Afterward they realized that the IT departments could be externalized.
• So, their Amazon infrastructure was one of their core strengths and they said, "you know what maybe we can do IT for someone else, for other people."
• So, they launched their first offering publicly which was SQS in 2004.
• In 2006, they expanded their offering and they relaunched with the availability of SQS, S3, and EC2.
• Then they expanded and said, "you know what? "We don't have to be just in America. We could be in Europe."
• And then fast forward to today, we have so many applications that used to run or are still running on AWS, such as Dropbox, Netflix, Airbnb, or even the NASA.

Number Fact:

• In 2019, AWS had $35.02 billion in annual revenue
• AWS accounts for 47% of the market in 2019 (Microsoft is 2nd with 22%)
• Pioneer and Leader of the AWS Cloud Market for the 9th consecutive year
• Over 1,000,000 active users

AWS Cloud Use Cases

• AWS enables you to build sophisticated, scalable applications
• Applicable to a diverse set of industries
• Use cases include
• Enterprise IT, Backup & Storage, Big Data analytics
• Website hosting, Mobile & Social Apps
• Gaming              

Now AWS is global. And this is where we are going to learn a bit more specifics about how it works.

AWS Global Infrastructure

• AWS Regions
• AWS Availability Zones
• AWS Data Centers
• AWS Edge Locations / Points of Presence

And all of these can be represented on the map right here: https://infrastructure.aws/

AWS Regions

• AWS has Regions all around the world
• Names can be us-east-1, eu-west-3…
• A region is a cluster of data centers
• Most AWS services are region-scoped

How to choose an AWS Region?

• Let say you're launching a new application.
• Where should you do it?
• Should you do it in America, in Europe in South America, or in Australia?
• Well, the answer is, of course it depends.
• But let's look at some factors that may impact your choice of an AWS region.
• Compliance with data governance and legal requirements: data never leaves a region without your explicit permission
• Proximity to customers: reduced latency. As if most of your users are going to be in America, it makes a lot of sense to deploy your application in America, close to your users, because they will have a reduced latency.
• Available services within a Region: new services and new features aren’t available in every Region
• Pricing: pricing varies region to region and is transparent in the service pricing page 

AWS Availability Zones

• Each region has many availability zones (usually 3, min is 3, max is 6). Example:
• ap-southeast-2a
• ap-southeast-2b
• ap-southeast-2c

• Each availability zone (AZ) is one or more discrete data centers with redundant power, networking, and connectivity
• They’re separate from each other, so that they’re isolated from disasters
• They’re connected with high bandwidth, ultra-low latency networking

AWS Edge Locations / Points of Presence

• Amazon has 216 Points of Presence (205 Edge Locations & 11 Regional Caches) in 84 cities across 42 countries
• Content is delivered to end users with lower latency

Tour of the AWS Console

• AWS has Global Services:
• Identity and Access Management (IAM)
• Route 53 (DNS service)
• CloudFront (Content Delivery Network)
• WAF (Web Application Firewall)
• Most AWS services are Region-scoped:
• Amazon EC2 (Infrastructure as a Service)
• Elastic Beanstalk (Platform as a Service)
• Lambda (Function as a Service)
• Rekognition (Software as a Service)  

Finally, to know if a service is available in your region, there is a region table you should check out right here:
Region Table: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regional-product-services

Shared Responsibility Model diagram

• You as a customer, you're responsible for the security in the cloud.
• So, whatever you use in the cloud, however you configure, it is your entire responsibility.
• That includes security, your data, your operating system, your network, and firewall configuration, etc.
• And AWS is going to be responsible for the security of the cloud.
• So, all the infrastructure, all the hardware, all the software, all their own internal security, they are responsible of.
• And this is why we have shared responsibility.

AWS Acceptable Use Policy

• https://aws.amazon.com/aup/
• No Illegal, Harmful, or Offensive Use or Content
• No Security Violations
• No Network Abuse
• No E-Mail or Other Message Abuse