AWS Certification is in high demand. And the most frequently asked question is “Will AWS certification be valuable in 2022?” The answer is yes. Several institutions provide online AWS training at a low cost. 

AWS (Amazon Web Services) is a comprehensive, ever-evolving cloud computing platform offered by Amazon that includes infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and packaged software as a service (SaaS) offerings. AWS services can provide a company with tools like compute power, database storage, and content delivery services.

AWS was founded in 2006 as an extension of the internal infrastructure built by Amazon.com to handle its online retail operations. AWS was among the first companies to offer a pay-as-you-go cloud computing model, which scales to provide users with computing, storage, or throughput as needed.

AWS provides a wide range of tools and solutions for businesses and software developers that can be used in data centers in over 190 countries. AWS services are available to government agencies, educational institutions, nonprofits, and private organizations.

Who is using AWS?

The list of some companies that house their IT environments in AWS reads like a who’s who of the world’s most successful corporations:

• Adobe integrates its system with AWS Cloud to provide multi-terabyte operating environments for its customers. Instead of attempting to deploy and manage the infrastructure, Adobe can concentrate on deploying and operating its own software.
• Airbnb, the online vacation rental marketplace that connects property owners and travellers, maintains a massive infrastructure in AWS, utilising nearly all of the available services.
• Autodesk is a software company that creates software for the engineering, design, and entertainment industries. Using services such as Amazon RDS and Amazon S3, Autodesk can focus on developing machine learning tools rather than managing infrastructure.
• AWS has helped America Online (AOL) save money by closing data centers and decommissioning approximately 14,000 in-house and co-located servers. They’ve moved mission-critical workloads to the cloud, expanded its global reach, and saved millions of dollars in energy costs.

What is the secret to AWS’s success?

Companies report a key set of reasons for not only choosing but also relying on Amazon Web Services for critical parts of their IT infrastructure:

• Security and long-term viability – AWS encrypts data, providing end-to-end privacy and storage.
• Experience – Amazon’s established processes can be relied on by developers. Their tools, techniques, and best practises recommendations are based on years of experience.
• AWS offers a high level of flexibility, allowing developers to choose the operating system language and database.
• Ease of Use – Amazon Web Services is simple to use. Developers can quickly deploy and host applications, create new applications, and migrate existing ones.
• Scalability – Applications can be easily scaled up or down to meet the needs of the user.
• Cost savings – Companies only pay for the computing power, storage, and resources they use, with no long-term commitments.

How AWS works

AWS is categorized into different services, each of which can be configured differently depending on the needs of the user. For an AWS service, users should be able to see configuration options as well as individual server maps.

The Amazon Web Services portfolio includes more than 100 services, including compute, databases, infrastructure management, application development, and security. These services are classified as follows:

• Compute
• Storage databases
• Data management
• Migration
• Hybrid cloud
• Networking
• Development tools
• Management
• Monitoring
• Security
• Governance
• Big data management
• Analytics
• Artificial intelligence (AI)
• Mobile development
• Messages and notification

Availability

Amazon Web Services offers services from dozens of data centres located in various availability zones (AZs) around the world. An AZ is a location that houses a number of physical data centres. A region is a collection of AZs that are geographically close together and are linked by low-latency network links.

A company will select one or more availability zones for a variety of reasons, including compliance and proximity to end users. For example, an AWS customer can spin up virtual machines (VMs) and replicate data across AZs to create a highly reliable infrastructure that is resilient to individual server or data centre failures.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a service that provides compute capacity in the form of virtual servers known as EC2 instances. The EC2 service provides dozens of instance types with varying capacities and sizes, each tailored to a specific workload type or application, such as memory-intensive or accelerated-computing jobs. AWS also offers an Auto Scaling tool for dynamically scaling capacity in order to keep instances healthy and performing well.

Storage

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is a scalable object storage service used for data backup, collection, and analytics. To keep data and files organised, an IT professional stores them as S3 objects – which can be up to 5 gigabytes (GB) – inside S3 buckets. Businesses can save money by using Amazon S3’s Infrequent Access storage tier or Amazon Glacier for long-term cold storage.

While working on EC2 instances, Amazon Elastic Block Store provides block-level storage volumes for persistent data storage. Amazon Elastic File System provides cloud-based file storage that is managed.

A company can also migrate data to the cloud using storage transport devices like AWS Snowball and Snowmobile, or use AWS Storage Gateway to give on-premises apps access to cloud data.

Databases and information management

The ARD (Amazon Relational Database) Service offers a relational database management system for AWS users. AWS also offers managed NoSQL databases via Amazon DynamoDB.

AWS customers can use Amazon ElastiCache and DynamoDB Accelerator as in-memory and real-time data caches for applications. Amazon Redshift provides a data warehouse, making it easier for data analysts to perform business intelligence (BI) tasks.

Cloud migration, hybrid cloud

AWS offers a variety of tools and services to help users migrate their applications, databases, servers, and data to its public cloud. The AWS Migration Hub is a central location for monitoring and managing on-premises to cloud migrations. Once in the cloud, EC2 Systems Manager assists an IT team in configuring on-premises servers and AWS instances.

Amazon has also formed alliances with a number of technology vendors to facilitate hybrid cloud deployments. VMware Cloud on AWS brings VMware’s software-defined data center technology to the AWS cloud. Another collaboration resulted in Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Amazon EC2, which extends Red Hat’s operating system to the Amazon Web Services cloud.

Networking

An Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) gives an administrator control over a virtual network that uses an isolated section of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. For added security, AWS automatically creates new resources within a VPC.

The Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) service, which includes the Application Load Balancer and Network Load Balancer, allows administrators to balance network traffic. AWS also provides a domain name system known as Amazon Route 53, which directs end users to applications.

A dedicated connection from an on-premises data centre to the AWS cloud can be established by an IT professional using AWS Direct Connect.

Management and supervision

AWS Config and AWS Config Rules permit administrators to manage and track cloud resource configuration. The tools, with AWS Trusted Advisor, can assist an IT team in avoiding incorrectly configured and unnecessary cloud resource deployments.

AWS’s portfolio includes a number of automation tools. AWS CloudFormation templates can be used to automate infrastructure provisioning, and AWS OpsWorks and Chef can be used to automate infrastructure and system configurations.

Customers can use Amazon CloudWatch and the AWS Personal Health Dashboard to monitor resource and application health, as well as AWS CloudTrail to retain user activity and API calls for auditing.

Governance and security

AWS provides a variety of cloud security services, including AWS Identity and Access Management, which allows administrators to define and manage user access to resources. An administrator can also use Amazon Cloud Directory to create a user directory or use the AWS Directory Service to connect cloud resources to an existing Microsoft Active Directory. Furthermore, the AWS Organizations service allows a company to create and manage policies for multiple AWS accounts.

Amazon Web Services has also released tools that automatically evaluate potential security risks. Amazon Inspector examines an AWS environment for vulnerabilities that could compromise security and compliance. To safeguard sensitive cloud data, Amazon Macie employs machine learning (ML) technology.

AWS also includes tools and services for providing software and hardware-based encryption, defending against DDoS attacks, issuing Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificates, and filtering potentially harmful traffic to the web applications.

The AWS Management Console is a graphical user interface (GUI) for AWS that is accessible via a browser. The Management Console can be used to manage cloud computing resources, cloud storage, and security credentials. The AWS Console provides access to all AWS resources.

Analytics and big data management

AWS provides a wide range of big data analytics and application services. This includes the following:

• Amazon Elastic MapReduce, which offers a Hadoop framework for large-scale data processing.
• Amazon Kinesis offers a number of tools for processing and analyzing streaming data.
• AWS Glue is a service that handles extract, transform, and load operations.
• Amazon Elasticsearch Service facilitates a team to use the open source Elasticsearch tool to perform application monitoring, log analysis, and other tasks.
• Amazon Athena for S3, which enables data analysts to query their data.
• Amazon QuickSight, which aids analysts in visualising data.

Artificial intelligence (AI)

AWS provides AI model development and delivery platforms, as well as pre-packaged AI-based applications. The Amazon AI toolkit includes the following tools:

Amazon Lex is a voice and text chatbot technology; Amazon Polly is a text-to-speech translation technology, and Amazon Rekognition is an image and facial analysis technology.

AWS also provides developers with the tools they need to create smart apps that rely on machine learning and complex algorithms.

Developers can use AWS Deep Learning Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) to build and train custom AI models on clusters of graphics processing units (GPUs) or compute-optimized instances. Deep learning development frameworks for MXNet and TensorFlow are also available on AWS.

AWS technologies power the Alexa Voice Services, and developers can use the Alexa Skills Kit to create voice-based apps for Echo devices.

Mobile application development

The AWS Mobile Hub provides a suite of tools and services for mobile app developers, including the AWS Mobile SDK, which includes code samples and libraries.

A mobile app developer can also use Amazon Cognito to manage user access to mobile apps and Amazon Pinpoint to send push notifications to app end users and then analyse the effectiveness of those communications.

AR and VR (Augmented reality and virtual reality)

Through its Amazon Sumerian service, AWS provides augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) development tools. Amazon Sumerian enables users to create AR and VR applications without the need for programming or 3D graphics. Users can also use the service to test and publish applications in-browser.

Game development

AWS can also be used to develop games. AWS services will be used by large game development companies such as Ubisoft for their games such as For Honor. AWS can provide services for every stage of a game’s lifecycle.

AWS can  provide back-end developer services, analytics, and developer tools. Back-end services may be able to assist with building, deploying, or scaling a developer’s platform, while developer tools should aid in the creation of their game. Analytics may assist developers in better understanding their customers and how they play the game. AWS servers can also be used by developers to store data or host game data.

Internet of Things (IoT)

AWS also offers a number of services that support internet of things (IoT) deployments. The AWS IoT service provides a back-end platform for managing IoT devices and ingesting data into other AWS storage and database services. AWS IoT Button provides hardware for limited IoT functionality, while AWS Greengrass adds AWS compute capabilities to IoT devices.

Amazon Web Services’ Future

As IoT, artificial intelligence, and business intelligence mature and truly come of age, the demand for cloud computing, data storage, and security will skyrocket. As healthcare, financial markets, and other industries become more reliant on these technologies, more services will migrate to the cloud. Fortunately, Amazon Web Services has released – and continues to develop – simple and scalable solutions for cloud-based web application deployment and management. It’s clear that the future is bright and that there is a silver lining to this cloud.

Final Thoughts

In today’s competitive world, hands-on experience with cloud services such as AWS provides a significant advantage in the data science race. AWS is now widely used by businesses, and your experience with such cloud computing platforms will help you stand out during the hiring process. So, are you ready to begin your AWS Certification journey? Check out the most popular AWS Certification Courses with Linux2Cloud.