AWS CCP EXAM PREP: Overview Of AWS Compute Services

The cloud computing field has been growing tremendously over the last decade. As per recent research, the cloud computing industry is expected to be valued at 68.5 billion USD by the end of 2025, at a phenomenal 15% growth rate! And it is not surprising because cloud computing is revolutionizing how organizations work.

More businesses are now moving to cloud computing to save costs on servers, storage, and various management services by shifting them to the cloud. It makes services more efficient at a lower cost, and businesses can focus more on their core strength.

Organizations can move their workload remotely over the internet on the cloud. The deployed cloud service can be either a public cloud service or a private cloud service. In private cloud service, the house data center of the business delivers service to internal users. While in the public cloud model, a commercial cloud service provider is hired to deliver computing services over the internet.

Google cloud platform, AWS, and Microsoft Azure are among the most popular public cloud service providers. The cloud computing services provided by them are broadly divided into three categories.

• One is Saas (Software as a service), a service that distributes software applications over the internet. Email service provided by Microsoft365 is one such example of Saas.
• The second is Iaas (Infrastructure as a service), a service that works as a remote data center and provides storage and virtual server instances. AWS is one of such IaaS providers.
• The third is Paas (Platform as a service), a cloud service that provides software development tools on its platform. That enables users to develop software on their platform. Salesforce lightning and AWS elastic beanstalk are famous examples of it.

AWS is one of the most popular cloud computing service providers. As you are pretty clear about cloud computing, we will now discuss various AWS compute services in detail.

Amazon EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud)

Before discussing Amazon EC2, you should have a basic idea about virtual machines. In simple language, a virtual machine is the virtual version of a physical computer. They can deliver all the functions of a physical computer like running operating systems and software, connecting with networking, and data storage.

Virtual machines are known as instances in AWS compute services.  Amazon EC2 provides different instances with multiple options of configurations of networking, storage, and CPU resources. 

Amazon EC2 provides a flexible cloud computing service for software development and web-scale computing. Organizations can hire Amazon EC2 services for various instances on an hourly pay basis as per their requirements.

Amazon EC2 provides services for 5 major instances.

1. For general purpose instances: They are used for a wide range of purposes and provide a sound balance between network services, memory, and computing. It is suitable for web servers that require these resources in a balanced number.

2. Memory-optimized instances: They are used for high-speed access of data on the back of robust drive infrastructure. This service is highly used by open source databases that have high memory usage but less CPU power.

3. Compute-optimized instances: High-end compute applications like big scientific data, financial analytics, and data warehouses, that constantly need high input-output operations per second, high availability, and fast performance requires these instances.

4. Storage-optimized instances: These instances are suitable for applications that need read & write access to the huge databases from the storage at a very high speed.

5. Accelerated compute instances: This instance makes data processing, complicated mathematical calculations, and graphical analysis faster than any software powered by a CPU, with the help of strong co-processors and hardware accelerators.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

The organization can manage and maintain your Amazon EC2 applications with the help of Amazon EC2 autoscaling. The user is enabled to add and remove EC2 instances as per their requirement. The organization can use auto-scaling on a large scale with the help of predictive scaling functionalities.

Amazon Lightsail

Amazon Lightsail is a very famous virtual private server providing service by AWS. Amazon lightsail is very affordable and provides access to a wide range of services like SSD storage, Virtual machines, and managing DNS. Also, lightsail is very flexible to scale up with the increasing demand of the organization.

Amazon Elastic Container Registry

It is a registry for various operations like sharing and storing container images. Amazon elastic container registry helps organizations maintain container repositories. This service makes the app development process smooth by hosting container images.

Amazon Elastic Container Service

This service helps organizations develop high-performing containerized applications on a cluster of EC2 instances, with the help of dock containers. The user gets access to various features of applications on the cloud.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service

This service specifically helps widely spread businesses run Kubernetes infrastructure and provides a smooth migration to any application running on Kubernetes and running their partner plugins.

AWS Batch

AWS Batch helps organizations with running batch computing as per the demand and requirement set by the users of the organization. This service is very helpful as organizations can focus more on their core work data and not on less important tasks like maintaining batch computing software.

AWS Elastic BeanStalk

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is very useful to organizations in developing and launching various applications with the help of docker and programming languages like java, python, .NET, and PHP. Elastic Beanstalk takes care of load balancing and scaling after the user uploads only codes.

AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda enables users with serverless computing without any extra cost and administration. Users can run code without managing any servers and provisions. 

AWS Outposts

AWS outposts help organizations with hybrid AWS services when they need teamwork that involves on-premise services and AWS data centers. Users can access AWS infrastructure from any data center for their cooperation usage with the help of AWS outposts.

AWS Fargate

AWS Fargate makes organizations free from handling backend infrastructure for their application. Amazon Fargate is a serverless compute engine that runs containers so that organizations can focus on their core work which is application building.

AWS Serverless Application Repository

This service enables users to launch applications for mobile and desktop use in a very fast manner. This serverless service makes data processing and monitoring fast for the application.

VMware Cloud on AWS

This service is jointly developed by VMware and AWS. It provides scalable solutions to businesses in migrating to the AWS cloud.

How Can You Choose a Suitable AWS Compute Service?

As you are now aware of so many AWS compute services, you may have a question about how to choose the specific service. Selecting the service completely depends on your computing requirement, demand, and application requirement.

• If you are looking for a wide range of computing services and various instances, then Amazon EC2 is suitable for you.
• You can choose Elastic container service (ECS) for running docker-enabled applications on various EC2 instances.
• You can choose Amazon Lamba for running in-house-made code in a serverless environment. 

Benefits of AWS Compute Services

• AWS compute services reduce the business cost, as the user needs to pay only for the required resources and instances, depending on the usage time.
• Businesses have full flexibility to build and deploy applications rapidly with the help of the infrastructure and resources provided by AWS. Like you can build any type of app as per your requirement on Amazon Lightsail.
• Amazon Compute services provide built-in security features that monitor and protect hardware instances on a real-time basis.
• Amazon EC2 provides a wide range of options for managing the whole operation in networking and storage.

To Sum Up

So, that’s it about AWS computing services. I hope you might have gotten a complete idea about AWS computing services. But, if you still have any doubts or queries regarding it, join our saasguru Slack community and discuss with the industry experts on anything regarding the AWS platform. 

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