How AWS is helping in our life/ Companies.

 What is Cloud Computing? 

Cloud computing refers to the delivery of computing resources such as servers, storage, databases, software, and more over the internet, allowing users to access these resources on-demand from anywhere with an internet connection. Rather than owning and managing physical infrastructure and hardware, cloud computing allows users to rent and use resources on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Cloud computing is often categorized into three main types: infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and software-as-a-service (SaaS). IaaS provides users with the building blocks of computing infrastructure, including servers, storage, and networking resources. PaaS provides users with a platform to develop, run, and manage their own applications, while SaaS provides users with a fully functional application that is accessible via the internet.

Cloud computing offers numerous benefits, including flexibility, scalability, cost savings, and increased efficiency. By leveraging cloud computing, businesses can reduce the need for on-premises hardware and infrastructure, scale their resources up or down to meet changing demand, and quickly spin up new applications and services. Overall, cloud computing is an essential tool for businesses looking to stay competitive and meet the evolving needs of the digital landscape.

Concept behind Cloud Computing Technology:

Now let’s talk about what is the concept behind cloud computing.

We need to go through some steps for this. Let’s understand the following:

There are basic three ways to install Operating System.

1. Bare Metal

2. Virtualization

3. Containerization

In Bare Metal you directly install the OS to your Local System. The OS will consume Physical resources like HD, RAM, CPU, etc from your local system, and at only one point in time only one OS you can run or work on.

Next comes, Virtualization Technology

To use virtualization technology, you have to install one program or software that will give you the capability to boot multiple independent OS at the same point in time on your Physical Hardwar(your physical resource will be sharable to all the independent OS). The program is called Hypervisor. Some Virtualization product is Oracle VirtualBox, VMware, KVM, Xen, etc.

3rd way is Containerization Technology.

It’s the same as Virtualization, you have to install one program on top of your physical hardware, the program is called a “container engine”. This technology can install and boot OS in less than 1 second.

some of the vastly used Containerization tools are Docker, Podman, RKT, Rancher, etc.

Now you might wonder Why should we use the cloud when we have these 3 ways of installing the OS.

Think about cloud

The reason behind it, you will not have a headache about the physical resources like RAM, CPU, Storage (volume), and the entire infrastructure, cloud will provide you with whatever is necessary to run the respective OS, you have to just select or pick from the catalog.

Cloud Computing technology provides all the previous ways of installation through respective services.

MaaS is a cloud infrastructure service that provides users with access to physical servers and other bare-metal resources over the internet. It allows users to deploy, manage, and scale their infrastructure without needing to physically own or maintain the hardware. MaaS provides businesses with flexibility, agility, and scalability, allowing them to quickly spin up or down resources as needed.

CaaS is a cloud computing model that provides users with access to computing resources, such as software, operating systems, and application platforms, over the internet. CaaS provides businesses with a cost-effective way to manage their IT infrastructure by eliminating the need for them to purchase and maintain their own hardware and software. With CaaS, businesses can focus on their core operations without worrying about the IT infrastructure.

IaaS is a cloud computing model that provides users with access to computing resources, such as virtual machines, storage, and networking components, over the internet. IaaS allows businesses to deploy and manage their IT infrastructure without needing to physically own or maintain the hardware. It provides businesses with the flexibility and scalability to quickly scale their IT infrastructure up or down as needed.

Container as a Service (CaaS) is a cloud computing model that provides users with access to container-based applications and services over the internet. CaaS enables developers to build and deploy applications using containerization technology, which allows applications to be packaged in a lightweight, portable, and standardized way. With CaaS, users can quickly and easily deploy and manage container-based applications, without needing to worry about the underlying infrastructure. This provides businesses with a cost-effective way to manage their IT infrastructure and allows them to focus on their core operations, rather than managing the IT infrastructure.

What is AWS? 💡

In 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) began offering IT infrastructure services to businesses in the form of web services — now commonly known as cloud computing. One of the key benefits of cloud computing is the opportunity to replace up-front capital infrastructure expenses with low variable costs that scale with your business.

It is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 200 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.

With data center locations in the U.S., Europe, Brazil, Singapore, Japan, and Australia, customers across all industries are taking advantage of the services of AWS.

AWS Regions Globally 🌍

AWS Data Centre:

1. Region — A region is a geographical area. Each region consists of 2 (or more) availability zones.
2. Availability Zone — It is simply a data center.
3. Edge Location — They are CDN (Content Delivery Network) endpoints for Cloudfront.

What are different AWS products and Services and Implementations?

Amazon provides 175 full-featured services from data centers globally. These products and services are listed below:

• Application Integration
• AR & VR
• Analytics
• Blockchain
• Business Applications
• Compute
• AWS Cost Management
• Database
• Developer Tools
• Security Identity & Compliance
• Customer Engagement
• Game Tech
• Machine Learning
• Management & Governance
• End-User Computing
• Media Services
• Internet of Things
• Migration & Transfer
• Networking & Content Delivery
• Quantum Technologies
• Mobile
• Robotics
• Satellite
• Storage

Global Market Share Of AWS 💰🌍

Now Let’s focus on the Global Market Share of AWS.

Having established itself as an early leader in the market for cloud infrastructure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), the online retailer’s profitable cloud platform, is still ahead of the pack. According to estimates from Synergy Research Group, Amazon’s market share in the worldwide cloud infrastructure market amounted to 34 percent in the third quarter of 2022, still exceeding the combined market share of its two largest competitors, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

In Q3 2022, global cloud infrastructure service spending climbed to $57 billion, bringing the industry total for the trailing twelve months to $217 billion. As the following chart shows, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google accounted for two-thirds of cloud infrastructure revenues in the three months that ended Sept. 30, with the eight largest providers controlling more than 80 percent of the market.

“It is a strong testament to the benefits of cloud computing that despite two major obstacles to growth the worldwide market still expanded by 24 percent from last year,” John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research Group said. “Had exchange rates remained stable and had the Chinese market remained on a more normal path then the growth rate percentage would have been well into the thirties.”

Companies that use AWS 🏢💻

Source: mytechmag.com

the companies that use AWS are some of the most successful brands in their related sectors. But what’s driving their growth? Well, it’s the scalable and unique ways AWS has managed to solvitsir challenges.

Let’s dive right in!

As we said before, currently, AWS holds a 34% share of the global cloud infrastructure market. And part of that reason is how Amazon packages these services in a ‘pay-as-you-go’ model. In other words, it’s reliable and, more importantly, cheap.

AWS is the leader in the cloud infrastructure market

The companies that use AWS benefit from its scalable solutions and useful application programming interface (API) functionality. Due to the same, AWS isn’t available directly to end users but is hosted on server farms.

This also brings the focus back to the burning question: Who uses AWS?

The simple answer is everyone. Almost all organizations now base their foundation on Amazon’s unique solutions, from healthcare to streaming service providers.

Now Let’s deep dive into the case study of any particular company, and for the case study, I am choosing Netflix.

So, let’s start.

AWS Case Study: Netflix

Netflix on AWS:

Netflix is the world’s leading internet television network, with over 200 million members in more than 190 countries enjoying 125 million hours of TV shows and movies daily. Netflix uses AWS for nearly all its computing and storage needs, including databases, analytics, recommendation engines, video transcoding, and more — hundreds of functions that in total use more than 100,000 server instances on AWS.

NETFLIX SUPREMACY

“Like other home-entertainment services, Netflix has seen temporarily higher viewing and increased member growth during this unprecedented time. In order to meet this demand our control plane services needed to scale very quickly. This is where the value of AWS and our strong partnership became apparent, both in being able to meet capacity needs in compute, storage, as well as providing the necessary infrastructure, such as AWS Auto Scaling, which is deeply ingrained in Netflix’s operations model.”

— Nils Pommerien

Director, Cloud Infrastructure Engineering, Netflix

Source: AWS Customer Stories.

Brief about Netflix 📝

It is the number one video streaming service on the entire planet as of 2018 and the amount of infrastructure it takes to serve video continuously to over 190 countries with minimal latency (no lag) requires intensive computing time. The cost to run your own data center involves paying for a location, construction, staffing, security & disaster recovery across the globe. Managing and fronting the cost of physical data centers is a very costly and time-consuming endeavor. Renting this capacity, virtually, from AWS is a faster way to get to market and a cheaper way to run a cloud business.

Just for fun

If Netflix was a series, it would be a blockbuster. Each season would be nothing short of dramatic to the chagrin of investors.

Want to crunch some numbers?

The video streaming service had an $11.5 billion valuation in January 2011. It had about 26 million subscribers at the end of that year. Ten years later, Netflix reported it had about 204 million subscribers and a valuation of over $220 billion.

The Los Gatos, CA, giant made a staggering $25 billion in 2020 in annual revenue. Netflix also welcomed a startling 37 million paid subscribers in 2020 alone, a new record.

Migration Over AWS 

Netflix was one of the very first companies to move their infrastructure over to AWS and has since pioneered many of the common architectural patterns for designing products on AWS. Since moving the majority of its infrastructure to AWS, they have been able to design a system where it is cheaper to serve video as it continues to acquire more and more customers. This results in massive profits for the company. It is able to do this by leveraging AWS services without having to build and manage it itself.

AWS YOUTUBE

Netflix estimates that it uses around 700 microservices to control each of the many parts of what makes up the entire Netflix service: one microservice stores all shows you watched, one deducts the monthly fee from your credit card, one provides your device with the correct video files that it can play, one takes a look at your watching history and uses algorithms to guess a list of movies that you will like, and one will provide the names and images of these movies to be shown in a list on the main menu. And that’s the tip of the iceberg. Netflix engineers can make changes to any part of the application and can introduce new changes rapidly while ensuring that nothing else in the entire service breaks down.

And when two applications do need to talk to each other, they use an application programming interface (API) — a tightly-controlled set of rules that both programs can handle. Developers can now make many changes, small or huge, to each application as long as they ensure that it plays well with the API. And since one program knows the other’s API properly, no change will break the exchange of information.

Netflix architecture on AWS

Here is a breakdown of the services that Netflix uses on AWS and how they are used:

Amazon S3: Netflix stores all of its content, metadata, and user preferences on Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service). S3 is a highly scalable and durable storage service that allows Netflix to store petabytes of data in the cloud. Netflix uses S3 to store raw video files, encode video files into different formats, and store user preferences and viewing history.

Amazon EC2: Netflix uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to run its encoding and transcoding operations. EC2 provides scalable and flexible computing capacity in the cloud. Netflix uses EC2 to convert video files into different formats and resolutions to provide a seamless streaming experience to its subscribers.

Amazon CloudFront: Netflix uses Amazon CloudFront to deliver its content to users quickly and efficiently. CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) that caches content in multiple locations around the world, reducing the latency and improving the user experience.

Amazon ElastiCache: Netflix uses Amazon ElastiCache to improve the performance of its content recommendation engine. ElastiCache is an in-memory caching service that helps reduce the latency of frequently accessed data. Netflix uses ElastiCache to cache user preferences and viewing history, improving the accuracy of its content recommendations.

Amazon RDS: Netflix uses Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) to store metadata about its content. RDS is a managed database service that provides scalable and reliable relational databases in the cloud. Netflix uses RDS to store metadata about its content, such as titles, actors, and ratings.

Amazon Kinesis: Netflix uses Amazon Kinesis to process and analyze real-time streaming data. Kinesis is a streaming data service that can process millions of events per second. Netflix uses Kinesis to track user behavior in real time, allowing it to optimize its content recommendations and provide a personalized user experience.

Amazon DynamoDB: Netflix uses Amazon DynamoDB to store and manage its metadata catalog. DynamoDB is a NoSQL database service that provides low-latency access to data. Netflix uses DynamoDB to store metadata about its content, such as titles, actors, and ratings.

Amazon SageMaker: Netflix uses Amazon SageMaker to develop and train its machine-learning models. SageMaker is a fully-managed service that provides tools for building, training, and deploying machine learning models in the cloud. Netflix uses SageMaker to develop and train its content recommendation algorithms, improving the accuracy of its content recommendations.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Netflix uses a variety of AWS services to power its streaming platform, store its content and metadata, and deliver a seamless user experience to millions of subscribers worldwide. By leveraging AWS’s highly scalable and reliable cloud infrastructure, Netflix can provide its subscribers with a highly personalized and engaging streaming experience, while also optimizing its content recommendations and improving the accuracy of its machine-learning models

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