What is AWS (Amazon Web Services)?
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 200 fully-featured services from data centers globally. Even though there are a few worthy competitors, it doesn't seem like anyone will push them off the podium for a while.
For example, it’s difficult to catch up with AWS’ pace of innovation. AWS services and features have grown exponentially every year: as shown in the following figure, in 2011, AWS released over 80 new significant services and features, followed by nearly 160 in 2012; 280 in 2013; 516 in 2014; 722 in 2015; 1,017 in 2016; 1,430 in 2017; and 1,957 in 2018; 2,345 in 2019, 2,757 in 2020, and 3,084 in 2021:
Figure 1.1 – AWS – number of features released per yearThere is no doubt that the number of offerings will continue to grow at a similar rate for the foreseeable future. Gartner named AWS as a leader for the 11th consecutive year in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure & Platform Services. AWS is innovating fast, especially in new areas such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things (IoT), serverless computing, blockchain, and even quantum computing.
The following are some of the key differentiators for AWS in a nutshell:
| Oldest and most experienced cloud provider | AWS was the first major public cloud provider (started in 2006) and since then it has gained millions of customers across the globe. |
| Fast pace of innovation | AWS has 200+ fully featured services to support any cloud workload. They released 3000+ features in 2021 to meet customer demand. |
| Continuous price reduction | AWS has reduced its prices across various services 111 times since its inception in 2006 to improve the Total Cost of Ownership ( TCO ). |
| Community of partners to help accelerate the cloud journey | AWS has a large Partner Network of 100,000+ Partners across 150 + countries. These partners include large consulting partners and software vendors. |
| Security and compliance | AWS provides security standards and compliance certifications to fulfill your local government and industry compliance needs. |
| Global infrastructure | AWS has 84 Availability Zones within 26 geographic Regions, 17 Local Zones, 24 Wavelength Zones, 310+ Points of Presence (300+ Edge locations and 13 regional mid-tier caches) in 90+ cities across 47 countries. |
It’s not always possible to move all workloads into the cloud, and for that purpose, AWS provides a broad set of hybrid capabilities in the areas of networking, data, access, management, and application services. For example, VMware Cloud on AWS allows customers to seamlessly run existing VMware workloads on AWS with the skills and toolsets they already have without additional hardware investment. If you want to run your workload on-premise, then AWS Outposts brings native AWS services, infrastructure, and operating models to virtually any data center, co-location space, or on-premises facility. You will learn more details about hybrid cloud services later in this book.
This is just a small sample of the many AWS services that you will see throughout this book. Let's delve a little deeper into how influential AWS currently is and how influential it has the potential to become.
