In this article by Uchit Vyas, who is the author of the Mastering AWS Development book, we will see how to use AWS services in detail.

It is important to have a choice of placing applications as close as possible to your users or customers, in order to ensure the lowest possible latency and best user experience while deploying them.

AWS offers a choice of nine regions located all over the world (for example, East Coast of the United States, West Coast of the United States, Europe, Tokyo, Singapore, Sydney, and Brazil), 26 redundant Availability Zones, and 53 Amazon CloudFront points of presence.

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It is very crucial and important to have the option to put applications as close as possible to your customers and end users by ensuring the best possible lowest latency and user-expected features and experience, when you are creating and deploying apps for performance. For this, AWS provides worldwide means to the regions located all over the world. To be specific via name and location, they are as follows:

US East (Northern Virginia) region
US West (Oregon) region
US West (Northern California) region
EU (Ireland) Region
Asia Pacific (Singapore) region
Asia Pacific (Sydney) region
Asia Pacific (Tokyo) region
South America (Sao Paulo) region
US GovCloud

In addition to regions, AWS has 25 redundant Availability Zones and 51 Amazon CloudFront points of presence.

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Apart from these infrastructure-level highlights, they have plenty of managed services that can be the cream of AWS candy bar! The managed services bucket has the following listed services:

Security: For every organization, security in each and every aspect is the vital element. For that, AWS has several remarkable security features that distinguishes AWS from other Cloud providers as follows :
- Certifications and accreditations
- Identity and Access Management
Right now, I am just underlining the very important security features.
Global infrastructure: AWS provides a fully-functional, flexible technology infrastructure platform worldwide, with managed services over the globe with certain characteristics, for example:
- Multiple global locations for deployment
- Low-latency CDN service
- Reliable, low-latency DNS service
Compute: AWS offers a huge range of various cloud-based core computing services (including variety of compute instances that can be auto scaled to justify the needs of your users and application), a managed elastic load balancing service, and more of fully managed desktop resources on the pathway of cloud. Some of the common characteristics of computer services include the following:
- Broad choice of resizable compute instances
- Flexible pricing opportunities
- Great discounts for always on compute resources
- Lower hourly rates for elastic workloads
- Wide-ranging networking configuration selections
- A widespread choice of operating systems
- Virtual desktops
- Save further as you grow with tiered pricing model
Storage: AWS offers low cost with high durability and availability with their storage services. With pay-as-you-go pricing model with no commitment, provides more flexibility and agility in services and processes for storage with a highly secured environment. AWS provides storage solutions and services for backup, archive, disaster recovery, and so on. They also support block, file, and object kind of storages with a highly available and flexible infrastructure. A few major characteristics for storage are as follows:
- Cost-effective, high-scale storage varieties
- Data protection and data management
- Storage gateway
- Choice of instance storage options
Content delivery and networking: AWS offers a wide set of networking services that enables you to create a logical isolated network that the architect defines and to create a private network connection to the AWS infrastructure, with fault tolerant, scalable, and highly available DNS service. It also provides delivery services for content to your end users, by very low latency and high data transfer speed with AWS CDN service. A few major characteristics for content delivery and networking are as follows:
- Application and media files delivery
- Software and large file distribution
- Private content
Databases: AWS offers fully managed, distributed relational and NoSQL type of database services. Moreover, database services are capable of in-memory caching, sharding, and scaling with/without data warehouse solutions. A few major characteristics for databases are as follows:
- RDS
- DynamoDB
- Redshift
- ElastiCache
Application services: AWS provides a variety of managed application services with lower cost such as application streaming and queuing, transcoding, push notification, searching, and so on. A few major characteristics for databases are as follows:
- AppStream
- CloudSearch
- Elastic transcoder
- SWF, SES, SNS, SQS
Deployment and management: AWS offers management of credentials to explore AWS services such as monitor services, application services, and updating stacks of AWS resources. They also have deployment and security services alongside with AWS API activity. A few major characteristics for deployment and management services are as follows:
IAM
CloudWatch
Elastic Beanstalk
CloudFormation
Data Pipeline
OpsWorks
CloudHSM
Cloud Trail

Summary

There are a few more additional important services from AWS, such as support, integration with existing infrastructure, Big Data, and ecosystem, which puts it on the top of other infrastructure providers. As a cloud architect, it is necessary to learn about cloud service offerings and their all-important functionalities.