Top 10 AWS services to choose for your business in 2020

The universe of Amazon

In the past years, cloud computing has revolutionized the technology industry. With it, tech companies don’t need anymore to make essential investments in hardware and infrastructure; alternatively, they can purchase just the appropriate volume of computing resources to instantly operate their IT departments on the pay-as-yo-go basis.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is genuinely the undisputed pioneer in the cloud computing market who launched the computing services on an as-needed basis. More than 100 efficient services in their extensive portfolio provide a comprehensive list of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings, among which are the services for a database, application development, security, infrastructure management, storage, etc. 
More read:AWS DevOps tools

AWS services are compatible building blocks for development and deployment of any specific kind of cloud application or expanding the existing cloud environment. AWS products are technologically aligned with each other to bring to life highly scalable and refined products. AWS owns and operates the hardware necessary for maintaining their services.

Benefits of AWS services:

• Flexible and scalable IT resources
• Considerable cost savings on hardware
• Faster innovation
• Instant upscaling or downscaling
• Quick positioning of necessary resources
• Flawless infrastructure

More read: “The Definitive Benefits of AWS Cloud Adoption”

It’s very easy to take the wrong turn with such a vast number of AWS offerings. That’s why we’ve made up a list of the top 10 most popular and in-demand essential AWS services for businesses. We hope this AWS services overview will come in handy on your way to becoming a stronger and more innovative company.

Top 10 must-have AWS services:

1. Amazon EC2 - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.
2. Amazon ELB - Elastic Load Balancing.
3. Amazon DynamoDB - NoSQL Cloud Databas.
4. Amazon RedShift - Data Warehouse.
5. Amazon RDS - Relational Database Service.
6. Amazon Lambda - Serverless Functions.
7. Amazon SNS - Simple Notification Service.
8. Amazon S3 - Redundant File Storage.
9. Amazon Lex - Conversational Interfaces.
10. Amazon VPC - Virtual Private.

Amazon EC2

Features: EC2 allows creating virtual machines (instances) and other server management features, like storage, security, ports, with the chosen operating system. There are lots of pre-configured instance templates - AMIs (Amazon Machine Image). In addition, the instances may be configured as per requirement.

Benefits:

• Very easy to scale up and down
• Integration with other services
• Hourly payment
• Eliminates the need to deploy costly physical servers
• Security and resistibility
• Accelerated development and deployment of applications

Amazon ELB

Features: ELB automatically distributes the load between different instances, in other words, if one instance is busy, the other one can handle the large incoming traffic. The service helps avoid any server hotspots. ELB offers three types of load balancers: Application Load Balancer, Network Load Balancer, Classic Load Balancer. ELB ensures only healthy targets receive traffic.

Benefits:

• Application performance monitoring
• Automatic upscaling or downscaling
• Better performance
• Fault-tolerant applications
• Robust security features
• User authentication
• Increased availability of an application

Amazon DynamoDB

Features: This completely managed NoSQL cloud database platform ensures storage, processing, and access to data, and supports scale-driven and high-performance applications. It works with document and key-value storage models. Perfect for IoT, ad tech, gaming, and mobile apps. DynamoDB can scale to accommodate large datasets.

Benefits:

• Supports mission-critical workloads
• Extremely fast
• Serverless
• Fully managed in-memory cache
• Low-latency data access at any scale
• Single-digit millisecond response time

Amazon RedShift

Features: This Database-as-a-Service solution is the fastest data warehouse available in the cloud market. It can house petabytes of data and scale up or down according to your requirements. RedShift powers mission-critical analytical workloads. The clusters are fully managed by AWS. The database is compatible with most third-party applications.

Benefits:

• Cost-efficient
• Fast-performing
• Horizontal scaling
• Continuous backups
• Columnar storage
• Massively Parallel Processing (MPP)
• Data lake integration

Amazon RDS 

Features: This service allows running and managing a relational database without typically having to spend time and considerable resources for its infrastructure management. Databases can be equipped with 5 GB-6 TB in size and can be run on magnetic or solid state storage (SSD). The service can support multiple database engines, like Aurora, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, MariaDB, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server.

Benefits:

• Cost-effective
• Fully managed
• Highly scalable
• Resizeable
• Lower administrative burden
• Dedicated instances for databases in minutes
• Automatic software patching

Amazon Lambda

Features: It is also called Function-as-a-Service (FaaS). You barely have to upload your code virtually for any kind of application or backend service, and Lambda handles everything to run and scale your code with high availability. Supports all types of development tasks. You can execute code functions without the requirement of any EC2 server.

Benefits:

• No servers to manage
• Zero administration
• Pay per run
• Helps avoid complexity and management overhead
• Automatic scaling of an application

Amazon SNS

Features: Allows sending notifications to users on any platform. The service sends emails, text messages, SQS (Simple queue services), HTML endpoint messages. Enables to decouple microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. This service is built for high-throughput, push-based, many-to-many messaging.

Benefits:

• High message durability
• Fully managed service
• Keeps sensitive data secure
• Integrates with any type of application (Node.JS, Python, PHP)
• Low-cost infrastructure for mass message delivery

Amazon S3

Features:

This is a triple redundant scalable data storage. The data is stored in 3 datacenters in one particular region, which guarantees high data security and adequate protection from failures, errors, and potential threats. This service can be used by companies of all sizes for the storage, retrieval, and protection of any amount of data. The service offers a possibility to manage, classify and report on your data, as well as run big data analytics across your objects. 

Objects consist of the data, key (assigned name), and metadata. The objects are stored in “folders”, which can be private or public. The service provides integrations with PCI-DSS, HIPAA/HITECH, FedRAMP. 

Benefits:

• High data availability
• Granular data control
• Simple data transfer
• Backup and recovery
• Incredibly secure infrastructure
• Scalability
• Almost zero latency
• High performance
• Easy-to-use management features
• Easy integration with third-party applications

Amazon Lex

Features: Lex is an AI service for developing conversational interfaces (voice and text) for any application using the same deep learning technologies that power Amazon Alexa. They are Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and natural language understanding (NLU). You can build, test and deploy your chatbots directly from Amazon Lex console. This service enables creating applications with highly engaging user experiences.

Benefits:

• Meaningful interactions
• Sophisticated deep learning algorithms
• Easy-to-use console
• You are charged for the  text of speech requests
• Scales automatically

Amazon VPC

Features: This service has been launched as Amazon’s answer to the increasing number of security threats and data breaches. The service allows creating an isolated space on AWS, and provide access to it only for authorized individuals, groups, or systems. This provides an extra layer of security to the data and resources running under a defined VPC. Your information is absolutely free of exposure.

Benefits:

• Effective prevention of data security risk
• Possible VPN connections to a corporate network
• Ensured accessibility of information
• Complete control over the virtual networking environment
• Inbound and outbound filtering

Summing up

AWS services are invaluable for businesses directed towards superior agility, continuous innovation, and migration to the cloud. The broad range of services AWS offers can satisfy the most sophisticated requirements of any businesses with any specific goals. AWS services help considerably cut costs on infrastructure management and capital investment into hardware, and reach a quicker time to value. Companies pay exactly for what they use.

Wit Amazon AWS products costly on-premise data centers, which require maintenance and considerable attention, can be replaced with scalable and efficient digital infrastructure. Managed AWS services help upscale or downscale the infrastructure according to the ever-changing business landscape, ensure reliability and security, and maximize revenues.

But you nevertheless have to consider the fact, that not all the AWS services are an appropriate match with each other. You need to have an accurate understanding of which technology stack and the combination of AWS services you need to correctly solve a particular business task.

Have you made up your mind to migrate to AWS and establish a thriving cloud-based business? Don’t have enough cloud expertise in-house? 

Romexsoft is a certified AWS consulting partner, and we can help you quickly and securely get a handle on complex AWS environment and mix the precise combination of AWS services with each other according to your business needs. Reach us to get in touch with our acknowledged AWS expert.

Originally published at Romexsoft Blog “ Top 10 AWS services to choose for your business in 2020”