One of the most famous and massive traffic websites is the Amazon.com which offers a vast selection of products using infrastructure-based web service. This company was started in the year 2006 with the available platform on web-service for developers on a usage-basis model. This company brings the best example of web-service achieved through the service-oriented architecture.

Amazon Web Service is a supplementary of Amazon.com. Amazon has made it possible to develop private virtual servers that can run worldwide via 'Hardware Virtualization' on Xen hypervisor. These servers can be provisioned [1] with different types of application software that user might predict along with a range of support services that not only makes cloud-computing applications possible but also make them strong to withstand computation.

The Amazon's web services have the following components

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud: The centralized application of AWS which facilitates the management and usage of virtual private servers that can run on Windows and Linux-based platforms over Xen Hypervisor. A number of tools are used to support Amazon's web services. These are:
  • Amazon Simple Queue Service is a message queue and transaction system for distributed Internet-based applications.
  • Amazon Simple Notification Service is used to publish message from an application.
  • Amazon CloudWatch is used for monitoring EC2 Cloud which supports by providing console or command line [2] view of resources in utilization.
  • Elastic Load Balancing is used to detect whether an instance is failing or check whether the traffic is healthy or not.
• Amazon's Simple Storage Service: is an online storage and backup system which has high-speed data transfer technique called AWS Import/Export figure1 shown below.

Another web - services components are:

• Amazon's Elastic Block Store
• Amazon's Simple Database (DB)
• Amazon's Relational Database Service
• Amazon Cloud front

A large number of services and utilities also support Amazon partners, i.e., the AWS infrastructure itself. These are:

• Alexa Web Information Service
• Amazon Associates Web Services (A2S)
• Amazon DevPay
• Elastic Map-Reduce
• Amazon's Mechanical Turk
• AWS Multi-factor Authentication
• Amazon's Flexible payment Service (FPS)
• Amazon's Fulfillment Web-Service (FWS)
• Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

Figure1: Amozon Web Services.

It is a virtual server platform allowing users to create and run virtual machines on Amazon Server firm. The Amazon Machine Images (AMI) is used by EC2 to launch and run server instances for running operating systems like: Linux (Red-Hat), Windows, etc. on different servers. As the name suggests, we can add or subtract elastically as and when required; replicate and load-balanced servers [3]. We can also locate our servers in different zones throughout the globe to provide fault-tolerance.

The term 'elastic' defines the ability to resize your capacity quickly as needed. Implementing a service might require the following components:

• Application server (having large RAM allocation)
• A load balancer
• Database server
• Firewall and network switches
• Additional rack capacity

References:

1. https://aws.amazon.com
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services
3. https://www.simplilearn.com/tutorials/aws-tutorial/what-is-aws

Cite this article:

S. Nandhinidwaraka (2021) Functions and Uses of Amazon Web Services, AnaTechmaz, pp. 5