amazon web services
is kind of a big deal how big one in
three sites you visit on the internet
uses aws services
somehow in 2019 amazon web services
raked in more than 35
billion dollars in revenue if aws
were its own company that's enough to
rank 359th
on fortune magazine's global 500 list
well hello there cloud gurus i am scott
fletcher and this is a 10
000 foot overview of amazon web
services amazon web services origins are
kind of unintentional way back around
the year 2000 amazon was still
just a scrappy e-commerce company who
found itself
struggling to grow under all the
technical debt
that it accumulated since its startup
days
very much at a necessity amazon made the
strategic
technology decision to start building
reusable modules for its
internal development groups this allowed
those groups to create
new features faster because they weren't
always reinventing the same things
over and over and as time went on
the collection of internal services grew
and
people inside the company started to
realize that
maybe there's a potential business
opportunity there first launched in 2004
and then relaunched in 2006 with three
public
pay as you go services amazon web
services
set sail into the uncharted waters of
what we now call
cloud computing after its launch in 2006
for the next few years aws enjoyed a
relatively
quiet competitive landscape allowing it
to build a dramatic head start
over contemporary competitors like
microsoft azure
and google cloud platform aws has been
the dominant cloud provider for a while
and is the clear
market share leader at present however
in the past few years that market share
has been eroding slightly largely going
to microsoft azure
but competition is a good thing and aws
has momentum
market share profitability and some
really smart people on its side
the innovation and customer focus are
greater than
ever aws operates globally in what are
called
regions 24 in all spread across six
continents each region consists of
multiple availability zones and these
are the physical data centers
where computers live and are
geographically separated to reduce the
likelihood
of a local disaster taking out a whole
region
additionally there are over 200 edge
locations scattered around the world as
part of
aws's content delivery network in
addition to the publicly available
regions there are a few special regions
two regions are designated for use by
those working in
and for the us government so-called
govcloud
there are also two regions in china
which are
operated by local qualified companies in
accordance with chinese law and
regulations
now all these regions availability zones
and edge locations are tied together
through aws's
private high-speed fiber optic network
aws has even invented its own
proprietary hardware to make their
network faster and more robust and
chances are you're already using the aws
network if you use
netflix twitch hulu reddit slack
all are aws customers you are writing on
the aws network
now as far as strengths because aws had
such a
large head start on current competitors
aws
has the most robust and comprehensive
offering currently 175 services
and counting new features enhancements
and services come out weekly
and many of which are the direct results
of customer requests
additionally aws has a long history of
price reductions
and provide many tools and programs to
help companies
really optimize their spend as far as
downsides
when you're as big as amazon you're
bound to step on some toes
many retail companies view amazon as a
direct competitor and simply can't bring
themselves to give their rival
any money whatsoever this will probably
get even more complicated as amazon
expands its reach
into other industries additionally while
aws
does not charge you to put your data
into their cloud
you do have to pay a little bit to get
that data back out
so-called egress charges it's not very
much given the potential value but is
something
to note now aws provides such a
wide variety of services that almost any
use
case fits right in services range from
the basic
storage and compute all the way to the
more specialized niche services like
streaming media robotics and even
quantum computing
they even have a service that lets you
control your fleet of space
satellites should you have a need for
that in addition
to the usual disaster recovery and
remote data center
use cases organizations are increasingly
leveraging aws investment in machine
learning and data analytics to help them
make sense out of
all their data many organizations have
gone all in
moving their entire it operations into
aws
and have realized great gains in agility
efficiency and reliability
now obviously we've just scratched the
surface here
and if you'd like to dig in a little
deeper into that next layer we have some
great resources
if you're just getting started with aws
i recommend our introduction to aws
course
to get a good baseline if you want some
further guidance
on ramping up your aws knowledge we have
you covered there too
our curated learning paths guide you
from
novice to guru across six different
specialized career tracks
architect developer data devops security
and we even have an executive track now
as i mentioned before
aws releases new services and features
all the time and we have content
to keep you updated there as well aws
this week and aws
service spotlight are two such examples
of reoccurring shows
that are freely available thank you for
joining me on this high level overview
i'm scott fletcher
and keep being awesome cloud gurus