What Is Amazon Web Services (AWS)?
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s leading cloud computing service provider. It has grown to be the most profitable arm of the behemoth that is Amazon, and businesses around the world have grown to know and trust Amazon as their preferred cloud service provider.
Back in 2004, Amazon launched Simple Queue Service (SQS) as the first building block that would become AWS. Two years later in 2006, they released Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), their seminal cloud service storage solution, and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) allowing businesses to build applications fully in the cloud.
Today this list of services has expanded to hundreds of different products. These include services for containers, customer service, storage, identity management, robotics, VR and AR, IoT, databases, and even quantum computing. You’re hard pressed to find a problem that AWS does not have a first-party solution for.
Why To Choose AWS?
AWS is the best known, and most widely used, cloud services platform on the market. Organizations turn to AWS for their second-to-none product suite, expanding global presence and their sterling reputation for innovation and reliability.
A core AWS principle is “Security is Job Zero”, and true to that they provide all the tools you need to manage your estate, no matter how big you scale. This, coupled with cost management solutions, and offerings which help provide recommendations to secure and optimize your infrastructure, allow you to deliver faster, safer and cheaper than is possible with your on-premise infrastructure, or with other cloud providers.
According to Amazon, the number of active AWS users exceeds 1,000,000.
Whether it’s technology giants, television networks, banks, food manufacturers or governments, many different organisations are using AWS to develop, deploy and host applications.
Clearly, AWS is the cloud computing platform of choice for businesses across a range of industries. But who are the biggest, and how much money are they spending on these services?
The top AWS User based on EC2 Monthly spend is :-
Netflix: $19 Million
What Is Netflix ?
Netflix is the world’s leading internet television network, with more than 200 million members in more than 190 countries enjoying 125 million hours of TV shows and movies each day.
Among enterprises, Netflix was the most prominent early user of AWS, adopting it in 2009.
According to an article in Business Insider from January 2016, Netflix placed enormous demands on the resources available to AWS at the time, often pushing the service to its limits and beyond. The ongoing pressure from Netflix, combined with Amazon’s willingness to improve its service and meet its customers’ requirements, pushed AWS to develop into the full, enterprise-scale integrated set of services that it is today.
Netflix uses AWS for nearly all its computing and storage needs, including databases, analytics, recommendation engines, video transcoding, and more — hundreds of functions that in total use more than 100,000 server instances on AWS.
ARCHITECTURE
Netflix Realizes Multi-Region Resiliency on Amazon Route 53
What happens when you need to move 89 million viewers to a different AWS region? Netflix’s infrastructure, built on AWS, makes it possible to be extremely resilient, even when the company is running services in many AWS Regions simultaneously. In this episode of This is My Architecture, Coburn Watson, director of performance and reliability engineering at Netflix, walks through the company’s DNS architecture — built on Amazon Route 53 and augmented with Netflix’s Zuul — that allows the team to evacuate an entire region in less than 40 minutes.
~By Tanmay
Thanks To Read
