AWS for Solutions Architects, Second Edition: Design your cloud infrastructure by implementing DevOps, containers, and Amazon Web Services

Welcome to Packt Early Access. We’re giving you an exclusive preview of this book before it goes on sale. It can take many months to write a book, but our authors have cutting-edge information to share with you today. Early Access gives you an insight into the latest developments by making chapter drafts available. The chapters may be a little rough around the edges right now, but our authors will update them over time.

You can dip in and out of this book or follow along from start to finish; Early Access is designed to be flexible. We hope you enjoy getting to know more about the process of writing a Packt book.

1. Chapter 1: Understanding AWS Cloud Principles and Key Characteristics
2. Chapter 2: Understanding AWS Well Architected Framework and Getting Certified
3. Chapter 3: Leveraging the Cloud for Digital Transformation...

What is cloud computing?

What exactly is cloud computing? It is a term often thrown around by many people who don’t understand it and wonder what it means. Having your infrastructure in the cloud does not mean you have your servers up in the sky. Let’s try to define it plainly.

Essentially, cloud computing is outsourcing a company’s hardware and software infrastructure to a third party. At a high level, it is the on-demand availability of IT resources such as servers, storage, databases, and so on over the web, without the hassle of managing physical infrastructure. Instead of having their own data center, enterprises borrow someone else’s data center. Cloud computing has many advantages:

• Economies of scale are associated with buying in bulk.
• You only pay for the time you use the equipment in increments of minutes or seconds.
• Arguably one of the most important benefits is the ability to scale up, out, down, and in.

When...

What is AWS (Amazon Web Services)?

With over 200 fully-featured services available across the world, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the most widely used cloud platform globally. Even though there are a few worthy competitors, it doesn’t seem like anyone will push them off the podium for a while.

For example, keeping up with AWS’ pace of innovation can be challenging. The growth of AWS services and features has been tremendous each year, as demonstrated in the graph below. In 2011, AWS introduced over 80 significant services and features, followed by nearly 160 in 2012, 280 in 2013, 516 in 2014, 722 in 2015, 1,017 in 2016, 1,430 in 2017, 1,957 in 2018, 2,345 in 2019, 2,757 in 2020, and 3,084 in 2021.

Figure 1.1: AWS – number of features released per year

There is no doubt that the number of offerings will continue to grow at a similar rate for the foreseeable future. Gartner named AWS as a leader for the 12th year in a row in the 2022 Gartner Magic...

The market share, influence, and adoption of AWS

For the first nine years of AWS’s existence, Amazon did not break down its AWS sales, and since 2015 Amazon started reporting AWS sales separately. As of April 2022, Microsoft does not fully break down its Azure revenue and profit in its quarterly reports. They disclosed their Azure revenue growth rate without reporting the actual revenue number, instead burying Azure revenues in a bucket called Commercial Cloud, which also includes items such as Office 365 revenue. Google has been cagey about breaking down its Google Cloud Platform (GCP) revenue for a long time. Google finally broke down its GCP revenue in February 2019, but GCP also combines its cloud and workplace (G-suite) tools in the same bucket.

AWS has a large market share with a $80.1 B run rate in 2022 and a 29% year-over-year growth. It is predicted to hit $100 B business by end of 2023, which is phenomenal for a business of its size. As of 2022, AWS is leading...

Basic cloud and AWS terminology

There is a constant effort by technology companies to offer common standards for certain technologies while providing exclusive and proprietary technology that no one else offers. An example of this can be seen in the database market. The Standard Query Language (SQL) and the ANSI-SQL standard have been around for a long time. The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) adopted SQL as the SQL-86 standard in 1986. Since then, database vendors have continuously supported this standard while offering various extensions to make their products stand out and lock in customers to their technology.

Cloud providers provide the same core functionality for a wide variety of customer needs, but they all feel compelled to name these services differently, no doubt in part to try to separate themselves from the rest of the pack. As an example, every major cloud provider offers compute services. In other words, it is simple to spin up a server with any provider...

Why is AWS so popular?

Depending on who you ask, some estimates peg the global cloud computing market at around 545.8 billion USD in 2022, growing to about 1.24 trillion USD by 2027. This implies a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of around 17.9% for the period.

There are multiple reasons why the cloud market is growing so fast. Some of them are listed here:

• Elasticity and scalability
• Security
• Availability
• Faster hardware cycles
• System administration staff

In addition to the above, AWS provides access to emerging technologies and faster time to market. Let’s look at the most important reason behind the popularity of cloud computing (and, in particular, AWS) first.

Elasticity and scalability

The concepts of elasticity and scalability are closely tied. Let’s start by understanding scalability. In the context of computer science, scalability can be used in two ways:

• An application can continue to function...

Summary

This chapter pieced together many of the technologies, best practices, and AWS services we cover in the book. As fully featured as AWS has become, it will certainly continue to provide more and more services to help enterprises, large and small, simplify the information technology infrastructure.

In this chapter, you learned about cloud computing and the key differences between the public and private cloud. This lead into learning more about the largest public cloud provider, AWS, and about its market share and adoption.

We also covered some reasons that the cloud in general and AWS, in particular, are so popular. As we learned, one of the main reasons for the cloud’s popularity is the concept of elasticity, which we explored in detail. You learned about AWS services growth over the year along with it’s key differentiators from other cloud providers. Further, you explored AWS terminology compared to other key players like Azure and GCP. Finally, you learned...