What You Need To Know About Aws

Amazon Web Services (AWS) are becoming an integral part of everyday life in many companies and governments around the world.

- Michael Meyer, Chief Risk Officer (CRO) and Chief Security Officer (CSO), MRS BPO, LLC

While everyone has heard of AWS, people are only aware of a fraction of their offerings; there is lot more to AWS than most of us are familiar with. So, we are going to look deeper and explore parts of AWS that you may not have heard about before. By the time you finish this article, you will have a good idea of exactly what AWS is all about and how it can help your IT department enhance and enable your systems along with expanding the company’s operations.

AWS is so much more than cloud storage, or even a cloud compute engine. AWS is comprised of over 90 different types of services in 20 different categories. AWS is growing in size, breadth, and complexity every month. Let’s start with data organization. At a high level, AWS is organized into regions, availability zones, edge locations, and instances. Regions are the highest level and are physical geographic places in the world, whereas availability zones are virtual places located within the regions. Edge locations are closer to populated areas and basically serve as the front end to AWS, plus cache data to make access faster. An instance is the lowest level container for data.

Each AWS user can create one or many instances within an availability zone. Each availability zone can be located at one or more physical data centers to provide redundancy. As an example, in the US there are two regions: US East and US West. The US East region contains 9 availability zones, and US West contains 6. Also, there are 2 government regions in US West (for a total of 8 Regions). There are 20 edge locations and 3 regional edge caches.