Amazon Web Services (AWS) is surely one of the greatest inventions and is a great building block to deploy different types of applications to the cloud. For those who are unaware of the miracles of the AWS and willing to know what is Amazon Web Services, AWS is a gift to the mankind that Amazon provided in order to make the cloud computing one step ahead. Cloud computing has become a necessity for businesses that provide a flexible, cost-effective, and on-demand storage service. Further, it provides a different level of command and control over the information and data based on the users’ preference. These types of cloud computing services are called service deployment models.
As the lead cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the primary profit driver for Amazon.
In 2020, AWS broke the record of being a $10 billion business.
Amazon controls more than a third of the cloud market, almost twice its next closest competitor.
AWS is made up of so many different cloud computing products and services. The highly profitable Amazon division provides servers, storage, networking, remote computing, email, mobile development, and security. AWS can be broken into three main products: EC2, Amazon’s virtual machine service, Glacier, a low-cost cloud storage service, and S3, Amazon’s storage system. AWS is so large and present in the computing world that it's far outpaced its competitors. As of February 2020, one independent analyst reports AWS has over a third of the market at 32.4%, with Azure following behind at half that amount 17.6%, and Google Cloud at 6%.
AWS has 76 availability zones in which its servers are located. These serviced regions are divided in order to allow users to set geographical limits on their services (if they so choose), but also to provide security by diversifying the physical locations in which data is held. Overall, AWS spans 245 countries and territories.
What makes AWS the most successful and profitable service is its size and presence in the computing world. AWS’s existence is so large that it can be divided into two main products viz. EC2, Amazon’s virtual machine service and S3, Amazon’s storage system. Furthermore, some of the major services AWS provides include Amazon Cloud Front, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB, and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). AWS offers some amazing services to its users that include remote computing, servers, networking, security, storage, email, and mobile development etc.
Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute(EC2) -
The Amazon EC2 service comes under the compute domain and it provides services that help to compute workloads. Amazon EC2 web interface is used to reduce the expensive physical servers by creating virtual machines. Also, they help in managing different features of virtual servers such as security, ports, and storage. Amazon EC2 is highly preferable while creating a virtual server within a few minutes with just a few clicks according to the user’s operating system conveniently. It offers resizable compute capacity in the cloud. This helps a lot to focus more on the project rather than the server maintenance.
Amazon Simple Storage Service(S3) -
Amazon S3 is categorized under storage domain that provides data storage over the Internet services. Primarily, S3 stores data over the cloud in the form of objects. Amazon S3 stores the data with high security because of its improved infrastructure. The information is distributed over different physical regions and has high-quality integration. This prevents the data from getting lost and helps to retrieve stored data irrespective of time and space via the Internet. Amazon S3 is highly available so that users can access their data just by one click with minimum or zero retrieving time.
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) -
Amazon VPC falls under the Networking domain of AWS which is used to isolate the network infrastructure of a user’s computer. Every Amazon account holds a unique virtual network that protects the information from being accessed by others. These networks are logically isolated from other virtual networks in AWS clouds. This makes the user information risk-free in the AWS cloud.
Amazon CloudFront -
Amazon CloudFront represents the delivery domain that is used to deliver the content with great speed and reduced latency. Amazon CloudFront is used to connect with other AWS services and to help the developers to send the content to the end-users in a seamless manner. AWS CloudFront is managing all the users content in an effective manner via the Global Content Delivery Service.
Amazon Relational Database Services(RDS) -
Amazon RDS comes under the Database domain of Amazon Web Services and is used to handle database related workloads. The RDS helps the users to design and manage the relational database in the cloud which stores the complex data of the infrastructure. Earlier RDs used to support MySQL and now it also supports Oracle, Microsoft SQL, and MariaDB. It reduces the operational costs and leverages the database server from maintenance and support.
How Wix is benefitting From AWS?
Wix.com Ltd. is an Israeli software company, providing cloud-based web development services. It allows users to create HTML5 websites and mobile sites through the use of online drag and drop tools.
Users can add social plug-ins, e-commerce, online marketing, contact forms, e-mail marketing, and community forums to their web sites using a variety of Wix-developed and third-party applications.
Wix sites are optimized for mobile and are built, maintained and managed easily through the Wix website. No matter what the user’s experience level is, Wix has an option for creating their site:
Wix Editor – The standard drag and drop website builder, users can choose from and customize a huge number of templates.
Wix ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence) – Wix ADI creates a tailor made website for users, making it the quickest and easiest way to set up a Wix site.
Corvid by Wix – The most technical option for creating a Wix site, Corvid is an open development platform for users to code and design their site from scratch.
Wix quickly became a leader in DIY web development due to its versatility and ease of use. As the number of users grew into the tens of millions, it became clear that the company’s legacy on-premises compute solution wasn’t going to keep pace.
When the idea came along to introduce SSR—a means of prerendering that vastly reduces load times—Wix looked to its cloud service provider, AWS, for a solution. Because the amount of reserved compute capacity needed to reliably deliver SSR would be costly, Amazon EC2 Spot Instances—which take advantage of unused Amazon EC2 capacity at up to a 90 percent discount compared to On-Demand Instance prices—stood out as an attractive choice.
Upon seeing the success of Amazon EC2 Spot Instances for the SSR workload, Wix has sought out other ways to apply the discounted idle capacity, including for business-intelligence workloads and for continuous-integration builds. Dimitri Krassovski (Wix systems engineer) sees an even bigger role for Amazon EC2 Spot Instances on the horizon.
“We are in discussions to diversify between Availability Zones and move a big part of our capacity to Amazon EC2 Spot Instances so we can offset the savings.”
One thing about the whole experience that has really stood out to Wix is the level of support AWS provides.
“On AWS, you can build tremendous products without ever writing a line of code or deploying a single server. It’s an amazing company,” Krassovski says.
Because of the support the company receives from AWS, Wix is able to support its end users with new features like SSR that make building a website fast and easy.