AWS

What is AWS?

AWS stands for Amazon Web Services, which is a subsidiary of Amazon providing on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered pay-as-you-go basis. It offers a broad and deep set of global compute, storage, database, analytics, application, and deployment services that help organizations move faster, lower IT costs, and scale applications.

Using AWS as a Skill

Using AWS as a skill entails mastering various cloud services offered by Amazon Web Services. Individuals skilled in AWS can efficiently manage and deploy applications on the cloud, handle big data projects utilizing services like AWS Redshift, and ensure cybersecurity with tools like AWS IAM. AWS expertise also includes proficiency in working with serverless architectures through AWS Lambda, and implementing DevOps practices using services such as AWS CodePipeline. Developers, data scientists, and system administrators often cultivate AWS skills to build, manage, and scale robust and secure applications, enhancing organizational IT infrastructures. AWS skills are honed through hands-on experience, training courses, and achieving AWS certifications.

Here are several areas where this skill can be applied:

1. Infrastructure Management

Provisioning Resources:

• EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud): This service allows you to run virtual servers and manage computing capacity.
• VPC (Virtual Private Cloud): Enables you to create isolated networks within the AWS cloud, where you can launch AWS resources in a virtual network that you define.

Scaling:

• Auto Scaling: Helps you ensure that you have the correct number of EC2 instances available to handle the load for your application.
• Elastic Load Balancer: Automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses.

2. Development

Serverless Applications:

• Lambda: Allows you to run your code without provisioning or managing servers, while automatically scaling your application.

API Development:

• API Gateway: Helps you create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale, facilitating the connection between applications and backend services.

3. Data Management and Analytics

Databases:

• RDS (Relational Database Service): This service makes it easier to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud.
• DynamoDB: A NoSQL database service that provides fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability.

Big Data:

• EMR (Elastic MapReduce): A cloud-native big data platform, allowing processing of large data sets across resizable clusters of Amazon EC2 instances.
• Redshift: A fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud.

4. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

ML Services:

• SageMaker: A fully managed service that provides every developer and data scientist with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly.

AI Services:

• Rekognition: A service that makes it easy to add image and video analysis to your applications.
• Comprehend: Uses machine learning to find insights and relationships in text from a broad range of data, such as social media, articles, or other text sources.

5. Security

IAM (Identity and Access Management):

• IAM: Allows you to manage access to AWS services and resources securely through users, groups, and roles.

Compliance:

• Key Management Service (KMS): Makes it easy for you to create and manage cryptographic keys and control their use across a wide range of AWS services and in your applications.
• CloudTrail: Enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of your AWS account.

6. DevOps

CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment):

• CodeBuild: A fully managed continuous integration service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages that are ready to deploy.
• CodePipeline: A fully managed continuous delivery service that helps you automate your release pipelines for fast and reliable application and infrastructure updates.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC):

• CloudFormation: Allows you to use a template to model and provision, in an automated and secure manner, all the resources needed for your applications across regions and accounts.
• CDK (Cloud Development Kit): An open-source software development framework to define cloud infrastructure in code and provision it through AWS CloudFormation.

TLDR

AWS as a skill involves a deep understanding of cloud computing concepts and the AWS platform's specific tools and services.