According to homethodology, Amazon Web Services, also known as AWS, is a cloud computing platform offered by the company of the same name. Customers can host applications, websites and services there, rent resources for computationally intensive tasks and much more. AWS has existed since 2006 and is one of the largest cloud services in the world.
Distribution of AWS around the world
In order for Amazon Web Services to provide the necessary stability for companies and private users, the company’s data centers are distributed all over the world. The four important continents of Europe, Asia, North and South America each host their own data centers. From there, the computing capacities are distributed all over the world. Both private users and companies are customers of AWS.
Overview of the Amazon Web Services offering
The company divides the services offered as Amazon Web Services into eight broad categories.
Cloud drive
Cloud Drive is a service that is also used by end users. This is where users save data of all kinds: documents, videos, images, music or any other form of data in general. This data can then be streamed or downloaded from any other device with access to Amazon’s Cloud Drive account. Amazon thus competes with other companies such as Microsoft, Dropbox or Google in this area.
Cloud search
Cloud Search is not a classic search engine, but a scalable service that is used to integrate search functions in apps. Amazon Web Services customers use Cloud Search to avoid programming their own search functions and instead buy a functional version of Amazon. Since the search can be adapted very precisely to the wishes of customers, an individual, app- and content-specific search is created in the end.
Dynamo Database
Databases are necessary to sort information and make it accessible. Dynamo Database is one such service, which is based on NoSQL and offers low search latency. Furthermore, the service is theoretically infinitely scalable, which enables the construction of huge databases. A link with other services from Amazon Web Services is also possible.
Simple storage service
This service, also known as S3, is cloud-based storage that can hold any amount of data over an infinite period of time. Simple Storage Service is one of the largest providers of this type in the world and is also used by companies for the long-term archiving of files and applications. AWS and S3 currently account for 31% of the market share among cloud storage solutions.
ElastiCache
Versatile cache systems are necessary to accelerate applications and reduce the load on databases. One such cloud-based system is Amazon ElastiCache. Data records of any kind can be sorted and stored in this way in order to be ready on demand more quickly than with the use of classic memory.
Elastic Compute Cloud 2
Amazon EC2 is a service that makes computing capacity available to all interested parties. Applications and calculations can be outsourced to EC2 in order to be calculated there faster. A scalability is theoretically possible to infinity. Billing is based on the computing capacities used. In this way, companies bring a kind of virtual machine into their homes in infinite execution for a limited period of time.
Redshift
Amazon Redshift is a data warehouse that is both fast and scalable. The service collects amounts of data in the range of up to several petabytes and manages and processes this data, giving Redshift a central role in the big data area. A very high speed of requesting the data distinguishes Redshift from similar offers from the competition.
Mechanical Turk
AI can’t do everything: This service is intended for developers who need human instead of artificial intelligence for certain tasks. If developers need help programming an app, Mechanical Turk gives them access to a network of people who then perform predefined tasks. This can significantly accelerate the development of apps and websites.
Importance of AWS for online marketing
Amazon Web Services can play a role for use in online marketing. Due to the very high computing power and the stability of the service, a website will be permanently accessible and offer short loading times for visitors and search engine crawlers. This improves the ranking and the quality of the user experience. Applications that are hosted on websites via AWS also benefit from the high availability of the service.
All Amazon offers in this area are calculated according to their consumption. How expensive the services are in the end depends on the respective service and the intensity of use. More storage space generates higher costs, more rented computing capacity generates higher costs and the like.
Amazon Personalize as part of AWS
With Personalize, Amazon also offers a service that is specifically tailored to advertisers. Amazon itself speaks in the functions of the service of being able to create “personalized product and content recommendations, tailor-made search results and targeted marketing advertising campaigns”.
To do this, Personalize creates a stream of activities that calls up a wide variety of data – such as page impressions, registrations, purchases, interactions with product groups and more. Demographic and geographic data are also included. In the end, users can be recommended products that are tailored to their interests.
