Amazon Web Service (AWS) started it's journey as an online bookseller way back in 1996. Amazons online business model was a completely new concept. Its business model gave birth to a new type of industry itself. As an online bookseller, they achieved tremendous success. It was its own business that outstripped the capability of all the existing software and could not scale any more. Considering its growth, they wanted a kind of IT infrastructure that could scale based on the requirements, while maintaining its system and application performance.

It is surprising to see how Amazon became one of the leading cloud provider of the time. Around 2000 to 2002, they felt that everything that could be done in the software to optimize its applications and business logic had reached its peak and their complex pieces of software could not evolve anymore...

AWS Cloud provides various services in regard to compute, storage, networking, applications, and many more supportive services. These sets of services offer numerous benefits. At a high level, these benefits are highlighted in the following list. These benefits are very attractive to most organizations from a cost and scalability perspective:

• No capital expenditure: There is no need to invest heavily in setting up your own data centers. All of your organization's upfront capital investment is not needed anymore. You simply spin up the servers and make use of the various AWS services on a pay-as-you-go model. You have only your operational cost when you work with AWS. You stop incurring cost when you stop using AWS resources.
• No maintenance of data centers: AWS Cloud has sophisticated data centers connected to multiple grids, which are...

As the race begins, every enterprise wants to be in the race getting to the cloud. There are several cloud providers with various on-demand services, but organizations do not know where to get started. Integrating the cloud with your on-premise data center requires various considerations, and it's not simply lift and shift. When you consider the cloud, a detailed assessment will be needed to see if existing application is a better fit for the cloud movement or whether it should be re-designed depending on the cloud capability and services. Based on my experience, most applications need some kind of rewriting to make them suitable for the cloud environment.

Here are some of the known challenges that have been noticed:

• Incompatibility: Can I lift my application and database and put them in the cloud to work? It is the first question...

AWS serves over a million active customers in more than 190 countries. They are steadily expanding the global infrastructure to help customers achieve lower latency and higher throughput, and to ensure that customers data resides only in the region they specifies. AWS data centers are available in multiple locations worldwide.

AWS infrastructure is built around regions and availability zones. In a region, there are multiple availability zones. Each region is strategically selected by AWS around the world. AWS plans at least three availability zones in each region. You can have more than that in some of the regions. These availability zones across the regions are connected with very low latency networks so that you can build fault tolerant and highly available applications. At the time of writing this book, there were 16 regions and 42 availability...

Security is the shared responsibility between AWS and the customer. One portion of the cloud is secured by AWS and another portion of the cloud is your responsibility:

• Security: Cloud security at AWS is the highest priority. As an AWS customer, you will benefit from a data center and network architecture built to meet the requirements of the most security-sensitive organizations. This means that you can have the security you need but without the capital outlay and with much lower operational overhead than in an on-premise environment. You get access to hundreds of tools and features to help you to meet your security objectives. AWS provides security specific tools and features across network security, configuration management, access control, and data encryption. And finally, AWS environments are continuously audited with certifications from accreditation...

AWS consists of broadly 18 categories of services at the time of writing this book, and you can use the combinations tailored to your business or organizational needs. All the services can be managed using AWS Console, AWS CLI, or PowerShell. You will be learning some of the PowerShell cmdlets for AWS Tools provided by AWS in other chapters:

• Compute
• Storage
• Database
• Networking and content delivery
• Migration
• Developer tools
• Management tools
• Security, identity, and compliance
• Artificial intelligence
• Analytics
• Internet of Things
• Contact center
• Game development
• Mobile services
• Application services
• Messaging
• Business productivity
• Desktop and apps streaming

Putting focus on all those services is out of the scope in this book, but I highly recommend that you review each and every service documentation on the AWS site so that you know what you can do with AWS Cloud and...

Laying foundations for your AWS journey is very crucial. If you are architecting your organization application framework on AWS, then just spinning up EC2 or RDS for moving your on-premise applications and databases are not enough. You should understand the frameworks and tools provided by AWS to lay the foundations. Overall there are four areas that you can focus on:

• Accounts: Some organizations might want to create a single AWS root account and host different types of environments in different VPCs or some might think that having different accounts for different environments is a right thing to do. You should think about the account structure that will make sense in your organization. Nothing wrong or right, but it would help you to segregate environments appropriately. Hence, understanding where development, testing, and production should be hosted would...

If you are new to AWS and want to make use of the free tier that AWS provides, then simply visit https://aws.amazon.com/ and Create a Free Account. This is the best way to get started with AWS. The sign-up process is not complicated; it just involves entering your details and credit card. Though you select the free tier, the process would prompt you to enter your credit card details. I feel AWS is just keeping the details for an individual identity purpose and nothing else. AWS won't charge your credit card for the free tier if you are using free tier services only. If you provide an expired credit card or cancelled credit card, the AWS account will not be activated. Otherwise, you have the AWS dashboard ready for you straight away to get started.

At the time of writing this book, I noticed the following screen, and this is always changing, but the web address...

Whether your organization is new to AWS, or continuing to increase the adoption of AWS services as they develop applications and build business solutions, AWS support can provide a unique combination of tools and expertise to help you do amazing things with AWS. There are four support tiers available for your organization to consider. You can see the support details at https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/.

In addition to the AWS support, in case you want to engage with a managed cloud provider, there are many out there to choose from. Usually, it is good practice to be with any one of them if you are new to AWS and do not know the various techniques that you can use for billing and cost optimization. The managed cloud provider can play a role to optimize your cost and also provide a level of support that you need to manage your AWS cloud regularly.

AWS is a digital ocean and is becoming more and more relevant today. Sailing through it requires the use of proper navigational instruments, otherwise you will be lost or it will cost you more. Up to now, you could say that you do not know AWS, but that is something that cannot be said anymore.

For IT staff in any organization, knowing AWS is a need and not a choice. These days, if you do not know cloud computing technologies such as AWS or Azure, you will become obsolete. AWS is more popular for its IaaS platform, not PaaS or SaaS. There could be situations where you cannot do one-to-one mapping for your on-premise applications with the AWS infrastructure. The success of the AWS integration in your business depends upon whether you have utilized the strength of the AWS cloud or not. There are a lot of materials posted on the AWS website to get started with. Reviewing...