What is AWS: Services, Regions, Pricing, and Case Studies

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If you're wondering what AWS is and why so many companies use it every day, here you'll find a complete guide, direct and very practical. Let's condense everything important: services, regions, security, pricing, use cases, and how to get started without paying a euro..

Beyond the buzzwords, AWS is all about infrastructure and tools that are ready to work at scale. From computing and storage to artificial intelligence, IoT and advanced analyticsAmazon's platform offers a huge catalog that allows you to launch projects quickly and with a clear pay-per-use model.

What is AWS and how does cloud computing fit in?

Amazon Web Services is a cloud services platform with more than two hundred capabilities covering compute, storage, databases, networking, security, analytics, machine learning, IoT, mobile development, and much more.

His key proposal is simple: You access IT resources on demand, without purchasing or maintaining hardware, with almost immediate scalability and billing based on actual consumption.

Since its inception, many of its services are consumed over HTTP using REST or SOAP APIs, which makes it easy for developers to integrate into websites and apps. The philosophy is clear: Most services are not “end-user facing” but rather building blocks that other developers integrate..

In everyday use, this means you can choose exactly the database, compute tier, storage, or messaging component you need, compose your architecture by modules and resize when necessary.

For SMEs and early-stage projects, the value is clear: They avoid investment in CPD and convert the infrastructure into a variable cost. And for companies with their own CPD, AWS fits as business continuity option, being able to shift loads to the cloud in case of an incident at the main center.

Global structure: regions, zones and data residency

The Amazon cloud is deployed in multiple regions, each with several Availability Zones (AZ) physical, separated from each other to isolate faults. In some services (for example, S3, DynamoDB or engines like MariaDB on RDS), multi-zone operation is native; in others, you can configure replication between zones to increase resilience.

Each region is contained within a single country and, By design, data can remain in the chosen regionThere is also a specialized region, AWS GovCloud (US), for U.S. public institutions, with specific compliance requirements.

In the published historical list, regions are mentioned with their AZ number. Representative examples:

• US East: Northern Virginia (6), Ohio (3).
• US West: Northern California (3), Oregon (3).
• Canada: Central (2). Mexico: Central (2).
• Asia Pacific: Bombay (2), Seoul (2), Singapore (2), Sydney (3), Tokyo (3).
• China: Beijing (2), Ningxia (2).
• Europe: Frankfurt (3), Ireland (3), London (3), Paris (3), Zaragoza (3).
• South America: São Paulo (3), and it was noted next Lima (1)
• Central America: San José, Costa Rica (1).
• AWS GovCloud (US-West): (2).

This architecture allows to design loads with high availability and prevent the spread of cuts between AZs. It also enables multi-region patterns for low latency or advanced continuity.

History, milestones and relevant incidents

The origins of AWS date back to 2003, when Chris Pinkham and Benjamin Black proposed selling infrastructure capabilities based on Amazon.com's internal practices. The first service open to the public was Amazon SQS in November of 2004.

The platform was officially launched in 2006 and shortly after, Amazon EC2 was developed by a team in Cape Town technically led by Chris Brown under the direction of Chris Pinkham.

By 2007, Amazon claimed that More than 330.000 developers were already registered using AWS, an early indicator of mass adoption.

Like any great infrastructure, AWS has also faced incidentsIn April 2011, part of the EBS service suffered a backup that impacted reads and writes for days. In June 2012, a severe storm in Northern Virginia caused loss of connectivity for multiple sites. In October 2012, a latency error in a data collection agent affected sites like Reddit, Foursquare or PinterestOn Christmas Eve 2012 there was another outage that hit Netflix and He later explained in detail about Elastic Load Balancing.

On the business side, analysts estimated that in 2012 AWS revenue exceeded $1.500 billion. More recently, AWS has strengthened its ecosystem with agreements such as the collaboration with SENA in Colombia (training in AI, data, cloud and cybersecurity for more than 150.000 people) and its alliance with Hugging Face in 2022 to accelerate ML and AI capabilities.

If you are looking for official resources, in addition to documentation, You have the AWS website and its YouTube channel with announcements, releases and tutorials.

Key benefits, security and resilience

One of the reasons so many companies choose AWS is its functional breadth and maturity. It is the most complete and widely adopted cloud, with a presence in more than 190 countries and an ecosystem of more than 10.000 partners.

In security, AWS integrates benchmark controls and certifications, such as PCI DSS level 1, FISMA Moderate, HIPAA, ISO 27001 and SOC 1/2/3 auditsAt the physical level, its data centers have 24/7 surveillance, biometrics, and staff.

On the network, AWS employs firewalls, IDS/IPS and TLS encryption for transit. Access is managed with I AM and key encryption with KMSMonitoring and auditing are carried out by CloudWatch and CloudTrail, and in the face of DDoS there is AWS Shield.

It also facilitates the governance and visibility of costs and assets, something basic for IT and finance teams. And in architectural design, with multi-zone and multi-region strategies, it is possible to aim for very high levels of availability, even typical figures. 99,99999% of time online.

In the partner ecosystem there are consulting firms with different levels, such as Partner Select from some specialized firms (for example, Hiberus), which offer everything from migrations to operation and continuous improvement.

AWS Core Services

The catalogue is very extensive, but it is worth locating the fundamental pieces that more are repeated in the architectures Of customers.

Computers and Tablets

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) It is the foundation of elastic computing: you launch instances, choose optimized types (CPU, memory, storage, or GPU), size them, and automate with autoscaling.

EC2 combines raw power and control: You decide the operating system, network, security and storageIf your traffic increases or decreases, you can scale up or down without stopping your service and pay only for what you consume. It also supports running containers like Docker, integrating modern deployment architectures.

AWS Lambda It's serverless computing: you upload your function and it runs on events, without managing machines. Startup times depend on the runtime, and Node.js, Python, Java, Go and C# are officially supported.

Lambda stands out for its billing model: payment in 100 ms execution increments and with a specific free tier that, unlike others, does not expire after 12 months. In addition, there are formulas for invoke Linux binaries through compatible runtimes; examples have even been shown with Haskell.

Typical cases include process uploads to S3, respond to changes in DynamoDB, handle clicks on websites or react to IoT sensor readings. To expose HTTP endpoints, it is often combined API Gateway with Cognito for authentication and authorization.

Storage

Amazon S3 It is the object storage service: durable, scalable, and secure for any amount of data, from static files to data lakes. More technical details about how it works and its classes are available at Amazon S3: What It Is and How It Works.

Amazon S3 Glacier (and related classes) is oriented to long-term archiving at very low cost, where access is not immediate, perfect for copies, historical logs and long-term retention.

Databases

Amazon RDS Simplifies relational databases with engines like MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle or SQL Server, managing patches, backups, and scaling. If you want to delve deeper into the advantages and challenges of using cloud databases, check out use cloud databases.

Amazon DynamoDB It is fully managed NoSQL, designed for single-digit millisecond latencies and auto-scaling, ideal for patterns with variable traffic and key-value access or Valid identity document.

Analytics and Big Data

Amazon RedShift is the managed data warehouse for fast SQL queries on large volumes, historical analysis, and BI. If you're interested in the concept and practices of analytics, read more about data analytics.

Amazon Athens allows you to consult data in Amazon S3 with Serverless SQL, reducing preparation times and unnecessary loads.

Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce) run Hadoop, Spark and other distributed frameworks to process large volumes in parallel.

Amazon QuickSight facilitates the interactive visualization and business dashboards cloud natives.

Network, messaging and deployment

For virtual private networks, Amazon VPCs Isolate and segment your topology with subnets, route tables, and security controls.

In messaging, Amazon SQS (tails) and Amazon SNS (publish/subscribe) allow you to decouple services and orchestrate events.

Amazon CloudFront accelerates content distribution as a CDN, while AWS Elastic Beanstalk Simplifies app deployments with managed infrastructure.

Furthermore, the catalogue is organised by areas such as Migration, hybrid cloud, security, governance, development tools, monitoring, AI/ML, IoT and other disciplines.

Use cases, sectors and real stories

With AWS you are covered from websites and mobile apps to complex business systems, data lakes or AI/ML, through rendering and HPC.

Among well-known stories, Netflix take advantage of scalability for global streaming, Airbnb manages massive reservations on a daily basis and Slack relies on the reliability of the global network for uninterrupted conversations.

In healthcare, AWS helps store and analyze clinical data, enable telemedicine and treatment personalization. In finance, the infrastructure of low latency and advanced analytics supports real-time transactions. In manufacturing, AWS IoT connects machines and Reduce stops with real-time data.

Additionally, many other companies use AWS in production: Intuit, Coinbase, FINRA, Johnson & Johnson, Capital One, Adobe, AOL or Hitachi, to name a few.

Prices, discounts and cost control

The model is from payment for use: Computing, storage, or transfer are billed based on usage. There are no long commitments by default, and you can start with minimal costs.

To forecast expenses, AWS offers a monthly calculator. With greater adoption, they enter volume discounts and, in computation, options such as Reserved Instances or Savings Plans.

In optimization, practices such as resource tagging (to attribute costs), the right-sizing (choose the appropriate instance type) and the autoscaling (avoid oversizing).

For financial visibility, AWS Cost Explorer details trends, patterns and identifies savings opportunities, crucial to maximizing the value of the platform.

Free account and getting started

AWS has a free tier With always-free offers, others valid for 12 months from registration, and short-term trials, it's ideal for experimenting with controlled limits.

Typical discharge includes: create Account (personal or business), enter email and password, Contact information, payment method for verification, telephone verification with code, choice of support plan (the Basic free of charge), acceptance of the customer agreement and 2FA setup to protect access.

With the account ready, you access the AWS Dashboard and you can launch free tier resources with peace of mind, always checking the limits to avoid unexpected charges.

BI and Visualization: Tableau Integrated with AWS

For business analytics, Tableau natively integrates with AWS services, connecting to motors such as Redshift, PostgreSQL, MySQL or SQL Server, in addition to external sources such as Google Analytics, Salesforce or Snowflake.

This tandem allows you to cover the complete cycle: ingestion, transformation, storage and display. References such as Lenovo, St. Mary's Bank, Box or Dwolla combine AWS with Tableau for visual analytics and decision making. If you're working with MySQL, you can query resources for MySQL that facilitate integration and optimization.

Marketplace, support and possible disadvantages

El AWS Marketplace Add a catalog of ready-to-deploy third-party software, expanding the ecosystem with security, data, monitoring, and integration solutions.

It should be considered that Advanced support plans are paidFor immediate response and proactive advice, many companies invest in them.

In complex migrations it has been observed Continuity challenges, backups and change windows; it is essential to plan, test, and leverage replication across AZs/regions to minimize risk.

They have also been reported Degradations in scenarios with sudden load/hardware changes in certain apps; elastic design and stress testing help mitigate this.

If you like learning with audiovisual content, Many portals recommend introductory videos that explain these bases and good practices.

Beyond the day-to-day, AWS drives innovation with services such as SageMaker (ML) and Redshift (analytics), global support, a straightforward console to use, and training resources, including paths to Certifications such as AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner.

AWS combines a broad catalog, global network, security, and cost control so that projects of any size can be can scale safely, quickly, and with a focus on the business.