The extremely customizable, robust and out-standing cloud computing service provider, AWS has the potential of being the era defining cloud service provider. In a brief period of time it has imagined a very trusted and rapidly increasing cloud infrastructure within its reach—a league which is further growing and dominating the computer and IoT market. It is through these defining parameters that one can easily predict the tremendous change in cloud computing, dominated by AWS. Unlike its contemporary kinds, AWS aims at greater affordability, customization and “get what I want!” forces of the modern day market.
Market Size
Amazon markets AWS to subscribers as a way of gaining large scale computing volume more quickly and cheaply than building an actual physical server farm. All services are billed based on usage, but each service measures usage in varying ways. As of 2017, AWS owns a dominant 34% of all cloud (IaaS, PaaS) while the next three competitors Microsoft, Google, and IBM have 11%, 8%, 6% respectively according to Synergy Group.
Growth and profitability
For Full Year 2018, Net sales increased 31% to $232.9 billion, compared with $177.9 billion in 2017. Excluding the $1.3 billion favorable impact from year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates throughout the year, net sales increased 30% compared with 2017. Operating income increased to $12.4 billion, compared with operating income of $4.1 billion in 2017. Net income increased to $10.1 billion, or $20.14 per diluted share, compared with net income of $3.0 billion, or $6.15 per diluted share, in 2017.
Availability and topology
As of 2019, AWS has distinct operations in 20 geographical “regions”: 6 in North America, 1 in South America, 5 in EMEA, and 8 in Asia Pacific. AWS has announced 5 new regions that will be coming online in Hong Kong SAR, Bahrain, Milan, Cape Town and Jakarta. Each region is wholly contained within a single country and all of its data and services stay within the designated region. Each region has multiple “Availability Zones”, which consist of one or more discrete data centers, each with redundant power, networking and connectivity, housed in separate facilities. Availability Zones do not automatically provide additional scalability or redundancy within a region, since they are intentionally isolated from each other to prevent outages from spreading between Zones.
Number of Server
How many servers does it take to power Amazon’s huge cloud computing operation? Amazon doesn’t say, but a researcher in 2012, estimates that Amazon Web Services is using at least 454,400 servers in seven data center hubs around the globe. As of 2019, the exact number of sever in AWS data centers, is not clear.
Services
As of January 2019, there are currently 137 top level services spread across 23 categories. Following are some of the important services:
• Amazon EC2
• Amazon RDS
• Amazon S3
• Amazon CloudFront
• Amazon VPC
• Amazon SNS
• Amazon Elastic Beanstalk
• Amazon Lambda
• Amazon Auto Scaling
• Amazon Elasticache
Most services are not exposed directly to end users, but instead offer functionality through APIs for developers to use in their applications. Amazon Web Services’ offerings are accessed over HTTP, using the REST architectural style and SOAP protocol.
Customers
According to iDatalabs there are 3,17,364 companies that use Amazon AWS platform. Their vast global audience base includes major business enterprises, start-ups and public sector organizations. Some of important is clients includes:
• Netflix
• Airbnb
• Docker
• Disney
• Unilever
• SAP
• Philips
• NASA
• Adobe Systems
• BMW
As of 2017, according to Amazon, the number of active AWS users exceeds 1,000,000.
Amazon AWS is a big name in cloud computing business.
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