What exactly is AWS? And how is it beneficial to programmers like Data Scientist? And in what other aspects of programming life could it be used?
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It’s a bunch of someone else’s computers that you can rent processing time and storage on, so you don’t have to buy the entire machine yourself.
It’s beneficial because you don’t have to deal with owning the computers so if they break its not your problem. It’s also beneficial because you can just buy more time if you suddenly need more computing done for a few days or weeks a year but not the rest of the year.
It can be used pretty much as any other headless (without its own display) computer.
Amazon has a MASSIVE cluster of servers – way more than they need for themselves. They rent them out by the hour to anybody who wants them and is willing to pay. There are a variety of server types, and other network services, under the “AWS” name umbrella.
If you ever thought to yourself, “Oh crap, I need 500 CPUs and graphics cards for a day”, AWS has you covered. For a price of course. Other people just don’t bother with their own servers and 100% rent. It works, as a cost of course.
It’s a bunch of someone else’s computers that you can rent processing time and storage on, so you don’t have to buy the entire machine yourself.
It’s beneficial because you don’t have to deal with owning the computers so if they break its not your problem. It’s also beneficial because you can just buy more time if you suddenly need more computing done for a few days or weeks a year but not the rest of the year.
It can be used pretty much as any other headless (without its own display) computer.
It’s a bunch of someone else’s computers that you can rent processing time and storage on, so you don’t have to buy the entire machine yourself.
It’s beneficial because you don’t have to deal with owning the computers so if they break its not your problem. It’s also beneficial because you can just buy more time if you suddenly need more computing done for a few days or weeks a year but not the rest of the year.
It can be used pretty much as any other headless (without its own display) computer.
Amazon has a MASSIVE cluster of servers – way more than they need for themselves. They rent them out by the hour to anybody who wants them and is willing to pay. There are a variety of server types, and other network services, under the “AWS” name umbrella.
If you ever thought to yourself, “Oh crap, I need 500 CPUs and graphics cards for a day”, AWS has you covered. For a price of course. Other people just don’t bother with their own servers and 100% rent. It works, as a cost of course.
Amazon has a MASSIVE cluster of servers – way more than they need for themselves. They rent them out by the hour to anybody who wants them and is willing to pay. There are a variety of server types, and other network services, under the “AWS” name umbrella.
If you ever thought to yourself, “Oh crap, I need 500 CPUs and graphics cards for a day”, AWS has you covered. For a price of course. Other people just don’t bother with their own servers and 100% rent. It works, as a cost of course.
AWS is what is known as a cloud provider. Other cloud providers are Microsoft Azure and Google cloud. Cloud providers have big data centers around the world full of servers that they rent out in different ways. You can rent full servers for yourself, or just rent time on a shared server. This is very convenient if you need a really powerful server, you can rent it by the minute. Or if you only need a fraction of a server, you can rent it for cheap. When you rent the really powerful server, that is called “scaling up”.
You can also rent access to software services running on those servers. For example, instead of renting a full server to hold your database, you can just gain access to your own space inside a large shared database.
What is more, if your application suddenly needs more database, then the cloud provider will simple spread your need over multiple servers for you automatically. This is called “scaling out”.
There is a lot of innovation in the offerings of cloud providers, new services that allows you to scale up and out are introduced every day.
AWS is what is known as a cloud provider. Other cloud providers are Microsoft Azure and Google cloud. Cloud providers have big data centers around the world full of servers that they rent out in different ways. You can rent full servers for yourself, or just rent time on a shared server. This is very convenient if you need a really powerful server, you can rent it by the minute. Or if you only need a fraction of a server, you can rent it for cheap. When you rent the really powerful server, that is called “scaling up”.
You can also rent access to software services running on those servers. For example, instead of renting a full server to hold your database, you can just gain access to your own space inside a large shared database.
What is more, if your application suddenly needs more database, then the cloud provider will simple spread your need over multiple servers for you automatically. This is called “scaling out”.
There is a lot of innovation in the offerings of cloud providers, new services that allows you to scale up and out are introduced every day.
AWS is what is known as a cloud provider. Other cloud providers are Microsoft Azure and Google cloud. Cloud providers have big data centers around the world full of servers that they rent out in different ways. You can rent full servers for yourself, or just rent time on a shared server. This is very convenient if you need a really powerful server, you can rent it by the minute. Or if you only need a fraction of a server, you can rent it for cheap. When you rent the really powerful server, that is called “scaling up”.
You can also rent access to software services running on those servers. For example, instead of renting a full server to hold your database, you can just gain access to your own space inside a large shared database.
What is more, if your application suddenly needs more database, then the cloud provider will simple spread your need over multiple servers for you automatically. This is called “scaling out”.
There is a lot of innovation in the offerings of cloud providers, new services that allows you to scale up and out are introduced every day.
AWS offers a lot more than just “servers you can use”; there are tons of server providers out there.
One of their biggest selling points is the services they provide on their cloud platform. This stuff can be pretty abstract for people not familiar with developing web services, but there are certain common functions that many applications need to use, like storing files, passing them between apps, handling long queues of data that are coming from many sources and may be processed at many endpoints, etc.
AWS offers a platform that does a lot of those common tasks more efficiently, securely, and with better scaling than most developers could accomplish in-house. This saves developers time coding routine stuff for their apps, because they can just pass that stuff off to the cloud which will do it more reliably anyway.
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