Introduction

Computation done on cloud, or in elaborate terms the delivery of computing services over the internet (ranging from but not limited to) - servers, storage, databases, authentication, networking, analytics and intelligence, DevOps, etc. - without installing and maintaining them on-premises is known as Cloud Computing.

The provider of such services is called cloud services provider (or CSP). Thus, instead of buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centers, servers, and software, you can access technology services on an as-needed or flexible basis from these CSPs. The CSPs usually make these resources available for a monthly subscription fee or with a pay-as-you-go billing.

Backed by Durability, Availability, Auto-Scaling, etc. and divided into categories such as Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Backend as a Service (BaaS), etc. the cloud computing helps business to lower IT and infrastructure investment, get up and running in a shorter period of time, and also to combine these separate services with each other to make better and faster business decisions.

Some of the popular Cloud Service Providers are:

• Amazon Web Services (popularly known as AWS)
• Microsoft Azure
• Google Cloud
• IBM Cloud
• Salesforce
• Oracle
• SAP
  and many more...

To get into more details about cloud computing, this blog will discuss it via services provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Popular AWS Services

Even though AWS itself has the word services in it, it feels weird to not mention it explicitly to get a clearer picture. Here are the general AWS Services, loosely categorized, that we should know when getting started with Cloud Computing. It should be noted that there are many many more services than the ones mentioned below.

Computation

• Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2)
• Lambda & Lambda Edge
• Auto Scaling & EC2 Auto Scaling
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Storage and Databases

• Simple Storage Service (S3)
• Elastic File System / FSx for Windows
• Elastic Block Store (EBS)
• Relational Database Service (RDS)
• DynamoDB
• ElastiCache
• Aurora
• Neptune

Authentication, Security, and Monitoring

• Identity Access Management (IAM) Groups Roles Trust Relationships
• Cognito
• Key Management Service (KMS)
• AWS Certificate Manager (ACM)
• Web Application Firewall (WAF), Network Firewall, and Firewall Manager
• Cloudwatch

Networking

• Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
• Route 53
• Network Address Translation (NAT, same as API Gateway?)
• Elastic Load Balancing
• API Gateway
• Direct Connect
• CloudFront

Analysis

• Athena
• EMR
• SageMaker
• QuickSight
• Rekognition
• Textract
• Glue
• Kinesis (check media services)
• Redshift

Containerization

• Elastic Container Registry
• Elastic Container Service
• Elastic Kubernetes Service
• AWS Fargate

Application Integration

• Step Functions
• Simple Notification Service
• Simple Queue Service
• Amazon MQ

Developer Tools & Others:

• AWS Amplify and AppSync
• CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, CodePipeline, CodeStar
• Cloud9
• CloudFormation

P.S. My earlier intent was to explain each of these services in brief, but it turned out to be longer than those Terms and Conditions Agreements that are often TL;DR'ed :D.

Hence, I have divided the explanation into a total of 3 parts. Stay tuned!