The AWS overview

In the land of cloud infrastructure, AWS is the king. It was the first of its kind, launched in 2005, and is the largest by a wide margin. It is ranked number one in every segment of Gartner magic quadrants on cloud infrastructure providers.

As reported by Computerworld in 2016, it has ten times the compute capacity of its 14 closest rivals combined. Entire companies, such as Netflix and AirBnB, run their operations on it. As can be seen in the following chart, AWS has over 30% of the market share, with the next closest competitor at 9%.

AWS offers a wide range of services from networking to compute to IoT. The following is a listing of the services from AWS management console. The management console is where you launch new services, monitor existing ones, and review billing:

You can reduce these into three categories of services that you need to have configured properly to support your analytics: networking, compute, and storage.

Networking includes security and handles communication routing. Your services need to be able to talk to each other.

Compute handles processing, calculations, and running applications. This is where the fun stuff happens - your analytics will operate here.

Storage handles where you keep the input data and output results of your IoT analytics. This needs to match the requirements of your analytics.

Managed services preconfigure a combination of the three categories so that much of the detail is handled automatically for you. The launching and configuring of underlying services is abstracted away and is handled under the covers. This enables you to add functionality quickly while reducing overall complexity. The penalty is that you are locking yourself into the AWS ecosystem. But the benefit typically outweighs the cost. There is enormous analytical power at your fingertips.