AWS

Cloud Computing and AWS Introduction

In recent years, cloud computing (the “cloud”) has become an indispensable part of the IT world. By leveraging cloud technologies, organizations and individuals can utilize IT resources in a flexible and efficient manner without having to own or maintain physical infrastructure. Among the various cloud platforms available, Amazon Web Services (AWS) stands out as a leading service, widely adopted across the globe. In this article, we will introduce the fundamentals of cloud computing and AWS for beginners in infrastructure and cloud technologies. We will cover theoretical explanations of what cloud computing is, illustrate key concepts with diagrams, and provide a hands-on tutorial for getting started with AWS. Along the way, we will also keep SEO in mind by incorporating relevant keywords such as “cloud computing introduction,” “AWS for beginners,” “cloud benefits,” “AWS free tier,” and “launch EC2 instance.”

What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing is a model of providing computing resources – such as servers, storage, databases, networking, software, etc. – on-demand over the internet, with a pay-as-you-go pricing model. In simpler terms, instead of owning and managing physical servers and equipment yourself (on-premises IT), you rent computing resources from a cloud provider’s data centers and access them via the internet when needed. This means users can obtain the necessary computing power or storage without having to install hardware in-house, and they can scale usage up or down dynamically based on demand.

Before cloud computing emerged, the typical approach was to set up and run your own servers and infrastructure (known as on-premises). Cloud computing changed this paradigm by allowing people to use IT resources “as a service” provided by companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google over the network. With cloud services, you can access powerful remote servers in large data centers from anywhere in the world via an internet connection, and you only pay for what you use.

There are several types of cloud service models, commonly known by the acronyms IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.

  • IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) provides fundamental IT resources like virtual servers and storage (AWS EC2 and S3 are examples).
  • PaaS (Platform as a Service) offers application platforms and environments (for example, a managed database or application hosting service).
  • SaaS (Software as a Service) delivers fully functional software applications over the internet (like web-based email or CRM systems).
    In this article, our focus is on AWS, which primarily falls under IaaS (with some PaaS offerings). It’s worth noting that besides AWS, other major cloud platforms include Google’s GCP (Google Cloud Platform) and Microsoft’s Azure, among others.

Benefits of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing brings many advantages over the traditional on-premises approach:

  • Lower Initial Cost and Cost Optimization: There is no need for large upfront investments in hardware; you avoid purchasing and installing servers, data center equipment, etc. Instead, you rent resources and pay only for what you use. This pay-as-you-go model significantly reduces initial expenses and can optimize ongoing costs, since you can scale down resources when they are not needed.
  • Speed and Agility: Cloud platforms allow you to provision IT resources in just a few clicks and within minutes. You no longer have to wait weeks or months for hardware procurement and setup – servers and services can be available almost instantly. This greatly accelerates project timelines and helps teams respond quickly to new requirements or traffic spikes. For instance, deploying a new server can often be done in a matter of minutes on a cloud platform.
  • Unlimited Scalability: The cloud offers virtually unlimited scalability. You can easily scale your applications up or down by adjusting the number of servers or service capacity on-demand. This means you can handle rapid growth or seasonal peaks by leveraging more resources, and scale back to reduce costs during off-peak times. In addition, providers have a global network of data centers so you can deliver services closer to users around the world for better performance.
  • Reliability and High Availability: Leading cloud providers design their infrastructure for high reliability. Your data and workloads are hosted in professionally managed, secure data centers with redundant systems. For example, cloud providers often replicate resources across multiple facilities to prevent single points of failure. This results in better uptime and resilience against outages compared to a single on-premises server room. Using multiple data centers (availability zones) ensures that even if one facility has an issue, your application can continue running from another, providing robust disaster recovery and business continuity.
  • Reduced Operational Burden: With cloud services, many infrastructure management tasks are handled by the provider. They take care of hardware maintenance, power/cooling, routine updates, and other “undifferentiated heavy lifting.” Users can focus more on their core business or development, rather than managing physical servers. For example, backups, hardware replacements, and basic security patching can be automated or managed by the cloud vendor, freeing up your IT team’s time.
  • Global Reach and Flexibility: Cloud computing enables you to deploy services in multiple regions around the world easily. This means you can serve customers globally with lower latency by using cloud regions in their vicinity. If your application needs to expand to Europe or Asia, you can spin up resources in those geographic regions on the cloud without setting up new data centers yourself. This flexibility supports international growth and makes it easier to enter new markets quickly.

Overall, cloud computing provides significant benefits in terms of cost, speed, scalability, and reliability. Organizations ranging from small startups to large enterprises are taking advantage of these benefits to innovate faster and operate more efficiently.

What is AWS?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a comprehensive collection of cloud computing services provided by Amazon. Launched in 2006, AWS has grown to become the dominant cloud platform worldwide, with roughly about 30% of the global cloud infrastructure market share as of mid-2020s. It offers reliable, scalable, and cost-effective cloud solutions and has been adopted by millions of customers – from startups and individual developers to government agencies and large enterprises. In fact, AWS’s widespread use across industries means that understanding AWS is increasingly considered an important skill for not only IT engineers but also many business professionals.

AWS’s offerings span a wide range of cloud services. At a high level, AWS provides building blocks that allow you to run applications and services without having to set up the underlying infrastructure yourself. Whether you need virtual servers, storage, databases, machine learning capabilities, or IoT integration, AWS likely has a service to meet those needs.

Key Features and Advantages of AWS

Why do so many choose AWS? Here are some of the notable features and benefits of AWS:

  • Flexibility and Scalability: AWS resources are highly flexible – you can launch new servers or increase storage on-demand and later shut them down or scale back when not needed. This elasticity allows businesses to start small and expand their infrastructure seamlessly as they grow. Services like Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing enable applications to handle large traffic spikes by distributing load and adding instances automatically, ensuring stable performance even during peak times.
  • Broad and Deep Range of Services: One of AWS’s greatest strengths is the sheer breadth of services it offers – over 200 services as of 2022. AWS covers all fundamental infrastructure categories (compute, storage, databases, networking) as well as higher-level services for analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT), security, application development, and more. For example, AWS has services like EC2 (virtual servers), S3 (storage), RDS (database), Lambda (serverless computing), Redshift (data warehousing), SageMaker (machine learning platform), and many others. This wide selection means you can build almost any type of application or system on AWS’s platform.
  • Free Tier for New Users: AWS makes it easy for beginners to get started by offering a Free Tier program. The AWS Free Tier provides a range of services at no cost up to certain usage limits. For instance, new accounts get 12 months of free usage for services like EC2 (up to 750 hours per month of a small instance) and S3 (5 GB of storage) among others. Some services have short-term free trials or are always free within certain limits. This allows you to experiment with AWS and learn the ropes without incurring charges, as long as you stay within the Free Tier limits. It’s a great way to try out AWS services risk-free.
  • Security and Compliance: AWS is known for its strong security at both the physical and software levels. AWS data centers are highly secure facilities, and AWS provides many tools and features to help you secure your cloud resources. This includes identity and access management (IAM) to tightly control permissions, network security features like security groups and web application firewalls, encryption for data at rest and in transit, and continuous monitoring for threats. AWS also complies with numerous international security standards and certifications (ISO 27001, SOC 2, GDPR, etc.), which can help customers meet their own compliance requirements. In short, AWS invests heavily in security so that organizations can confidently run their workloads in the cloud.
  • Global Infrastructure: AWS has a global infrastructure that spans many geographic regions around the world. Each AWS Region is a separate geographic area (such as US-East, EU-West, Asia-Pacific Tokyo, etc.) that contains multiple isolated locations called Availability Zones (AZs). AWS’s infrastructure is designed so that resources in different AZs (even within the same Region) are physically isolated from each other, which improves fault tolerance. By deploying your application across multiple AZs in a Region, you can achieve high availability – if one data center goes down, the others keep your application running. AWS currently operates dozens of Regions across North America, Europe, Asia, and other continents. For example, in Japan there are two AWS Regions (Tokyo and Osaka) serving the East Asia area. This global reach means you can choose a Region closest to your users for better performance and also comply with data residency requirements by choosing specific geographic locations.

Major AWS Services Overview

AWS’s service catalog is vast, but let’s look at a few representative services that are especially relevant for beginners and common use cases:

  • Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud): This is AWS’s core service for renting virtual machines (instances) in the cloud. With EC2, you can quickly provision virtual servers with your choice of operating system (Amazon Linux, Windows, etc.) and hardware specifications. You have full control over the OS, and you can install any software you need. EC2 lets you scale the number of servers up or down and change their size as your needs evolve. It’s commonly used to host websites, application backends, game servers, and any workload that would traditionally run on a physical server.
  • Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service): S3 is a highly durable and scalable object storage service for files and data. You can think of S3 as a limitless cloud drive where you can store and retrieve any amount of data at any time. It’s ideal for backup storage, storing user uploads, media hosting, data lakes, and more. Data in S3 is redundantly stored across multiple facilities, which gives it 99.999999999% durability. Many companies use S3 to store things like images, videos, logs, and even to host static websites because of its reliability and simplicity.
  • Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service): RDS is a managed database service that makes it easy to set up and operate a relational database in the cloud. It supports popular database engines including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server, and Amazon’s own Aurora. With RDS, tasks like installing database software, applying updates, scaling hardware, and performing backups can be automated. This takes away a lot of the headache of database administration. You simply choose the database engine and size, and AWS handles the heavy lifting. RDS also offers high availability options with automatic failover, making it suitable for production workloads.
  • AWS Lambda: AWS Lambda is a serverless computing service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing any servers. You just upload your code as functions, and Lambda will execute those functions in response to events (like HTTP requests, file uploads, database updates, etc.) automatically. Lambda is event-driven and scales automatically; you are only billed for each execution’s computing time (down to milliseconds). It’s great for building microservices, APIs, or responding to events in an architecture without maintaining server instances. For example, you could use Lambda to process images when they’re uploaded to S3 or to run backend logic for a web application on demand.

(Aside from the above, AWS offers many other services: NoSQL databases like Amazon DynamoDB, data warehousing with Amazon Redshift, container management with Amazon ECS/EKS, machine learning with Amazon SageMaker, content delivery with Amazon CloudFront, and more. You can mix and match these building blocks to create complex applications in the cloud. The key is that AWS provides almost every piece of infrastructure or platform you might need as a ready-to-use service.)

Hands-On Tutorial: Getting Started with AWS

Now that we’ve covered the theory, let’s walk through a hands-on exercise to experience AWS first-hand. In this tutorial, we will sign up for AWS and launch a simple virtual server (an EC2 instance) using the AWS Free Tier. This step-by-step guide is aimed at complete beginners and will demonstrate how easy it is to get started on AWS.

Step 1: Create an AWS Account (and Understand the Free Tier)

To use AWS, you’ll first need to sign up for an AWS account. Go to the AWS website and follow the sign-up process, which will ask for details like your email, password, and credit card information (for identity verification and any future charges). Don’t worry – simply creating an account does not incur any charges, and AWS provides a lot of free resources for new users.

During the sign-up, AWS will automatically enroll you in the AWS Free Tier. The Free Tier allows new accounts to use certain amounts of many AWS services for free, within the first 12 months. For example, you get up to 750 hours per month of a t2.micro EC2 instance (which is enough to run one small server continuously), 5 GB of standard storage in S3, RDS usage hours, and more, all without cost. Some services also have a perpetual free tier with limited usage (marked as “Always Free”). This is AWS’s way of letting you experiment and learn without being charged, as long as you stay within the limits. It’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with Free Tier quotas for the services you plan to use to avoid unexpected charges.

Once your account is created and you log in to the AWS Management Console, you can monitor your Free Tier usage at any time via the billing dashboard. Now, with an account ready, we can proceed to launch our first server on AWS.

Step 2: Launching an EC2 Instance (Virtual Server)

In this step, we’ll launch a basic Linux virtual machine on AWS EC2. Follow the procedure below:

  1. Open the EC2 Console: After logging in to the AWS Management Console, find “EC2” from the list of services (you can type “EC2” in the search bar at the top). Click on EC2 to go to the EC2 Dashboard. Once there, click the orange “Launch Instance” button (sometimes labeled “Launch Instance” or “Create Instance”) on the dashboard to start the instance creation wizard.
  2. Choose an AMI (Amazon Machine Image): The first step in the wizard is to choose an AMI, which is essentially a template for your instance that includes an operating system and pre-packaged software. Under “Quick Start”, you will see a list of common AMIs. Select Amazon Linux 2 (AMI) as your instance’s operating system. Amazon Linux 2 is a lightweight Linux distribution provided by AWS and is a good default choice for beginners (it’s also Free Tier eligible). You could also choose other OS options like Ubuntu, Red Hat, or Windows Server, but note that some of those might not be in the free tier or might incur licensing costs. The wizard will usually highlight which AMIs are “Free tier eligible” – stick with those for now.
  3. Select Instance Type: Next, you’ll choose the hardware configuration of your server (CPU, memory, etc.). For Free Tier, AWS suggests the t2.micro instance type, which provides 1 vCPU and 1 GiB of memory. This should be pre-selected by default. Ensure that t2.micro is selected as the instance type. (In some regions, AWS may use t3.micro as the equivalent free tier option, which is similar.) The t2.micro is small, but it’s sufficient for testing and learning. Click “Next” to continue.
  4. Configure Key Pair (SSH Credentials): When launching an EC2 instance, AWS requires you to specify a key pair for SSH access. A key pair consists of a public key that AWS stores on the instance and a private key file that you download and keep secure. If you already have a key pair, you can choose it; otherwise, select “Create a new key pair”. Give the key pair a name (e.g., “my-first-key”) and download the private key file (.pem file) to your computer. Important: This is your only chance to download the key file – save it in a safe location. You’ll need this key to connect to your instance via SSH later. If you were to proceed without a key pair, you wouldn’t be able to log in to the instance with SSH using the default settings, so this step is essential for EC2 Linux instances.
  5. Network and Security Group Settings: The instance launch wizard will also configure networking settings. By default, AWS will launch your instance in a default VPC (a virtual private network isolated for your account) and create a security group (firewall rules) for the instance. The default security group for a new EC2 instance typically allows SSH access (port 22) from anywhere (0.0.0.0/0) by default, and all outbound traffic is allowed. This means you (and anyone else) can attempt to connect to the instance via SSH. For this tutorial and short-term testing, this default rule is convenient. However, note that allowing SSH from all IP addresses worldwide is not recommended for long-term or production setups due to security concerns. For learning purposes, we will use the default rules. You don’t need to change anything on this screen for now; click “Next” (through storage and tags steps, which we can keep as default) until you reach the final review.
  6. Review and Launch: Review the settings you’ve chosen. You should see Amazon Linux 2 as the AMI, t2.micro as the instance type, your new key pair name, and a security group allowing SSH. Everything should be within the free tier limits. Now click the “Launch” button to spin up your instance.
  7. Wait for the Instance to Start: AWS will begin provisioning the EC2 instance. In the EC2 Console, you can view your instance’s status. It will start in a “pending” state and within a minute or so move to “running”. When it’s running and passed its status checks (this usually takes another minute), your virtual server is ready to use.
  8. Connect to the Instance: Once your instance is running, the next step is to connect to it and verify that it’s working. On the EC2 Console, select your instance from the list and click the “Connect” button. AWS provides a few connection options:
    • The EC2 Instance Connect method (available for Amazon Linux and some other Linux AMIs) allows you to open a web-based SSH terminal directly in your browser with one click. This is very user-friendly for beginners. Simply choose the “EC2 Instance Connect” tab and click the orange “Connect” button. A new browser window will open, and you should see a terminal prompt for your instance without needing to enter a password (AWS handles the authentication using the key pair you set up).
    • Alternatively, you can connect via your own SSH client on your computer. For this, you would use the .pem private key you downloaded. AWS provides instructions under the “SSH client” tab when you click Connect, including a sample ssh command. For example, from a Linux/Mac terminal you might run: ssh -i /path/to/your-key.pem ec2-user@<your-instance-public-dns> The ec2-user is the default username for Amazon Linux, and the hostname (the part after @) can be copied from the EC2 console (it will look something like ec2-203-0-113-25.compute-1.amazonaws.com). If you’re on Windows, you could use PowerShell or an SSH client like PuTTY. Ensure your private key file permissions are set correctly (Linux/macOS will require the key file to have restricted permissions, e.g., chmod 400 your-key.pem).
    For this guide, if available, try the browser-based EC2 Instance Connect first, as it’s simplest. Once connected, you’ll get a shell prompt on your virtual server. You can type commands like uname -a (to see system information) or df -h (to check disk space) to test out your server. Congratulations – you are now operating a cloud-based server!
  9. Managing and Cleaning Up: After you’re done experimenting, remember to stop or terminate your EC2 instance to avoid unnecessary charges. Even though it’s free tier, it’s good practice to shut down resources you’re not using. In the EC2 console, you can right-click on the instance, go to “Instance State” and choose “Stop” to shut it down (you can start it again later) or “Terminate” to delete it permanently. Stopping the instance will stop the clock on compute hours, but keep in mind that certain resources like storage (EBS volumes) might still incur usage if not deleted. Terminating the instance will delete the virtual server and associated resources like the boot disk (unless you marked “Delete on termination” as false). For this simple exercise, terminating is fine once you no longer need the instance.

That’s it – you’ve launched and connected to a cloud server on AWS! The entire process from sign-up to having a running server can be done in a very short time, demonstrating one of the big advantages of cloud computing.

Conclusion

In this article, we introduced the basics of cloud computing and provided an overview of AWS, along with a step-by-step hands-on tutorial to help you get started. Cloud computing offers a new paradigm that delivers computing resources over the internet with flexible, on-demand pricing. Its benefits – cost savings, scalability, high availability, and agility – are transforming how IT systems are built and operated. AWS, as the leading cloud platform, exemplifies these benefits with a rich set of services and a robust global infrastructure, empowering everyone from small startups to large enterprises to innovate faster and more efficiently.

For beginners, the key takeaways are that you can start small (thanks to AWS’s Free Tier and extensive documentation) and gradually expand your cloud usage as you become more comfortable. We encourage you to continue exploring AWS: you might try launching a simple website using S3, setting up a database with RDS, or writing a serverless function with Lambda. AWS provides plenty of learning resources for newcomers – from official free training modules and hands-on labs to certification programs – so you can build your skills methodically. Achieving an AWS certification (such as the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner for entry-level) could be a good goal if you intend to demonstrate your cloud knowledge professionally.

Cloud computing is a vast field, but hopefully this introduction has given you a solid starting point. By understanding the core concepts and actually launching a cloud instance yourself, you’ve taken the first steps into the world of AWS and cloud infrastructure. Keep experimenting and learning, and you’ll soon be able to leverage the cloud to build something amazing. Happy cloud computing!

-AWS