Overview of AWS
While waiting for the Cypress PSOC to arrive I began studying how to use the AWS platform. AWS as the name implies is a set (actually a full ecosystem) of web services provided by Amazon to perform a wide variety of tasks such as: computation, data storage, database operations, machine learning, analytics and IoT connectivity among many other things:
AWS operates as pay-as-you-go, where you pay depending on how many resources you use. If you use very few resources you pay very little, but if you at any point use more resources AWS charges you more. Cloud computing has many advantages over traditional IT infrastructure:
- It requires no hardware investment.
- It does not suffer from idling hardware resources.
- It works as an abstraction that operates in a level where the underlying actual hardware is not relevant.
- It does not require wasting time and resources in maintaining the infrastructure, operating system and software.
- It can seamlessly handle growing or shrinking resource usage to meet the demand.
Even though, Cypress & AWS provided $50 to every participant of the design challenge, AWS still provides free and trial services to experiment with the platform without having to spend any money.
To learn how to use the platform there are two very good resources:
- The learning library, which provides videos and documentation to introduce you to every kind of aspect of the platform.
- The documentation, which also contains introductory content, but works better as reference than as learning material.