Amazon has given a new lease on life to the Cloud Services through DevOps, especially since the launch of the AWS services. Right from data scooping, to bringing on the revolution of facial recognition, Amazon has done it all. If you go thinking about the past, you would realize how simple life was in the Cloud earlier. All you needed was your credit card to start rooting your machine.
Gone are the days of the past, where technology was limited to the developer’s knowledge. As more and more developers are trudging forward, the Cloud services being offered are becoming more and more complex by the day. With complexity riding high on the wings of multi-functionality, it’s becoming difficult to reign in all the services within the Cloud itself. For this very reason, there is a lot of change which needs to be accepted, with the introduction of the AWS methodology.
Without further ado, let’s delve deeper into the 10 new AWS cloud services you never expected:
• Glue: Data collection is the most challenging part of data science; when it comes to analysis, if your data is correct, the analysis is so much easier. Gathering data and putting it into a usable format is like solving 90% of the job. Glue, an Amazon initiative, runs Python based scripts which collect data and transform it into a usable format, before transporting it into the Cloud for further use. The Python layer can be used, even when you don’t know how to write the Python script. Glue is well equipped to run jobs without interruption. You can bid adieu to all manual efforts, once you have Glue doing all the work for you.
• FPGA: FPGA or Field Programmable Gate Arrays have been used extensively by hardware designers to make their software ends meet. With Field Programmable Gate Arrays, you don’t need to worry about building custom masks or try and keep fitting multiple transistors into one piece of silicon. An FPGA is well designed to rewire itself to act like a real chip, while keeping in mind the software configurations.
Who needs such kind of technology? Bitcoin miners, who use cryptographically secure hash functions a gazillion times to speed up their searches can benefit extensively from the use of this technology. One can rent machines to run repetitive algorithms, which are further embedded into silicon, allowing programmers and software developers to ease out their work drastically.
• Blox: As Docker gains a lot of publicity, Amazon comes to the rescue again, as it allows people to run Docker anywhere. Blox is designed in such a way so as to run the optimum number of instances; since it is event driven, one can write the logic in a simplistic manner. The best part is that one does not need to keep tracking the machines, to understand which applications are being run.
• X-Ray: Loading job instances and managing efficiency has always been a tedious task for a lot of people. In order to ensure the smooth functioning of your cluster, the developer had to write elaborate code to track the progress at every step. This promoted a lot of people to purchase third party tools to do their bidding. However, Amazon’s X-Ray is a step ahead, since it offers to take care of all your work for you. In other words, it’s beating the competition and emerging as a clear winner, when it comes to watching your stack for you.
In simple words, as soon as your website gets the request for data, X-Ray has been enabled to trace the flow from your network of machines and services. Once the information is traced, the X-Ray suite aggregates the data from different zones and regions to create a one stop shop on a server. This way, the authorized personnel can access the data as and when required.
• Rekognition: Rekognition is pretty much aimed at image work, since it allows your apps to do a lot more than just store images. It chews through images, while searching for objects. By using some of the best known and well tested algorithms, Rekognition has been able to perfect the art of data science. All you need to do is point the algorithm at the image (the image needs to be stored in the Amazon Cloud) and you will immediately get a list of objects you would like to choose. The payment is on a per image basis, which makes it even trendier.
• Athena: Amazon’s Athena lets you run queries on their S3 model. Forget about writing extensive, complicated looping coding. With Athena, everything is done and ready for you. By using SQL based queries, Athena has been tuned to charge you per byte of information searched. Thankfully, the price is around $5 per TB, so it turns out to be rather cost effective for developers and companies alike.
• Lambda@Edge: Amazon loves to invent and make the lives of developers easier. Lambda@Edge is exactly another app in Amazon’s fully functional kitty; it lets you push Node.js code out to the edges, where it runs and performs the desired tasks. Unlike other data, which is usually stored at a centralized data store on the server, waiting for the requests to pour in from different sources, Lambda@Edge believes in cloning data, to enhance efficiency. Once the data is enhanced, the results are delivered in microseconds, making it available to different users in a more time effective manner. You get billed only when the code is running, so you save on the cost of renting different machines to pull data.
• Snowball Edge: Some people are extremely finicky, when it comes to getting their data in one place. Snowball Edge is the answer to the problems of all such people, who want everything in one place only. It enables data to be shipped anywhere one wants, with a shipping label. If you have data stored in the Amazon Cloud, and want it to be physically delivered somewhere, Amazon will copy it into a box and ship it to the desired location. Such is the convenience you get with Snowball Edge. This way, one prime purpose is served. Since downloading large blocks of data can often be slow and very time consuming, it becomes easier to have Amazon do the work for you.
• Pinpoint: As your company grows, so does your network of customers’, subscribers, employees etc. There will be times when you would want to push some updates through messages. However, most of the times, such mails usually end up in the junk folder, which makes it highly difficult to track. With Pinpoint, targeted mailing is a beneficial feature for companies and businesses alike. As soon as your users are ready to receive the mails, Pinpoint will shoot out the messages, allowing everyone to receive the mails in their inboxes. Further on, once the messages are delivered, Pinpoint will help you collect and report data efficiently, so that your campaigns can be fine tuned as and when required.
• Polly: Audio interfaces always have a better conversion rate than normal text based messages. For this very reason, it becomes imperative to use Polly, software which helps convert text messages into sound waves, which are easily understood by the human ears. By using the concept of speech synthesis, it converts text to sound, to make conversions easier and stronger.
These were the top 10 AWS Cloud services which are doing the rounds of the market these days. With extended features all geared towards making your life easier, there is a lot more to AWS than meets the eye. Which service are you using today?
