*AWS Role In Facebook*
What Is Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s leading cloud computing service provider. It has grown to be the most profitable arm of the behemoth that is Amazon, and businesses around the world have grown to know and trust Amazon as their preferred cloud service provider.
Back in 2004, Amazon launched Simple Queue Service (SQS) as the first building block that would become AWS. Two years later in 2006, they released Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), their seminal cloud service storage solution, and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) allowing businesses to build applications fully in the cloud.
Today this list of services has expanded to hundreds of different products. These include services for containers, customer service, storage, identity management, robotics, VR and AR, IoT, databases, and even quantum computing. You’re hard pressed to find a problem that AWS does not have a first-party solution for.
Why Choose AWS?
AWS is the best known, and most widely used, cloud services platform on the market. Organizations turn to AWS for their second-to-none product suite, expanding global presence and their sterling reputation for innovation and reliability.
A core AWS principle is “Security is Job Zero”, and true to that they provide all the tools you need to manage your estate, no matter how big you scale. This, coupled with cost management solutions, and offerings which help provide recommendations to secure and optimize your infrastructure, allow you to deliver faster, safer and cheaper than is possible with your on-premise infrastructure, or with other cloud providers.
AWS Users
According to Amazon, the number of active AWS users exceeds 1,000,000.
While small and mid-size companies make up the majority of that user base, recent polls by private consulting firms suggest that enterprise-scale users make up at least 10% of that total.
The Big Spenders
Clearly, AWS is the cloud computing platform of choice for businesses across a range of industries. But who are the biggest, and how much money are they spending on these services?
The top ten AWS users based on EC2 monthly spend are:
- Netflix: $19 million
- Twitch: $15 million
- LinkedIn: $13 million
- Facebook: $11 million
- Turner Broadcasting: $10 million
- BBC: $9 million
- Baidu: $9 million
- ESPN: $8 million
- Adobe: $8 million
- Twitter: $7 million
How Facebook uses AWS
A Facebook application is, effectively, a hosted web application that utilizes the Facebook Developer API to be accessed from within the Facebook environment. Developers can host their Facebook applications on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to access a reliable, scalable, and cost-effective compute infrastructure. You can use the following AWS components alone or combined to build your scalable Facebook application:
$ Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Amazon EC2 provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. You define your virtual Amazon EC2 environment with the operating system, services, databases, and application platform stack required for your hosted application. Amazon EC2 provides a full management console and APIs to manage your compute resources.
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It is durable, highly available, and secure. Amazon S3 also stores multiple redundant copies of your data.
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). Amazon RDS makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable database capacity while managing time-consuming database administration tasks.
Amazon SimpleDB. Amazon SimpleDB provides the core database functions of data indexing and querying. You can write your applications to take advantage of Amazon SimpleDB’s simplicity and its ability to scale seamlessly.
Amazon CloudFront. Amazon CloudFront provides a high performance, globally distributed content delivery system. Your application can use Amazon CloudFront to easily distribute content to Facebook users with low latency, high data transfer speeds, no commitments, and seamless integration with Amazon S3.
Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS). Amazon SQS provides a high performance, secure queuing system for your application that enables you to reliably distribute work between your application’s processes
