Machine Learing (ML) Services Offered By Amazon Web Services (AWS)

In today’s rapidly evolving technologies, harnessing the power of cloud computing has become imperative for businesses striving to stay ahead. Among the many cloud computing platforms, AWS is the most used cloud computing platform. In this guide, I will make sure that you will understand what is AWS and why cloud computing services are important to use. Moreover, I will discuss some of the key AWS Services such as EC2, S3, VPC, IAM, and more.

What is AWS (Amazon Web Services)?

AWS stands for Amazon Web Service which is an evolving cloud computing platform. AWS is provided by Amazon. AWS cloud platform provides a wide range of services. For example computing services like Elastic Cloud Compute(EC2), Amazon Lambda, storage options like Amazon S3 service, databases like RDS, DynamoDB, and many other services.

You may wonder now why a cloud computing platform like AWS is necessary. Cloud computing platform like AWS provides scalability which means you can scale up or down your resources based on demand. This cloud platform provides more cost-effectiveness as the user has to only pay for the resources they consume. There are many data centers available in AWS which provides high availability and reliability. It also provides security measures to protect data and infrastructure.

AWS operates a global network of data centers known as Availability Zones located in multiple geographic areas across the world . Multiple availability zones are present in each region. Each region has at least 3 availability zones and some regions may have more. This distributed infrastructure allows AWS users to deploy their applications near the end users’ geographic region. This lowers the latency and improves the performance.

Top AWS Machine Learning Services

1. AWS LEX Service

AWS LEX is a service that helps developers build conversational chatbots into their applications using text and voice. It uses NLP to understand user inputs and respond correctly. It helps in enhancing the user experience. With AWS LEX, businesses can automate customer support, seamless interaction, and personalized experience which ultimately helps in improving efficiency and customer satisfaction. Let’s now understand how AWS LEX works. At first, the user gives input to LEX. Then LEX understands the purpose of the input. This understanding of intent is called intent recognition. Then it collects any relevant data like place, date, location, etc through entity extraction. Then based on the intent recognition and entity extraction, action is triggered. Also with continuous interaction, it improvises and learns to give more accurate answers.

LEX

2. AWS SageMaker Service

AWS SageMaker helps build, train, and deploy machine learning models. SageMaker simplifies the data preprocessing and model training process. Here first the user uploads the data to SageMaker. Then the users have to clean, preprocess, and explore the data using Jupyter notebooks. After this users select a machine learning algorithm. Users then customize their selected machine learning if needed and apply the algorithm to the data. Once the model is trained and optimized SageMaker deploys the machine-learning model in a few steps. Throughout the process, AWS SageMaker provides the monitoring tools to monitor model performance, manage infrastructure, and automate tasks. Overall we can say that AWS SageMaker builds impactful machine learning solutions enabling effective data driven decisions .

SageMaker

AWS Compute Services & Storage Services

There is a wide range of services provided by AWS . Some of the key AWS services that are used by many users is discussed below .

1. AWS EC2 Service

Elastic cloud compute also known as EC2 , is an AWS web service which allows users to rent virtual servers on cloud . These virtual servers are called EC2 instances . EC2 instances run on a variety of operating system like Ubuntu, CentOS, Windows ,etc . There are also different different types of EC2 instances are present which you can select as per your requirement . For example lets take t2.micro EC2 instance , this instance type provides 1 GB memory . You can also take the instance types providing more memory and compute power such as t2.large or t2.xlarge . These instances are mostly used to handle large tasks . EC2 instances can also be scaled up or down on the basis of load on the instance . Overall EC2 instances provide users flexible, scalable and cost effective solution for running their applications and allow business to grow without any on-premise constraints .

EC2

2. AWS IAM Service

AWS Identity and Access Management is a web service which allows organizations to manage access to AWS services and resources . Lets understand the concept through an example . Suppose you have an organization which is hiring junior developers and devops engineer . Junior engineers have their own AWS account . These junior engineers are inexperienced and which makes it possible that they will make blunders while working . Blunders like deleting any critical function of a project . This situation can lead to delay in project completion or in worst case may lead to entire project failure . So here basically a simple solution is that organization have to give limited access of project to junior engineers . This limited access is given through AWS IAM user . Organization can create specific role and attach policy , like the junior engineers can only have read access not write access . From this example we can now summarize that AWS IAM service is a fundamental and critical component of AWS security architecture , providing robust identity and access management capabilities to help organizations maintain security , compliance and governance in their cloud platform .

IAM

3. AWS VPC Service

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is a AWS service which allows users to create a isolated network on AWS cloud platform . VPC allow users to create their own subnets , routing tables , IP address range , internet gateways and other network gateways providing the entire the control over the AWS environment’s network configuration and security . VPC provide the internet and NAT gateways to enable internet connectivity within a isolated VPC . You can create a security group where you can provide the inbound and outbound rules for better security . NACLS are used at the subnet level which allow or deny certain IPs whenever tries to enter the subnet and access any instance running. Overall we can say that VPC is an essential component to control the cloud networking environment .

VPC

4. AWS S3 Service

AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) is an object storage service . S3 commonly used to store static websites, media files like images and videos , artifacts , and many more . S3 bucket can also be used for backup and large data storages . S3 have a variety of storage classes like S3 standard which is used to access data at a low latency , S3 Standard-IA which is used to store data at a single availability zone , etc . S3 bucket has a feature called versioning which allows users to store multiple versions of an object . S3 provides Cross Region Replication which allow users to replicate the objects across different regions . This Cross Region Replication is a good feature for disaster recovery and more availability . Users can also define rules to automate the movement and deletion of objects in S3 bucket .

S3

5. AWS RDS Service

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is a fully managed relational database provided by AWS . It supports several database engines such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB ,etc . Amazon RDS can be scaled vertically or horizontally . Amazon RDS also provides high availability and fault tolerance . Users only have to pay for resources they use . It also has a cross region restore feature which helps it from the disaster recovery . Overall RDS provides a reliable and cost effective solution for storing and accessing structured data for a web application .

RDS

6. AWS Lambda Service

AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service which run code without any management or involvement of servers . Lambda automatically scales up the function in response to any incoming events and demands . It supports many programming languages like Python, Node.js , .NET , Go ,Ruby ,etc . Users can automate creation or deletion of AWS resources on the basis of requirements . Lambda can integrate with CloudWatch service for automatic deletion of resources that are not used for a long period . Overall AWS Lambda allow users to build event driven , scalable and cost effective applications without managing any servers . By focusing only on writing the codes and responding to events users can deliver more reliable serverless applications .

Lambda

7. AWS SNS Service

Amazon Simple Notification Service is a messaging service which enables users to send notification or messages to various subscribers . SNS follows a publish-subscribe messaging model . Here various SNS topics are created . Subscribes (receivers) subscribe these topics . Whenever publisher(sender) send any message or notification to SNS topics, then subscribers subscribed to topics will receive the message . This model structure allows for scalable and flexible message distribution . SNS supports various subscriber types such as Email, SMS , AWS Lambda, HTTP/HTTPS and many more . Overall AWS SNS service simplifies the process of sending message or notifications.

SNS

8. AWS CloudFront Service

AWS CloudFront is a CDN service which improves the content delivery to the users . Lets understand this service through an example . Suppose you have a website and you deployed it on the EC2 instance . You want your website content to be globally accessed without users facing any type of high latency because high latency can hamper the user experience and eventually making the users less interest in your website content . Such situations can really affect badly from a business perspective . To solve this type of CDN is used . CDN or content delivery network is an interconnected network which helps in fast webpage loading . Due to which users can access the website content in low latency and high transfer speed . CloudFront is a CDN service . Basically in AWS CloudFront , whenever any request made through CloudFront distribution URL it first checks the website content is present in the cache or edge location or not . If not present then it stores the website content in the cache and sends the website content to the users and if it is already present in the cache it will directly send the website content to the users in low latency from the cache or edge locations .

CloudFront

Conclusion

Here we have started by learning what is AWS . Then learned why to use cloud platform like AWS . After this we have learned about some of the top AWS machine learning services such as AWS LEX and AWS SageMaker . At last we studied some of the other key AWS services like EC2, IAM , CloudFront and many more

AWS Amazon Services Overview – FAQ’s

What are the main services categories AWS provides ?

AWS mainly provides services for compute, storage , databases , networking , security , developer tools and IOT and many more .

What is the difference between AWS Lambda and EC2 ?

AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service which allows to write function in a certain programming language and it runs without managing any servers but in EC2 , it requires to manage servers .

Does AWS Lambda automatically scales up or we have to configure ?

Yes, AWS Lambda automatically scales up as per the requirement .

What is AWS ECS ?

AWS ECS service is similar to dockerhub . Basically it stores the container image of a web application .

What are different use cases of Amazon S3?

S3 is used for backups and object storage . It stores large data, artifacts , static websites, images , videos and many more. Overall it is used for storage purpose .