8 AWS Offerings Gaining Popularity Right Now

Up And Coming

With hundreds of cloud offerings – including compute, storage, security, database, and migration services – consumers and business users relying on Amazon Web Services have a nearly overwhelming portfolio of options.

Amazon reported that its cloud business pulled in $17.459 billion in sales in 2017, up an impressive 43 percent from $12.219 billion in sales in 2016, and the cloud provider is not slowing down. The retail giant's booming cloud business is estimated to be soon worth $20 billion in total. However, some cloud services are more popular than others.

Here are eight AWS services that are picking up steam right now among business users that solution providers need to know about.

Amazon Aurora

According to Amazon, Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud that brings together the performance and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. The solution is cheaper than comparable products from the likes of Oracle or IBM.

Aurora has been one of AWS' fastest-growing service in 2016, and it has kept up the pace. In the same year, Aurora adoption outpaced adoption of Amazon's Redshift, a cloud data warehousing solution.

A mazon Chime

Amazon Chime, a video conferencing and communications service focused on business users, burst onto the scene in February 2017.

Chime, a Skype and Google Hangouts competitor, has been disrupting the web conferencing market since its introduction last year because it marked Amazon's foray into the video management market. The service includes VoIP calling and video conferencing. Pricing starts at $2.50 per user per month, with a higher tier plan of $15 per user a month, which includes more advanced features, such as screen-sharing. There is also a free option for the service, which is limited to video calls between two users.

Amazon CloudWatch

With security being top of mind for many solution providers and business users, it is no surprise that Amazon CloudWatch is such a sought-after service.

CloudWatch monitors AWS cloud resources, such as Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon DynamoDB tables, and Amazon RDS DB instances. It can also be used to keep an eye on applications users are running on AWS infrastructure. Business can use CloudWatch to collect and track metrics and log files, and view resource utilization, application performance, and operational health. Alarms can be set, and users can react to any changes in real-time so that applications stay up and running, and running smoothly.

Amazon Elastic File System

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) gives users a fully-managed, scalable file storage option to use with Amazon EC2 instances within the AWS Cloud.

Amazon introduced EFS in 2015 and made the offering available for production use in 2016. In November 2017, the cloud giant revealed that users could leverage EFS File Sync to securely sync files from on-premises or in-cloud file systems to Amazon EFS at speeds of up to 5x faster than standard Linux copy tools.

Amazon Elastic MapReduce

Businesses with Big Data on the brain are tapping Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR), an inexpensive managed Hadoop framework that lets businesses, researchers, data analysts, and developers process large amounts of data across Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon S3, and Amazon DynamoDB.

According to Amazon, EMR can securely handle a broad set of big data use cases, including log analysis, web indexing, data transformations, machine learning, financial analysis, scientific simulation, and bioinformatics.

AWS Glue

Fully-managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service AWS Glue is another offering that deals with big data and data processing. Users can employ the service to prepare and load their data stored on the AWS cloud for analytics, and create and run an ETL job within the AWS Management Console. AWS Glue works by discovering data and storing the associated metadata in the AWS Glue Data Catalog. This data is then immediately searchable, queryable, and available for ETL jobs.

Customers using the serverless AWS Glue service do not have to buy or manage any infrastructure, and customers are charged by the amount of compute resources consumed while running ETL jobs. The service became available in August.

AWS Lambda

A popular offering among AWS channel partners, Lambda is a serverless computing platform that runs code in response to events and automatically manages the compute resources required by that code, without provisioning or managing servers.

Developers pay only for the compute time they consume when their code is running, and they do not have to provision compute or storage resources to support the code. The serverless computing offering was first introduced in 2014 and still a sought-after offering today.

Amazon X-Ray

Developers can use AWS X-Ray, a distributed tracing system, to analyze and debug distributed applications in development and in production. The tool can map out how applications and its underlying services are performing, and identify causes of performance issues and errors.

Amazon first revealed a preview of the service at its annual Re:Invent conference in 2016 and made X-Ray available in April 2017.