AWS (Amazon Web Services)

What is AWS (Amazon Web Services)?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is Amazon's cloud computing platform that provides more than 200 cloud services for computing, storage, networking, databases, analytics, artificial intelligence, security, and application development. Organizations use AWS to build, deploy, manage, and scale applications across a global cloud infrastructure.


Popular AWS Services

While AWS provides a vast spectrum of services, it can be challenging to determine the right services for your needs. Check out this article, which provides details of the top 10 most popular service offerings from AWS (including AWS EC2, AWS RDS, and more) and how they map to different business needs.

Popular AWS services include Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, AWS Lambda, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, Amazon CloudFront, and Amazon DynamoDB. These services support application hosting, cloud storage, container workloads, serverless computing, databases, networking, and analytics.


How does AWS work?

AWS is a cloud computing platform that allows individuals and businesses to forgo investing upfront capital in their own data storage infrastructure and instead move it offsite to Amazon’s servers.

AWS cloud monitoring enables organizations to monitor AWS services, cloud infrastructure, virtual machines, databases, containers, applications, and network resources from a centralized monitoring platform. Effective monitoring helps improve application performance, infrastructure reliability, and operational efficiency.

AWS servers are regional, with each region isolated for maximum fault tolerance. Regions are then divided into multiple isolated availability zones, each containing multiple physically separate data centers.

AWS also uses local zones, which extend their regional zones and allow for storage resources to be placed even closer to users. Amazon believes that this practice is one of the most significant advantages of AWS, as it offers greater redundancy.

The AWS system has three separate categories:

  • EC2: provides secure and scalable compute capacity
  • Glacier: long-term storage designed for data archiving
  • S3 (Simple Storage Service): high-speed cloud storage

These three solutions can be customized according to each user’s need for data storage, AWS monitoring, analytics, compliance, and more.

Many organizations complement native AWS monitoring capabilities with specialized AWS monitoring tools that provide end-to-end visibility, application dependency mapping, automated root cause analysis, and monitoring across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.


Who uses AWS?

In 2022, technology intelligence giant HG Insights reported that there were 1.45 million AWS users across the globe. Netflix is among those millions of users; the streaming giant signed up for AWS in 2009 and has spent almost $20 million monthly to run most of its technology operations on AWS’s EC2 services.

Other well-known enterprise brands that use Amazon Web Services include the following:

Meta (formerly known as Facebook), Adobe, BBC, Twitch, Salesforce, Airbnb, Pfizer, Kellogg’s, McDonald’s.

According to Amazon, over 90% of Fortune 100 companies and over half of Fortune 500 companies use AWS. However, large corporations are not the only ones reaping the benefits of AWS.

Amazon offers a time- and feature-limited free tier of AWS services that is ideal for individuals to gain hands-on experience with their services. The company also provides services designed specifically for small business users.


What is AWS cloud monitoring?

After applications are deployed in the cloud, their performance has to be monitored. When users complain that the applications are slow, your IT team needs to be able to troubleshoot and diagnose these problems. This is where AWS monitoring comes in. Broadly, AWS monitoring focuses on tracking the availability and performance of key applications you have hosted on AWS cloud. It also tracks the usage, availability, and performance of the AWS services that your applications may be using. AWS monitoring also should cover real-time monitoring, diagnosis, and historical analytics to assist IT operations and architect teams.


Why is AWS cloud monitoring important?

Proactive monitoring and rapid diagnosis is a must for most organizations deploying applications in the cloud. Every minute of application downtime or slowness costs your organization money. And if your applications don’t work well in the cloud, you may need to move them back to an on-premises infrastructure. After all, end users care about application performance, not about where the application is hosted and what infrastructure it uses. Learn more about AWS Cloud monitoring from eG Innovations.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

AWS cloud monitoring is the process of tracking, collecting, and analyzing data from AWS resources and applications to understand their health, performance, and security. It helps teams detect issues early, optimize usage, and keep cloud environments running smoothly.

AWS monitoring is important because it improves reliability, availability, and performance while also helping control costs and strengthen security. AWS monitoring tools like eG Enterprise lets teams spot problems before they affect users, identify underused resources, and ensure smoother IT operation.

Some of the most widely used AWS services include Amazon EC2 for compute, Amazon S3 for storage, Amazon RDS for managed databases, AWS Lambda for serverless functions, and Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring and observability. eG Enterprise complements these AWS services by providing unified performance monitoring across cloud and hybrid environments, with deep integration into AWS CloudWatch and visibility into application, infrastructure, and user experience issues.

eG Enterprise can help teams monitor AWS workloads more effectively by correlating metrics across AWS resources, VMs, applications, and supporting infrastructure from a single console. This makes it easier to troubleshoot performance bottlenecks, track cloud usage, and maintain end-to-end visibility as workloads move across AWS and other environments.

AWS monitoring tools are services and software used to track the performance, availability, logs, and security of AWS environments. Common AWS-native tools include Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, AWS Config, AWS X-Ray, and Amazon GuardDuty, while eG Enterprise adds unified, full-stack monitoring across AWS and hybrid environments with deep visibility into application, infrastructure, and user experience performance.

eG Enterprise is especially useful when you need to correlate AWS service metrics with application and end-user impact from a single console. That makes it easier to detect bottlenecks, isolate root cause faster, and maintain consistent visibility across cloud and non-cloud components.