Many businesses in Korea are looking to AWS for their cloud-based needs. It is projected that the cloud services market is projected to reach $927 billion by 2027. Therefore many startups around the world are looking to the leading cloud computing platform AWS when launching their company. Some of the most successful startups in the world, like Slack, Netflix, and Airbnb, have been able to scale globally by using cloud-native applications. AWS is constantly coming out with new innovative products and services. Every week they come out with new cloud-based services that are affordable, durable, reliable, and easily scalable.

AWS is great for startups since it offers a pay-as-you-go model, allowing them to scale at their own pace. This is why this article will only focus on the top 20 Amazon Web Services for 2023.

The demand for AWS Solutions Architects is also growing, and it is one of the top-paying positions in 2023. For those interested in becoming an AWS Solutions Architect, here is an article on how to become an AWS Solutions Architect.

4th Availability Zone Launched in South Korea

AWS is growing rapidly in South Korea. The country had a late start, with AWS launching its first Asia Pacific (Seoul) Region in 2016. Since then, tens of thousands of active AWS customers, from large enterprises to early-stage startups in Korea. Currently, there are four availability zones (data centers) in Korea. This is a clear sign that South Korean companies are investing a lot in AWS. A 4th availability zone in Korea means lower latency and higher durability. Therefore many startups will be able to leverage AWS services into their business model.

Here are the top AWS Services every startup in Korea should know. To list all their services would be too hard, so I am only focusing on what I think are the most useful services for startups in Korea.

Top 20 AWS Services for Startups in Korea

1. Amazon S3

The top AWS service is, by far, Amazon S3. Think of S3 as a huge storage service. Users can store/upload/retrieve images, documents, files, and even videos if each uploaded file is less than 5TB. Therefore it is perfect for storing and retrieving data from the cloud. The data is safe and VERY secure, with almost zero latency. Netflix and Reddit use S3 for consistency and data records. S3 is the system that Amazon uses to run its website. It is also very cheap. You get 5GB for free, and then AWS charges you $0.023 a month for the first 50TB. In addition, you will have full control over making it public or private. S3 also allows for static hosting, which is great for showcasing static websites. My portfolio site is hosted on AWS using static hosting. Many companies in Korea use AWS strictly for storage on S3. However, S3 offers so much more!

2. Amazon EC2

With Amazon EC2, you can develop and deploy applications quickly at a very low cost. You can launch virtual servers based on your needs. Therefore companies in Korea no longer need to invest in expensive physical servers. With Amazon EC2, you can create virtual servers in minutes with the operating system you like. These virtual machines are the future as businesses can modify their infrastructure based on their business needs. In addition, startups can automatically scale their business’ computing capacity through the EC2 Auto Scaling tool.

3. Amazon CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront allows your website to load quickly with high transfer speed and low latency. It speeds up the sharing of your website content, such as .css, .html, and image files, to your users. A website should load in under 3 seconds. Cloudfront is a CDN (Content Delivery Service) that can boost your speed by managing all your content and sending it to users worldwide quickly and effectively. It is also very easy to use, and many companies join AWS just for Cloudfront. Furthermore, businesses can pay as they go with an upfront fee. Those looking for high transfer speed and low latency for their site should use Amazon CloudFront.

4. AWS Lambda

Amazon Lambda is a service that allows developer to run their code without any servers. Therefore you don’t need an EC2 server. All you need to do is upload your code, and Lambda does the rest. Codes are executed only when needed. It can scale automatically, and users are only charged for the computing time. If your code is not running, you will not be charged. Therefore users pay only for the computing time. Lambda supports code written in Node.js, Java, Python, and other languages supported by Linux. Therefore, companies in Korea that get tons of requests should use Lambda. It keeps the version of the codes, so whenever the user changes it, it automatically binds with the latest updates.

5. Amazon RDS

This is the most popular database on AWS. It is a SQL database on the cloud. Users can create and operate relational databases from anywhere in a highly scalable and affordable way. RDS allows you to have a dedicated instance for databases in minutes. It is fully managed by the AWS support team and supports multiple database engines such as SQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, etc. Therefore, users no longer worry about updates, patches, and backups to their database.

6. Amazon SNS

Amazon SNS is a web service that manages and delivers messages or notifications to users from any cloud platform. In SNS, there are two types of clients, publishers and subscribers. Publishers produce and send messages to the subscriber instance. Subscribers get notifications from the publishers over supported protocols such as Lamba, SQS, HTTP, etc. SNS can be used to send messages to subscribers with any application.

Over 200 countries allow this service. Startups with mobile apps need a way to send emails or notifications to their users. In addition, this notification needs to be secure. Amazon SNS allows startups to send high-throughput notifications to all their users easily. For example, if your application involves credit card transactions or other forms of payment, it would be a good idea to notify your customer of the transaction via email or text message. I recommend using SNS with Lambda to send customer reminders easily. If you are sending notifications within your company, use SQS (explained below) because it is guaranteed to get processed.

7. Amazon VPC

You can have your very own private cloud. Therefore information will be secure, and only authorized users can view your data. Amazon VPC is a virtual private cloud that protects your information from outside networks. External IP addresses will not be permitted access until they are allowed by the startup. Therefore startups can house their entire IT infrastructure in a private cloud network protected from the outside world.

8. Amazon Route 53

Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name System (DNS) web service. Think of DNS as the phone book of the internet. Its job is to translate domain names like www.seoulz.com into numbered IP addresses (ex. 145.2.0.45) that computers use to communicate. Route 53 offers startups in Korea a reliable and affordable way to route end users to Internet applications. In addition, Route 53 works seamlessly with other AWS services and can map domain names to load balancers, EC2 Instances, S3, Cloudfront, and other AWS resources. However, Route 53 can also be used with your non-AWS resources.

For startups planning to run multiple applications worldwide, you can easily set up routing using traffic flow to send each end-user to the best location for them. Traffic flow also allows for easy failover configuration to re-route users to another location if the primary application endpoint becomes unavailable.

9. Amazon SQS

Amazon SQS allows you to move the data or message from one application to another even though it is not in a running or active state. For example, you can send messages from S3 to an EC2 Instance. It uses the Java message queue service to deliver the data. So when should you use SQS? Startups should use SQS if their application needs to know about a certain event. Unlike SNS, your company will be receiving data rather than sending data out. For example, if a customer makes a payment, you would what that event analyzed. Therefore SQS works well with EC2 and will get the data from the SQS to analyze information like how many orders were processed that day and what the sales numbers were.

10. Amazon Dynamo DB

Dynamo DB is a fully managed NoSQL database service. With DynamoDB, you can create database tables to retrieve and store any data format. It is fully managed, so it will control the data traffic over multiple servers and maintain a high level of performance of the tables. You should consider using DynamoDB for your business if you:

• Are having problems with scaling using traditional database systems.
• Deal with a high online transaction processing (OLTP) workload.
• I am creating an application that must be highly available at all times.
• Do not have an operational team for your database.
• Need a high level of data durability.
• Do not have enough data for forecasting highs and lows in the required database performance.

11. Amazon Elastic Beanstalk

Most developers do not want to manage the infrastructure of their sites. Maintenance is hard and problems tend to arise. AWS Elastic Beanstalk allows developers o focus on just developing their software or applications without worrying about the infrastructure. It will manage EC2 computing and S3 storage by balancing loads across multiple data centers. New EC2s are automatically started when applications are overloaded. The best part is that Elastic Beanstalk is free to use!

12. Amazon Kinesis

Amazon Kinesis deals with very large volumes of data. Startups that deal with big data in real-time need to know Amazon Kinesis. It lets developers take large volumes of data from any source that can run on EC2 instances. It captures and stores the data and processes the data from social media feeds. After processing the data, it can distribute the data to consumers simultaneously.

13. Amazon EBS

Amazon EBS stores persistent data. It is block-level storage for EC2 Instances. EBS moves the data from one instance to another without losing the data stored on EBS. You can have many volumes on the same instance; however, each must be attached to a single instance at a time. Therefore all you need to do is create a volume. Then mount it on a device on an instance and format it. Best of all, you can snapshot the volume at any time to S3, creating a fresh volume from the snapshot.

14. Amazon ElastiCache

Amazon ElastiCache is a memory cache system service on the cloud. Use ElasticCache to improve memory performance by using a lot of CPU queries. Therefore, any website with static data needs a caching system like Amazon Elasticache. Startups can quickly retrieve data from a reliable in-memory system much faster than disk-based databases. Therefore it helps in reducing latency for applications with read-heavy and compute-intensive workloads. The gaming industry, healthcare, and IoT startups can benefit from ElastiCache.

15. AWS AutoScaling

AWS AutoScaling allows you to manage a fleet of servers to support all the traffic an application needs. This service is free. Startups that use AutoScaling are only charged for the number of instances runs. Therefore Amazon Auto Scaling allows startups to handle any traffic that might come in. Its goal is to maintain steady performance at the lowest possible cost. Furthermore, it is best to use CloudWatch for monitoring, which will come with a fee.

16. AWS AppSync

AWS AppSync gives you access to a fully-managed GraphQL API, which allows you to combine data from the web and mobile apps. In addition, it also allows users to update data offline. Startups in Korea building scalable applications requiring real-time updates from several sources would benefit from AppSync.

17. Amazon Trusted Advisor

Many startups don’t have certified AWS professionals on their teams because they are hard to find and expensive. This is where they can use Amazon Trusted Advisor who will advise companies on cost optimization, recommendations, notifications, and access to AWS Support API.

18. Amazon Cognito

Nowadays, almost every web application needs some authentication and user management mechanisms. Amazon Cognito integrates with Facebook, Google, and Amazon login services, enabling authenticated access to users. Now users can sign on using these accounts. Therefore by using AWS and Cognito, startups can target a larger audience.

19. AWS Shield

AWS Shield helps with DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) protection. It detects and automatically protects the downtime and latency of the application from any DDoS attack. AWS Shield is free; customers get automatic protection from layer 3 and 4 attacks. Therefore, those looking for higher-level protection and upgrade to AWS Shield Advanced. It provides additional detection and mitigation against large and sophisticated DDoS attacks. It also comes with 24/7 access to the AWS DDoS Response Team.

20. AWS Snow Family

Sometimes data is so large that it would be faster to move the data to AWS physically. Therefore the AWS Snow Family helps customers by offering them a variety of physical devices to transfer data from their on-premise databases to AWS. There is the AWS Snowcone, AWS Snowball, and AWS Snowmobile. Snowcone and Snowball and physical hardware devices, while Snowmobile is a large container that needs to be moved using a truck. Therefore, grown startups can easily move their on-premise data to AWS, regardless of size.

The Snowcone is the size of a large think book. It has 8 TB of usable storage.

Snowball is the size of a suitcase. It can store up to 80TB of data with 72TB of usable space.

AWS Snowmobile is the size of a long semi-truck! If you need to move more than 10PB (Up to 100PB) of data, use Snowmobile.

The APN Global Startup Program

In 2019, AWS launched the APN Global Startup Program. Think of this program as an AWS startup incubator program for mid to late-stage startups that have used AWS services for a while. Startups will need to pay a $2,500 fee if they are accepted into the program. However, AWS usually refunds this fee after graduation, and startups will get additional benefits for participating in the program. Once accepted into the program, startups will have access to a program manager knowledgeable about AWS services. It is like having an AWS professional architect on your team. Remember, these architects would cost startups at least $100,000 a year if they had to hire them themselves. In addition, startups will have access to vendors within the AWS partners network to increase their sales.