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An Essential Notes of the Understanding of Amazon Web Services - AWS


AI generated image of cloud computing
AI-Generated Illustration of Cloud Computing



The Cloud Computing



Client-Server System


In a client-server system, a central server provides resources or services to multiple clients (devices or programs). The server handles client requests and returns the required data or service.

For example, A bank's database server handles requests from ATMs (clients) to retrieve account information and process transactions.


Cloud Computing



When that server is placed in a remote location accessed via the internet, it becomes cloud computing.

Cloud computing delivers computing services like storage, databases, software, and processing power over the internet (the "cloud") on a pay-as-you-go basis.


It eliminates the need for physical hardware and allows users to access resources from anywhere. For example, Google Drive allows users to store and access files online without needing local storage.


Deployment Models for Cloud Computing


  • Cloud-Based Deployment

  • On-Premises Deployment

  • Hybrid Deployment


Benefits of Cloud Computing


  • Trade upfront expense for variable expense

  • Stop spending money to run and maintain data centers

  • Stop guessing capacity

  • Benefit from massive economies of scale

  • Increase speed and agility

  • Go global in minutes




Amazon Compute in the Cloud



AWS Amazon EC2 illustration


Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)


Amazon EC2, a service that lets you run virtual servers in the cloud  

  • Provision instances (virtual servers) 

  • Upload your code. 

  • Continue to manage the instances while your application is running. 

 


Amazon EC2 instance types  


  • General Purpose Instances 

    • Provide a balance of computing, memory, and networking resources.  

  • Compute Optimized Instances 

  • Memory Optimized Instances 

    • More ideal for workloads that process large datasets in memory, such as high-performance databases.  

  • Accelerated Computing Instances 

  • Storage Optimized Instances 

    • Designed for workloads that require high, sequential read and write access to large datasets on local storage.  

 


Amazon EC2 Pricing 


  • On-Demand 

  • Reserved Instances (Standard Reserved Instances, Convertible Reserved Instances) 

    • Reserved Instances require a commitment of either 1 year or 3 years. The 3-year option offers a larger discount  

  • EC2 Instance Savings Plans  

  • Spot Instances  

  • Dedicated Hosts 

 


Scalability

You can scale instances vertically and horizontally


  •  Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling (Automated Horizontal Scaling of Instances) 

    • Dynamic Scaling 

    • Predictive Scaling 

  • How to configure scaling 

    • Minimum Capacity 

    • Desired Capacity 

    • Maximum Capacity 


Managing Incoming Traffic

(Load Balancing) 


Elastic Load Balancing (Decouple the architecture):  AWS service that automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple resources, such as Amazon EC2 instances. 


Before Elastic Load Balancing


Without elastic load balancing - Image from AWS
Without elastic load balancing - Image from AWS


Post Elastic Load Balancing


With elastic load balancing - Image from AWS
With elastic load balancing - Image from AWS

Messaging & Queing


Monolithic Application > Leads to cascading failure >> Change to Loosely Coupled Architecture > Via Microservices 

Two services facilitate application integration in AWS: 


  • Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) 

    • Publishes messages to subscribers  

    • Subscribers can be web servers, email addresses, AWS Lambda functions, or several other options.  

       

  • Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) 

    • Message queuing service  

    • For decoupled applications and microservices, Amazon SQS enables you to send, store, and retrieve messages between components  

 


AWS Additional Computing Services 

 

The term “serverless” means that your code runs on servers, but you do not need to provision or manage these servers.  




  • AWS Lambda -  is a service that lets you run code without needing to provision or manage servers. 

In AWS, you can also build and run containerized applications. Containers provide you with a standard way to package your application's code and dependencies into a single object. Container orchestration services help you to deploy, manage, and scale your containerized applications.  


AWS has two services that provide container orchestration 

  • Amazon Elastic Container Service (For Docker Software Platform) 

  • Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service.  

 

AWS Fargate

Is a serverless compute engine for containers. It works with both Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS.  AWS Fargate manages your server infrastructure for you.  

 



AWS Global Infrastructure 


  • Selecting a region – Regions are geographically isolated areas 

  • Availability Zone - A single data center or group of data centers within a Region 

    • Planning for failure and deploying applications across multiple Availability Zones is an important part of building a resilient and highly available architecture.  

  • Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery service  

    • Edge location: this is a site that Amazon CloudFront uses to store cached copies of your content closer to your customers for faster delivery.  

  • AWS Outposts: Datacenters setup, managed by Amazon in the client's building. 

 


Provision AWS Resources


Ways to interact with AWS services (Use APIs to interact) 

  • AWS Management Console  

  • AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI)  

  • Software development kits (SDKs)  

  • AWS Elastic Beanstalk (Settings & Configurations) 

  • AWS CloudFormation (Infrastructure as code) 

 


Networking


  • Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)  

    • The subnet is a section of a VPC that can contain resources such as Amazon EC2 instances. 

      • Public Subnet 

      • Private Subnet 

  •  Internet gateway: allow public traffic from the internet to access your VPC  



  • Virtual private gateway: allows traffic into the VPC only if it is coming from an approved network 



  • AWS Direct Connect:  Establish a dedicated private connection between your data center and a VPC  



  • A packet is a unit of data sent over the internet or a network. 

  • Security 

    • Network ACL (access control list) is a virtual firewall that controls inbound and outbound traffic at the subnet level.  

      • Network ACLs perform stateless packet filtering  

    • Security group: is a virtual firewall that controls inbound and outbound traffic for an Amazon EC2 instance.  

      • Security groups perform stateful packet filtering  




Client > Domain Name System (DNS) > Amazon Route 53 (DNS Web service) > Client > Amazon CloudFront (access data) 




Database & Storage 

 

Instance Store - provides temporary block-level storage for an Amazon EC2 instance, once instance terminated you lose all the data. Hence use - 


Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) - Service that provides block-level storage volumes that you can use with Amazon EC2 instances.  

  • You can take incremental backups of EBS volumes by creating Amazon EBS snapshots.  

 


Amazon Simple Storage Service 

Object storage - each object consists of data, metadata, and a key.  


  • Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) 

    • S3 Standard 

    • Amazon S3 Standard-IA (infrequent Access) 

    • S3 One Zone-IA  

    • S3 Intelligent-Tiering  

    • S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval  

    • S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval  

    • S3 Deep Archive  

    • Amazon S3 Outposts  

 

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS): is a scalable file system used with AWS Cloud services and on-premises resources. As you add and remove files, Amazon EFS grows and shrinks automatically.  

 

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a service that enables you to run relational databases in the AWS Cloud.  

  • Database engine  

    • Amazon Aurora (enterprise-class relational database. It is compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL relational databases) 

    • PostgreSQL 

    • MySQL 

    • MariaDB 

    • Oracle Database 

    • Microsoft SQL Server 

 

Amazon DynamoDB is a key-value database service (NoSQL databases). It delivers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale.  

 

Amazon Redshift is a data warehousing service that you can use for big data analytics. It offers the ability to collect data from many sources and helps you to understand relationships and trends across your data.  

 

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) enables you to migrate relational databases, nonrelational databases, and other types of data stores.  

 

Additional Database Services 


  • Amazon DocumentDB is a document database service that supports MongoDB workloads. (MongoDB is a document database program.)  

  • Amazon Neptune is a graph database service.   

  • Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (Amazon QLDB) is a ledger database service.   

  • Amazon Managed Blockchain is a service that you can use to create and manage blockchain networks with open-source frameworks.   

  • Amazon ElastiCache is a service that adds caching layers on top of your databases to help improve the read times of common requests.   

  • Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) is an in-memory cache for DynamoDB.   

 



Security

 

AWS Shared Responsibility Model





 

  • AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)  

    • AWS account root user  

    • IAM user  

    • IAM policy  

    • IAM groups  

    • IAM roles  

    • Multi-factor authentication (MFA)  

    • Identity Federation 


  • AWS Organizations – A central location to manage multiple AWS accounts (like developer, billing, business, etc) 

    • Service control policies (SCPs) 

    • Organizational units (OUs)  


  • AWS Compliance (3rd party auditor audits AWS) 

    • AWS Artifact  

      • AWS Artifact Agreements 

      • AWS Artifact Reports.  

    • Customer Compliance Center  


  • Denial-of-service (DoS) attack  

    • Distributed denial-of-service attack (DDOS) 

    • AWS Shield  

      • AWS Shield Standard  

      • AWS Shield Advance 


  • Additional Security Services 

    • AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS)  

    • AWS WAF  

    • Amazon Inspector  

    • GuardDuty  

 



Monitoring & Analytics 


  • Amazon CloudWatch (access all your metrics from a central location) 

    • Amazon CloudWatch Alarm 

    • CloudWatch Dashboard 


  • AWS CloudTrail (Comprehensive API Auditing tool, it records all API calls) 

    • CloudTrail Insights  


  • AWS Trusted Advisor  

    • Cost Optimization 

    • Security 

    • Performance 

    • Fault Tolerance 

    • Service Limits 




 


AWS Pricing and Support

 

Pricing 

  • AWS Free Tier 

    • Types 

      • Always Free 

      • 12 Months Free 

      • Trials 

  • Cost Estimator 

  • AWS Pricing Works 

    • Pay for what you used 

    • Pay less when you reserve 

    • Pay less with volume-based discounts when you use more 

  • AWS Billing & Cost Management dashboard 

  • Consolidated Billings (For AWS Organizations) 

  • AWS Budgets 

  • AWS Cost Explorer 

    • Default Reports  

    • Custom Reports 

 


Support 

  • Basic Support (Free for all) 

    • a limited selection of AWS Trusted Advisor checks  

    • AWS Personal Health Dashboard  

  • Developer Support (24 hours) 

  • Business Support (1 hour downtime, Normal time – 4 Hours) 

  • AWS Enterprise On-Ramp Support (30 Mins Support) 

    • Technical Account Manager (TAM)  

  • AWS Enterprise Support (15 mins Support) 

    • Technical Account Manager (TAM)    

  • Technical Account Manager (TAM)  

  • AWS Market Place - Digital catalog that includes thousands of software listings from independent software vendors  

    • Several categories, such as Infrastructure Software, DevOps, Data Products, Professional Services, Business Applications, Machine Learning, Industries, and Internet of Things (IoT)  

 



Migration and Innovations

 

Migrations 

  • AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) 

    • The Business, People, and Governance Perspectives focus on business capabilities 

    • The platform, Security, and Operations Perspectives focus on technical capabilities 

  • 6 R's of Migrations 

    • Rehosting  

    • Replatforming 

    •  Retire 

    • Retain 

    • Repurchasing 

    • Refactoring 

  • AWS Snow Family (secure & Temper resistant in premise or in transit) 

    • AWS Snow Cone (It features 2 CPUs, 4 GB of memory, and up to 14 TB of usable storage) 

    • AWS Snowball Edge 

      • Storage Optimized (80 TB of hard disk drive (HDD)) 

      • Compute Optimized  

    • AWS Snow Mobile (100 petabytes of data per Snowmobile, a 45-foot long ruggedized shipping container, pulled by a semi-trailer truck) 




 


Innovations 

  • VMWare Cloud on AWS 

  • Amazon Sage Maker (ML/AI Modelling) 

  • Amazon Augmented AI (Amazon A2I) 

  • Amazon Transcribe 

  • Amazon Comprehend 

  • Amazon Fraud Detector  

  • Amazon Lex (Heart of Alexa – Interactive chatbot) 

  • Amazon Textract (used to extract data from documents) 

  • AWS Deepracer (Reinforcement learning in ML) 

  • Internet of Things 

  • AWS Ground Station 

  • Amazon Q Developer (AI Powered code generators) 





The Cloud Journey

 

  • AWS Well Architecture Framework 

    • Operational Excellence 

    • Security 

    • Reliability 

    • Performance Efficiency 

    • Cost Optimization 

    • Sustainability 

  • AWS Well Architecture Tool 

 


AWS Benefits 

  • AWS Services 

  • AWS Terminology 

  • Benefits of AWS Cloud 

    • Trade upfront expense for variable expense. 

    • Benefit from massive economies of scale. 

    • Stop guessing capacity. 

    • Increase speed and agility. 

    • Stop spending money running and maintaining data centers. 

    • Go global in minutes. 

 




The content is referred from the AWS Cloud Practitioner Essential Certificate Program.

The END.

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