AWS Essentials

Amazon web services(AWS) is currently the most mature cloud service provider. It provides IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) services to the customers. Businesses uses AWS services for different functionalities including, storage, computing power, analytics, virtualization, databases, security, networking, developer tools,etc.

Major cloud features

  1. On-demand self service: Cloud provisions computing capabilities as needed automatically without requiring human interaction with service provider.

  2. Broad-network access: Cloud capabilities are available over the network and accessed through standard(HTTP) mechanisms.

  3. Resource Pooling: The cloud provider's computing resources are pooled to serve multiple consumers using multi-tenant model, with different resources dynamically assigned and re-assigned according to the demand.

  4. Rapid Elasticity: Capabilities can be elastically provisioned and released automatically, to scale rapidly outward or inward with the demand. Scaling can be horizontal (scaling out) or vertical (scaling up).

  5. Measuring Services: Cloud resource usage can be monitored, controlled, monitored and reported.

  6. High Availability: Computing environments configured to provide nearly full time availability. Uses redundant hardware and softwares to avoid single point of failure.

  7. Disaster Recovery: It involves a set of policies, tools and procedures to enable the recovery or continuation of vital systems/infrastructures.

  8. Fault Tolerance: It indicates how cloud provider will ensure minimal downtime for services provided.

  9. Elasticity: Ability to quickly increase or decrease cloud resources on demand.

  10. CapEX Vs OpEx: For cloud OpEx (Operational Expenditure) is greater than CapEx (Capital Expenditure).

AWS Building Blocks

  1. Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC): It is your private section of AWS network, where you can place AWS resources, and allow or restrict access to them. It provisions a private, isolated virtual network on the AWS cloud for the customer, where customer has complete control over the resources. Resources can be placed in a subnet (public or private) under a VPC, where AWS assigns a unique id to every subnet.

  2. Elastic Cloud Computing (Amazon EC2): It is the virtual computing power allocated by AWS. It is a virtual computer that can be used for any activities the user may like (Web hosting, Scientific computing, Encoding, etc). This computing power is resizable according to the demand. And user user only has to pay for the capacity actually consumed. An Amazon EC2 system can be launched from pre-configured Amazon Machine Image (AMI).

  3. Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3): It is the storage platform for AWS. Its capacity is nearly unlimited and widely regarded as very fast storage. The access through Amazon S3 is only through web services. Amazon S3 provides mass storage feature with high reliablity. It stores data as objects within buckets. An object is also contains the metadata about it. Buckets act ac the logical containers for the objects. An object key uniquely identifies an object in a bucket. Also, object storing is replicated in multiple buckets to provide high availability of data.

  4. Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS): Relational database service for AWS. It provides RDBS management services. RDS is cost effective and resizable capacity. DB instances, which are isolated database environments in the cloud, are the basic building blocks of RDS. It is vertically scalable systems.

  5. Amazon Dynamo DB: It is for the storage of unstructured data. Using SSDs for fast and predictable performance. Here a table is a collection of items and each item in turns a collection of attributes. A primary key (Partition/ Sort Key) uniquely identifies each item in a table. Using Amazon Dynamo DB we can easily provision and change the requested capacity needed for each table.

  6. Elastic Block Store (Amazone EBS): Persistent block level storage volumes, offering consistent and low latency performance. EBS can be attached to EC2. It is very fast compared to S3. It is disk storage not online. Need to pay for whatever the capacity provisioned. EBS can be used for storing operating systems, DBs, persistent applications,etc.

Benefits of AWS

  1. Trade capital expense for variable expense.

  2. Benefits from massive economies of scale.

  3. Stop guessing capacity of the system in future.

  4. Increased speed and agility.

  5. Go global in minutes.

  6. High availability and scalability.