AWS Components

Posted by madhu Dm on August 5th, 2019

AWS offers a variety of infrastructural services. The list of AWS services is a continuously growing list of services with several of them in preview mode at  any given time. In this section, we will describe some of the main AWS services.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) 

Amazon EC2 is a web service that provides compute capacity in the AWS cloud. You can bundle the operating system, application software, and associated configuration settings into an Amazon Machine Image (AMI). You can then use these AMIs to provision multiple virtualized instances as well as decommission them using web service calls. EC2 instances can be resized and the number of instances scaled up or down to match your requirements or demand. These instances can be launched in one or more geographical locations or regions, and Availability Zones (AZs). Each region comprises of several AZs at distinct locations, connected by low latency networks in the same region. 

Amazon Elastic Block Storage (Amazon EBS) volumes provide network-attached persistent storage to the EC2 instances. Elastic IP addresses allow you to allocate a static IP address, and programmatically assign it to an instance. You can enable monitoring on EC2 instances using Amazon CloudWatch. You can create auto scaling groups using the auto scaling feature to automatically scale your capacity based on CloudWatch metrics. You can also distribute incoming traffic by using  the Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) service. You can also use the AWS CloudTrail service to monitor AWS API and AWS SDK calls for your account. 

Amazon EC2 Container Service is a cluster management and configuration management service. This service enables you to launch and stop container-enabled applications via API calls. 

Amazon S3 

Amazon S3 is a highly durable and distributed data store. Using a web services interface, you can store and retrieve large amounts of data as objects in buckets (containers). The stored objects are also accessible from the web via HTTP. For More About Amazon S3

Amazon EBS 

Amazon EBS is highly available and durable persistent block level storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances. You configure EBS with SSD (general purpose or provisioned IOPS) or magnetic volumes. Each EBS volume is automatically replicated within its Availability Zone (AZ).

Amazon CloudFront 

The Amazon CloudFront service is a CDN service for low latency content delivery (static or streaming content). For example, copies of S3 objects can be distributed and cached at multiple edge locations around the world, by creating a distribution network using the Amazon CloudFront service. 

Amazon Glacier 

Amazon Glacier is low-cost storage service that is typically used for archiving and backups. The retrieval time for data on Glacier is up to several hours. Other AWS Storage services include Amazon Storage Gateway (enables integration between on-premise environment and AWS storage infrastructure) and AWS Import/ Export service (which uses portable storage devices to enable movement of large amounts of data into and out of the AWS cloud environment). 

Amazon RDS 

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) provides an easy way to  setup, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. Database options available from AWS include MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and Amazon Aurora  (in preview at this time). You can launch a DB instance and get access to a full-featured MySQL database, while reducing effort on common database administration tasks like backups, patch management, and so on. 

Amazon DynamoDB 

Amazon DynamoDB is a NoSQL database service offered by AWS. It supports both document and key-value pairs, data models, and has a flexible schema. Integration with other AWS services, such as Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR) and Redshift provide support for Big Data and BI applications, respectively. In addition, the integration with AWS Data Pipeline provides an efficient means of moving data into and out of DynamoDB.

Amazon ElastiCache 

If your application is read-intensive, then you can use the AWS ElastiCache service to significantly boost the performance of your applications. ElastiCache supports Memcached and Redis in-memory caching solutions. AWS ElastiCache supports higher reliability through automatic detection and replacement of failed nodes, automates patch management, and enables monitoring through integration with Amazon CloudWatch. ElastiCache can be scaled-up/scaled-down in response to  the application load. 

Amazon Simple Queue Service 

Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) is a reliable, highly-scalable,  hosted, and distributed queue for storing messages as they travel between  computers and application components. 

Amazon Simple Notification Service 

Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) provides a simple  way to notify applications or people from the cloud application. It uses the  publish-subscribe protocol. 

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud 

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) allows you to extend your corporate network into a private cloud contained within AWS. Amazon VPC uses the IPSec tunnel mode that enables you to create a secure connection between a gateway in your data center and a gateway in AWS. 

Amazon Route 53 

Amazon Route 53 is a highly-scalable DNS service that allows you to manage your DNS records by creating a hosted zone for every domain you would like to manage. 

AWS Identity and Access Management 

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) enables you to you to control access to AWS services and resources. You can create users and groups with unique security credentials and manage permissions for each of these users. You can also define IAM roles so that your application can securely make API calls without creating and distributing your AWS credentials. IAM is natively integrated into AWS Services.

Amazon CloudWatch 

CloudWatch is a monitoring service for your AWS resources. It enables you to retrieve monitoring data, set alarms, troubleshoot problems, and take actions  based on the issues arising in your cloud environment. 

To get in-Depth knowledge on AWS Components you can enroll for live AWS Online Training.
 

Other AWS services 

There are several other AWS services that assist you in the administration of  your cloud environment. These include CloudTrail (records AWS API calls),  AWS Config (provides you with a resource inventory and current configuration of your AWS resources), AWS CloudHSM (helps you meet contractual obligations and/or compliance requirements), and AWS Key Management (to manage your  data encryption keys). 

In addition, AWS provides several services for deployment and management  of your applications. These include AWS Elastic Beanstalk (for deploying and  scaling web applications), AWS OpsWorks (an application management service), AWS CloudFormation (for provisioning a set of related AWS resources), and  AWS CodeDeploy (for automating code deployments). 

Other applications' related services from AWS include Amazon EMR (a hosted Hadoop framework), Amazon Kinesis (for real time streaming data ingestion and processing), Amazon SWF (a workflow service), Amazon AppStream (for streaming from the cloud), Amazon Elastic Transcoder (for conversion of media files), Amazon SES (a bulk e-mail service), and Amazon CloudSearch (for applications that need a scalable search service functionality). AWS also offers payment and billing services that leverage Amazon's payment infrastructure. 

Other than services provided by Amazon, there are many software products and services offered by third-party vendors through the Amazon Marketplace. Depending on your application requirements you can choose to integrate these services into your applications instead of building them. 

Optimizing cloud infrastructure costs 

It is important to understand your cloud-costing model, so that you are able to manage costs better. Typically, a substantial part of your bill comprises of costs of EC2 compute instances, database instances (especially, if you are using Provisioned IOPS), and the usage of any specialized application services (Amazon EMR, Amazon Redshift, and many more). However, storage costs can also be significant for certain applications such as a photo-sharing application. In this section, we will focus on several strategies that will help you cut your cloud infrastructure costs.

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madhu Dm

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madhu Dm
Joined: June 10th, 2019
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