AWS

SERVICES

AMAZON WEB

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the market leader in IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) and PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) for cloud ecosystems, which can be combined to create a scalable cloud application without worrying about delays related to infrastructure provisioning (compute, storage, and network) and management.

New and existing companies can build their digital infrastructure partially or entirely in the cloud with AWS, making the on-premise data center a thing of the past. The AWS cloud ensures infrastructure reliability, compliance with security standards, and the ability to instantly grow or shrink your infrastructure to meet your needs and maximize your budget, all without upfront investment in equipment.

AWS you can select the specific solutions you need, and only pay for exactly what you use, resulting in lower capital expenditure and faster time to value without sacrificing application performance or user experience.

Here’s a look at some of the services Amazon offers for making IT design and management simple with AWS.

Essential AWS Services

Amazon offers many services for application development and analytics. Here are some key building blocks in the AWS environment and a brief description of how they are leveraged against your needs.

1.EC2: Server configuration and hosting

Deploy your army of servers with Amazon EC2. In just minutes bring virtual machines–called instances–online. Select AMI’s with operating system of your choice (Linux or Windows) and start deploying your clusters. There are three popular instance types when creating EC2 instances:

Compute optimized. Used for instances that will require extremely high request rates, this configuration leverages industry leading processors.
Memory optimized. These instances are built with the most efficient per-GB memory cost.

Storage optimized. Storage optimized EC2 instances access extremely fast SSD storage to serve data retrieval requests with lightning speed.
For more information about EC2 instances and the different series that can be leveraged against your specific needs, check out the AWS Instance Types page.

2.Amazon S3: Data storage and movement

To build a powerful cloud application you need scalable storage. AWS Simple Storage Services (S3) provides all the needed tools to store and move data around the globe using ‘buckets.’

There are four ways to designate buckets in AWS and the cost to store them varies greatly.

Amazon Standard Storage

For data that are frequently accessed, such as logs for the last 24 hours or a media file that is being accessed frequently, Amazon Simple Storage offers affordable, highly available storage capacity that can grow as quickly as your organization needs.

Amazon Infrequent Access Storage

Using the S3 interface, monitor and manage resources that are necessary for your operation but are used far less frequently. By designating these buckets as infrequent access, data availability will be 99.9% (amounting to less than 9 hours of downtime in a year) as compared to 99.99% availability (less than an hour of downtime in a year) for standard storage but can be stored for far less cost per gigabyte than Standard Storage buckets.

Amazon Glacier

For deep storage items that must be retained but are rarely used, Amazon Glacier provides long-term archiving solutions. Data stored in Glacier can take hours to retrieve instead of seconds, but the cost is a fraction of standard storage. With redundant data sites all over the world Glacier ensures your archival data is secure and safe no matter what happens.

Amazon Reduced Redundancy Storage

This service allows for the storing of non-essential, easily reproducible data, without the same amount of redundancy and durability as their higher-level storage tiers. Understanding these storage concepts in S3 is essential before building your cloud architecture. You can learn more about the intricacies of S3 here. Now let’s take a look at some of the other AWS services that can be used to build scalable cloud application.

Elastic Load Balancing: Scalable performance

Amazon includes a powerful, scalable load balancing solution in AWS Elastic Load Balancer (ELB). ELB ensures that client requests are sent to the appropriate servers and avoiding any server hotspots (over-utilizing one server and under utilizing others)

AWS supports two types of load balancing: classic Load balancing and Application Load Balancing.

Classic Load Balancing, which analyzes basic network and application data and ensure fault tolerance if one of the EC2 instances running web application happens to fail.
Application Load Balancing, which looks at content request and routes traffic to the appropriate container or microservice based on the Application content information.
As with most AWS services, you only pay for the services that you use. In case of ELB service, you pay for by an hour and by the amount of data processed.

CloudFront: Deliver a better user experience

Amazon Cloudfront is a global content delivery system that leverages Amazon’s vast global infrastructure to deliver contents with optimized speed and cost. CloudFront ensures that content is closer to the users and improves the user experience by delivering the content faster by serving the content from the AWS region closer to the end user.

Cloudfront works seamlessly with AWS services. With no minimum usage commitment, experimenting with configurations and instances to find ways to improve performance is extremely easy.

Elastic Block Store (EBS): Low-latency instance access

AWS Elastic Block Storage provides persistent Block-level storage volumes for your EC2 instances with low latency. It also allows your system to access high speed SSD storage and layer your security with Access Control Lists and encryption.

Amazon Route 53: The AWS DNS service

Handle DNS routing with the high-speed, low cost Route 53 service from AWS. Translate machine hosts and named application to IP addresses and back within your VPC and connect resources like web servers, S3 buckets, and elastic load balancers. Route 53 is the network of DNS Servers hosted in various AWS regions all around the world. Using API, developers can easily automate the configuration changes to Route 53.