Really Quick AWS Overview

I’m just getting started inside this universe called AWS. I’m taking a course in A Cloud Guru and this is my studies notes, they might not make much sense now, but I’m putting all my knowledge here. This will not be too useful for those who already master Cloud Computing, but might help those who are beginners like me.

So with no further ado, let’s go through a really wide overview of AWS.

Global Infrastructure

How the physical stuff that AWS runs on is structured across the world.

AWS Skeleton

Even the cloud services must have physical hardware to provide their services. It’s not different with AWS. The place that your hardware lives matters, physical distance can produce delays on the service’s response, so geographic well-distributed hardware can reduce the latency. Amazon has now 25 regions, which is a place in the world where AWS resource exists.

AWS regions (source)

Availability Zones

Each AWS region consists of two or more Availability Zones (AZ), and each AZ consists of one or a collection of datacenter.

The importance of separated AZ is to prevent that physical problems like power shortages, or natural disasters, take down the whole region. Separated AZ creates redundancy.

Edge Locations

It's a CDN (Content Delivery Network) endpoint for Cloud Front, that cache large files of the network like videos or pictures, having a cached file in an edge location close to you reduces the latency of the service, maybe because of this Netflix videos always buffer faster than other services.

Network & Content Delivery

How stuff communicates inside AWS.

VPC

Virtual Private Cloud, as the name suggests, consists of a virtual data center where you will deploy your assets. You could have multiple VPC’s per regions and they can communicate with each other.

Route53

The Amazon DNS service, which is a service to make your IP address prettier, instead of the ugly but informative IP address, you can access your computer using a good-looking address like google.com, or medium.com.

The number 53 stands for the DNS port that is open when you use the service.

Cloud Front

A group of Edge Locations that will cache your files so can be accessed with low latency.

Direct Connect

A service to connect your physical data center to AWS using a dedicated telephone line, instead of the internet. Can be used for reliable connection or for safety.

Compute

How stuff is processed inside AWS. The logical services where you upload your code to be executed.

EC2

Elastic Cloud Computer is a scalable virtual machine in the cloud. Think of it as a computer in the cloud. It has an operational system, CPU, RAM chip, connection with the internet, firewall. With the benefit of scaling up or down as needed.

ECS

The EC2 Container Service is a scalable management service for Docker containers. Can manage dockers, eliminating the need for installing, operate and manage your own cluster management infrastructure.

Elastic Beanstalk

Elastic Beanstalk will look at your web application code and provide all the infrastructure needed to run it. It will scale as needed, manage and monitor your web application.

Lambda

The serverless solution of AWS. Instead of using an EC2 instance with an operational system, you upload your code to the Lambda service and it will respond to events, ideal for APIs.

Lightsail

Amazon Lightsail is an easy-to-use virtual private server (VPS). Usually for building WordPress blogging, for those who don't want to dive too deep inside AWS.

Storage

How stuff is saved.

S3

S3 stands for Simple Storage Service. You can think of it as a virtual HDD, but only for objects, like video, documents, text, and so on. You don't use it for installing a database for example, only for files.

Glacier

A low speed and low-cost file archiving. Usually for saving things that don't need to be accessed immediately. It takes about 4 hours to retrieve a file inside Glacier, so is mostly used for archiving files for compliance reasons.

EFS

Elastic File System is a file-based volume that can be shared among various machines. For example, you could install your database here.

Storage Gateway

It’s a way of connecting S3 to your data center. Usually installed in a virtual machine as an image.

Databases

How you store information.

RDS

Relational Database Service consists of a number of technologies like MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and so on.

Dynamo DB

Non-Relational database, super scalable, and high performance. A little trickier to query but it has superior performance.

Redshift

The amazon data warehousing solution. Usually, data is transferred to Redshift to be reported, in order to prevent the production database from slowing down.

Elasticache

As the name suggests is used for caching files to be accessed quickly. This takes offload from the database, so you want to do this for your most accessed files.

Migration

How to move stuff around.

Snowball

A service to transfer petabytes of information safely to AWS. Usually to migrate a physical data center to Cloud.

DMS

Database Migration Services used to migrate databases outside and inside AWS. You can use it to migrate your production database to Redshift without having any downtime.

SMS

Server Migration Services is similar to DMS but instead of databases, the service is aimed at virtual machines.

Analytics

Watch your stuff.

Athena

Run SQL query to your S3 files. You can write an SQL query for a .CSV file, for example, turning a flat file into a searchable database.

EMR

Elastic Map Reduce is used for big data processing. Like log analysis or financial market analysis.

Cloud Search/Elastic Search

They are almost identical, Cloud Search uses an Amazon framework, while Elastic Search uses an open-source framework. Both provide search capabilities for your website or web application.

Kinesis

Used for streaming and analyze huge amounts of data. Used for analyzing financial marketing or social media, where a large amount of data need to be processed in real-time.

Data Pipeline

Used to move data between services. For example, you can schedule a job for moving your data from S3 storage to a Dynamo DB.

Quick Sight

Used for building dashboards for analyzing data. Can create charts and graphs to better visualize data.

Security & Identity

Protect your stuff.

IAM

Identity Access Management is the service to grant access and permission to all others services of AWS. Manage credentials, authentication, and permission for users and services.

Inspector

Does security report of what is going on inside a virtual machine

Certificate Manager

Gives you free SSL certificates for your domain names.

Directory Service

A way of using active directories on AWS. Active Directory is a database containing all the credentials of a company, so the user doesn't need to create a login and password on every new machine.

WAF

Web Application Firewall gives application-level protection to the website.

Artifacts

All about certification, like ISO 9001.

Management Tools

Organize your stuff.

Cloud Watch

Monitor your AWS environment, like EC2 disk utilization, for example.

Cloud Formation

Describe your AWS environment as code, allowing you to create templates, so you can deploy entire production environments using one single command.

Cloud Trail

Auditing change in your AWS environments. Tracks change in the account.

Opsworks

Automates deployments using Shift.

Config

Monitor your environment and gives alerts when some specific configuration is broken.

Service Catalog

Permit you as an enterprise to authorize certain services or block as needed.

Trusted Advisor

Automated service to scan your environment and give tips on security, performance, and a more fault-tolerant enviroment.

Application Services

Stuff for your apps.

Step Functions

A way to visualize all the microservices that are going on inside your application.

SWF

Simple Work Flow is a nice way to integrate human work with an automated application.

API Gateway

Enables your apps to communicate with backend services, like a lambda function.

AppStream

Allows you to stream desktop applications to your users.

Elastic Transcoder

Changes the video format to suit all video devices.

Developer Tools

Tools to code your stuff.

CodeCommit

An Amazon version of GitHub.

CodeBuild

A compiler for your code.

CodeDeploy

As the name suggests deploy your code to EC2 instances.

CodePipeline

A service to keep track of the versions of your code.

Mobile Services

Stuff for your smartphone.

Mobile Hub

A tool to design and configure features for your mobile app.

Cognito

A tool for authentication. This provides the features of users sign-up into your app. Like login with your Gmail account.

Device Farm

Test your app on hundreds of real smartphones.

Mobile Analytics

Allows you to simply and cost-effectively analyze the app usage data.

Pinpoint

Tracks user behavior of your app.

Business Productivity

Keep stuff flowing.

WorkDocs

A secure way to store important documents.

WokMail

Sending and receiving emails.

Internet Of Things

Get your stuff smart.

iOT

A service to keep track and control hundreds or thousands of devices.

Desktop & App Streaming

Share your stuff.

Workspaces

A way to have your desktop in the cloud, its a VDI service.

App Stream 2.0

Stream of applications for your users.

Atificial inteligence

lex

Amazon voice service in the cloud. The structure of Alexa.

Polly

Text to voice service of Amazon.

Machine Learning

You give the service a dataset and an outcome, and Amazon will train a model for your problem.

Rekognition

Image processing service. Describe a picture and also process faces.

Messaging

Services to communications.

SNS

Simple Notification Services notify you via email, text, or can even publish to an HTTP serve.

SQS

Simple Queue Service is a way of decoupling your application. It provides a queue for jobs to be executed in instances, so if an instance dies in the process, the job still persists on the SQS, so it can be picked up by another machine.

SES

The Simple Email Service is a way of sending and receiving emails using AWS.

Conclusions

This is not even a scratch in all the services that AWS provides, but I talked about the most common ones. Now I have a clue about what those services are and I can go deeper into those ones that I’ll need the most.