Overview of AWS Continued

Compute

-- Amazon EC2

EC2 services are cloud hypervisors providing you with complete control of your computing resources. EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for compute usage only.

There are 3 types of EC2 Instances:

• On-demand - pay for compute capacity by the hour with no long-term commitments
• Reserved Instances - discount up to 75% compared to On-demand instance prices
• Spot Instances - discount up to 90% compared to On-demand instance prices, and lets you take advantage of unused EC2 capacity in the AWS cloud

-- Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

EC2 Auto Scaling helps you maintain app availability and allows you to automatically add or remove EC2 instances according to user-defined conditions.

-- Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR)

ECR is a fully-managed Docker container registry that makes it easy for developers to host, store, manage, and deploy Docker container images.

ECR is integrated with Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), simplifying development to production workflow.

Integration with AWS IAM provides resource-level control of each repository.

You pay only for the amount of data stored in repositories and data transferred to the Internet.

-- Amazon Elastic Container Store (ECS)

ECS is a container orchestration service that supports Docker containers and allows you to easily run and scale containerized apps on AWS.

With API calls, launch and stop Docker-enabled apps, query the complete state of apps, and access many familiar features, such as IAM roles, security groups, load balancers, CloudWatch Events, CloudFormation templates, and CloudTrail logs.

-- Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS)

EKS runs the Kubernetes management infrastructure for you across multiple AWS AZs to eliminate single point of failure.

EKS is certified Kubernetes so you can use existing tooling and plugins from partners and the Kubernetes community.

-- Amazon Lightsail

Launch and manage a virtual private server with AWS, which includes everything needed to jumpstart a project — a virtual machine, SSD- based storage, data transfer, DNS management, and a static IP address.

-- AWS Batch

Batch dynamically provisions the optimal quantity and type of compute resources based on the volume and specific resource requirements of the batch jobs submitted.

-- AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Elastic Beanstalk deploys and scales web apps and services developed with Java, .NET, PHP Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker on familiar servers such as Apache, Nginx, Passenger, and Internet Information Services (IIS).

-- AWS Fargate

A compute engine for Elastic Container Store (ECS) that allows you to run containers without having to manage servers or clusters, so it removes the need for you to interact with or think about servers or clusters to focus on building apps.

-- AWS Lambda

Lambda runs code without provisioning or managing servers, serverless. There is no charge when code is not running with zero infrastructure administration.

Setup your code to automatically trigger from other AWServices, or call it directly from any web or mobile app.

-- AWS Serverless Application Repository

Quickly deploy code samples, components, and complete apps for common use cases such as web and mobile back-ends, event and data processing, logging, monitoring, IoT, and more.

AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) template defines the AWS resources needed for your Serverless Application Repository.

With Serverless Application Repository, publish your own apps and share them within your team, across your org, or with the community at large.

-- AWS Outposts

Outposts can be used to support on-prem workloads needed to remain on-premises due to low latency or local data processing needs.

-- VMWare Cloud on AWS

VMWare Cloud on AWS is ideal for infrastructure and operations looking to migrate their on-prem vSphere-based workloads to the public cloud, consolidated and extend their data center capacities, and optimize, simplify and modernize their disaster recovery solutions.

With VMWare Cloud on AWS, orgs can simplify their hybrid IT infrastructure by using the same VMWare Cloud Foundation technologies across their on-prem data centers and on the AWS Cloud without having to purchase any new or custom hardware, rewrite apps, or modify their operating models.

Customer Engagement

-- Amazon Connect

A self-service, cloud-based contact center service that makes it easy for any business to deliver better customer service at lower cost.

-- Amazon SES

Simple Email Service (SES) is a cloud-based email sending service designed to help digital marketers and app developers send marketing, notification, and transactional emails.

Database

-- Amazon Aurora

Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL compatible relational DB engine that combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial DBs w/the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source DBs.

Aurora is up to 5x faster than standard MySQL and 3x faster than standard PostgreSQL DBs.

Aurora features a distributed, fault-tolerant, self-healing storage system that auto-scales up to 64TB per DB instance.

-- Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)

RDS makes it easy to setup, operate and scale relational DBs in the cloud. There are several DB instance types — optimized for memory, performance or Input/Output — and provides you with 6 familiar DB engines to choose from, including:

• Amazon Aurora
• PostgreSQL
• MySQL
• MariaDB
• OracleDB
• SQL Server

-- Amazon RDS on VMWare

Amazon RDS on VMWare lets you deploy managed DBs in on-prem VMWare environments using Amazon RDS.

RDS on VMWare allows you to utilize the same simple interface for managing DBs in on-prem VMWare environments as you would use in AWS.

-- Amazon DynamoDB

DynamoDB is a key-value and document DB that delivers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale.

-- Amazon ElastiCache

ElastiCache makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale in-memory cache in the Cloud. ElastiCache improves the performance of web apps by allowing it to retrieve info from fast, managed, in-memory caches, instead of relying on slower disk-based DBs.

There are 2 open source in-memory machine engines:

• Redis - a Redis-compatible in-memory service that delivers the ease-of-use and power of Redis along with the availability, reliability, and performance suitable for the most demanding apps
• Memcached - a protocol compliant with Memcached

-- Amazon Neptune

Neptune is a fully-managed graph DB service that makes it easy to build and run apps that work with highly connected datasets.

Neptune is a purpose-built, high-performance graph DB engine optimized for storing billions of relationships and querying the graph with milliseconds latency.

-- Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB)

QLDB provides a transparent immutable, and cryptographically verifiable transaction log owned by a central authority.

Ledgers are typically used to record a history of economic and financial activity in an organization. Ledger apps are often implemented using custom audit tables or audit trails created in relational DBs.

With QLDB, data’s change history is immutable, and using cryptography, you can easily verify that there have been no unintended modifications to app’s data.

QLDB provides developers with familiar SQL-like API, a flexible document data model, and full support for transactions. QLDB is also serverless, so it automatically scales to support the demands of your app.

-- Amazon Timestream

Timestream is fully-managed time series DB service for IoT and operational apps to store and analyze trillions of events per day at 1/10th the cost of Relational DBs.

Time-series data has specific characteristics such as typically arriving in time order form, data is append-only, and queries are always over a time interval.

With Timestream, you can easily store and analyze log data for DevOps, sensor data for IoT apps, and industrial telemetry data for equipment maintenance.

Timestream offers adaptive query processing engine which understands its location and format, making your data ampler and faster to analyze. Timestream also automates rollups, retention, tiering, compression of data, so data can be managed at the lowest possible cost.

Timestream is also serverless.

-- Amazon DocumentDB

DocumentDB is designed from he ground-up to give you the performance, scalability, and availability needed when operating mission-critical MongoDB workloads at scale.

Desktop and App Streaming

-- Amazon WorkSpaces

WorkSpaces is a fully-managed, secure cloud desktop service. You can provision either Linux or Windows desktop. You will pay either monthly or hourly, just for WorkSpaces you launch, which saves money when compared to traditional desktops and on-prem VDI solutions. You can access WorkSpaces from anywhere, anytime, from any supported device.

-- Amazon AppStream 2.0

AppStream 2.0 is a fully-managed app streaming service. With AppStream 2.0, centrally manage desktop apps and securely deliver them to any computer.

Each user has a fluid and responsive experience with AppStream 2.0, including GPU-intensive 3D design and engineering ones, because your apps run on virtual machines (VMs) optimized for specific use cases and each streaming session automatically adjusts to network conditions.

With AppStream 2.0, you can develop a full SaaS solution without rewriting a whole application.

Lessons Learned

With this 4 post finished, I am getting more and more frustrated that I haven’t gotten to the hands-on, lab part, so I went ahead and bough myself a bundle of practice exams from Whizlabs to get a measurement of where my knowledge gaps are, and what topics I need to focus on more based on my existing experience and knowledge.

I am going to finish up the Overview of AWS guide, but I will also take my first, full practice exam to see where I land on the pass/fail range. I’ll keep you posted on these practice results.

Next up on the Overview of AWS is DEVELOPER TOOLS.

Peace Out.

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