AWS Essentials - Part 1 [ Introduction to AWS ]

AWS Essentials

Amazon Web Services is a leading cloud-based services platform and if you are aiming for a career in cloud technology, AWS Essentials is a great place to start. This course will introduce you to the various services and products offered by AWS.

Introduction to AWS

Welcome to this course on AWS Essentials!

Here you will first learn about Cloud Computing and its characteristics. Then you will understand What is AWS, its application and its usage. Following that, you will learn in detail about the different kinds of products AWS supports.

1. Compute
2. Storage
3. Database
4. Networking and Content Delivery
5. Developer Tools
6. Management Tools
7. Security and Compliance
8. Application Services
9. Messaging

AWS Cloud

Here you will get a chance to know more about the different offerings of AWS.

What is Cloud Computing?

Before drilling down further into AWS, let us first understand What is Cloud computing?

Cloud Computing

• It is the type of Internet-based computing that provides shared computer processing resources and data to computers and other devices on demand.
• It is a model for enabling ubiquitous, on-demand access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., computer networks, servers, storage, applications and services) provisioned with minimal management effort.
• This relies on sharing of resources to achieve coherence and economy of scale, similar to a utility (like the electricity grid over an electricity network.)

Source - Wikipedia

Cloud Characteristics

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) highlights various characteristics that are needed for a service to be regarded as “Cloud”.

1. On-demand self-service - Sign up and enjoy the services without delays.
2. Broad network access - Access service through standard platforms (laptop, mobile, desktop, etc.)
3. Resource pooling - Resources are pooled to multiple customers.
4. Rapid elasticity - Ability to meet demand peaks.
5. Measured Service - Billing is metered and delivered as a utility service.

Three unique categories within Cloud Computing:

• Software as a Service (SaaS)
• Platform as a Service (PaaS)
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Software as a Service (SaaS)

1. Capability to run applications on a cloud infrastructure.
2. Applications are accessible from several client devices via either a thin client interface, like a web browser e.g., web-based email
3. The interplay between the outside world and organization. e.g., email newsletter campaign software
4. Software for a short term requirement. e.g., collaboration software for a particular project
5. “Vanilla” offerings where the solution is not differentiated.
6. The consumer does not control or manage the underlying cloud infrastructure, which includes servers, networks, operating systems and storage.

SaaS is not suitable in scenarios where the application

1. processes quick real-time data.
2. has a regulation or legislation that does not allow data to be hosted externally.
3. the existing on-premise solution that satisfies all of the requirements of an organization.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Computing platform that permits creating web applications effortlessly, fast, with no complexity of buying or maintaining the infrastructure and software.

1. Services to develop and test applications, as well as deploy, host and maintain applications in a similar integrated development environment.
2. Ability to deploy on cloud infrastructure with the help of programming languages, services, libraries, and tools.
3. Built-in scalability of deployed software with failover and load balancing.
4. Integration with databases and web services through common standards.

PaaS is not suitable in scenarios where the application -

• requires to be more portable concerning where it is hosted.
• performance needs customization of the underlying software and hardware.
• proprietary approaches or languages would affect the development process.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Capableness to provide networks, processing, storage, and other fundamental computing resources, and ability to deploy, run arbitrary software that can include operating systems and applications. Here, the consumer is incapable of controlling or managing the underlying cloud infrastructure.

1. Resources are distributed as a service and enable dynamic scaling
2. Utility pricing model
3. Multiple users on one hardware Applicability-
4. New organizations with less capital could invest in hardware easily
5. Organizations growing rapidly
6. Pressure on the organization to restrict capital expenditure and to migrate to operating expenditure

IaaS is not suitable in cases where

• strict regulatory compliance is followed
• A very high level of performance is required.

More on Cloud Computing

Let's discuss some advantages to moving to the cloud

1. Variable as opposed to upfront
2. Fixed cost
3. Economics of scale can reduce Operating cost
4. It's easier to match capacity to demand
5. It allows you to focus on developing and deploying applications instead of the undifferentiated heavy lifting associated with managing an on-premises data centre.
6. It allows you to increase the velocity of your Agile development and allows a global presence right out of the gate.

Types of Cloud Services

Following are the different types of services that are offered by cloud

1. Infrastructure as a Service: This allows you to easily provision the IT components you require; including networking capabilities, computers, multi-tenant or dedicated, and data storage. It's flexible and allows you to control and manage your IT resources similar to the way you would in a traditional on-premises data centre, such as EC2, S3, and VPC.
2. Platform as a Service: It frees you from having to manage the underlying infrastructure and focus on the deployment and management of your application. It frees you from having to think about resource procurement, capacity planning, software maintenance, and patching. Examples of Platform as a Service on AWS include Route 53, Elastic Load Balancing, and Auto Scaling.
3. Software as a Service: It provides you with an application that is run and managed entirely by a service provider. Think of SaaS as an end-user application running in the cloud. In a SaaS environment, you have access to the capabilities of an application without the hassle of how it's maintained or its underlying infrastructure

Geographical displacement

Next, let's take a look at the infrastructure in terms of its geographical dispersement.

• Regions are geographical areas, such as California, that contain multiple data centres in what is called availability zones.
• Availability zones are separate physical data centres that may exist within a particular region but have separate infrastructure dependencies, such as the electrical power grid, flood plain, and any other factors that might isolate it from the potential of outages
• In addition to AZs, AWS supports numerous Edge locations. Throughout the globe, there are a lot more Edge locations than there are AZs. And these are small kinds of point of presence services used to deliver content, such as the Cloud Front and Content Distribution Network.
• Infrastructure usage is the idea that you pay only for what you use, such as EC2. EC2 has various options, one of which is on-demand, which is where you only pay for the instance as long as you're using the instance or it's running.
• Pricing concepts include paying for infrastructure usage, such as when using EC2; and data usage and transfer, such as when using Amazon S3 or DynamoDB.
• Designing for high availability is a stricter requirement than designing for fault tolerance. For example, in architecture with a single instance, with an auto-scaling group of one, an instance failure will heal itself or replace the instance since the rule might say, "always provide one instance." This is an example of fault tolerance and not high availability. If however, I have an auto-scaling group with two instances in different AZs and one fails, the traffic will automatically route to the second instance. This is an example of higher availability.
• Global infrastructure services include Identity and Access Management (IAM). Core services include networking, computing, storage, and databases, Application services include SNS, SQS, and SWF, Deployment and management services include Elastic Beanstalk and Cloud formation.

History of AWS

Extending IT Infrastructure to the AWS Cloud

Observe how the IT extends further to support Cloud computing in this video

Features of AWS

AWS offers numerous ways to create and manage resources. Following are the different ways to access the features offered by AWS.

AWS Management Console - A web interface for AWS.

AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) - Commands for a wide set of AWS products.

***Command Line Tools***- Commands for individual AWS products.

AWS Software Development Kits (SDK) - APIs that are specific to programming language or platform.

Query APIs - Low-level APIs that are accessible using HTTP requests.

You will learn more about AWS Management Console and CLI in detail as you progress.

 AWS Management Console

AWS Command Line Interface

The AWS Command Line Interface is a unified tool that manages several AWS services from the command line and automates all the services through scripts.

AWS-shell is a command-line shell program to offer productivity and ease features to aid advanced and new users of the AWS Command Line Interface.

Key Features Include:

• Fuzzy auto-completion for Resource identifiers, Options, Commands.
• Dynamic in-line documentation
• Execution of OS shell commands
• Export executed commands to a text editor

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