Becoming an AWS Cloud Practitioner
Getting onto cloud might seem overwhelming if you are just starting over. AWS seems to be winning the cloud race with over 32.2% global market share.
I have tried to consolidate the list of all services you should be aware of if you are thinking to start working on Amazon Cloud. The objective is to just give anyone reading this a basic understanding of various AWS cloud concepts and services.
AWS Global Infrastructure spans across 64 Availability Zones within 21 geographic Regions around the world, with announced plans for 12 more Availability Zones and four more Regions.
1. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) lets you provision a logically isolated section of the AWS Cloud where you can launch AWS resources in a virtual network that you define. You have complete control over your virtual networking environment, including selection of your own IP address range, creation of subnets, and configuration of route tables and network gateways. You can use both IPv4 and IPv6 in your VPC for secure and easy access to resources and applications.
You can easily customize the network configuration for your Amazon VPC. For example, you can create a public-facing subnet for your web servers that has access to the Internet, and place your backend systems such as databases or application servers in a private-facing subnet with no Internet access. You can leverage multiple layers of security, including security groups and network access control lists, to help control access to Amazon EC2 instances in each subnet.
AWS Auto Scaling monitors your applications and automatically adjusts capacity to maintain steady, predictable performance at the lowest possible cost. Using AWS Auto Scaling, it’s easy to setup application scaling for multiple resources across multiple services in minutes. The service provides a simple, powerful user interface that lets you build scaling plans for resources including Amazon EC2 instances and Spot Fleets, Amazon ECS tasks, Amazon Dynamo DBtables and indexes, and Amazon Aurora Replicas. AWS Auto Scaling makes scaling simple with recommendations that allow you to optimise performance, costs, or balance between them. If you’re already using Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling to dynamically scale your Amazon EC2 instances, you can now combine it with AWS Auto Scaling to scale additional resources for other AWS services. With AWS Auto Scaling, your applications always have the right resources at the right time.
It’s easy to get started with AWS Auto Scaling using the AWS Management Console, Command Line Interface (CLI), or SDK. AWS Auto Scaling is available at no additional charge. You pay only for the AWS resources needed to run your applications and Amazon CloudWatch monitoring fees.
Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, IP addresses, and Lambda functions. It can handle the varying load of your application traffic in a single Availability Zone or across multiple Availability Zones. Elastic Load Balancing offers three types of load balancers that all feature the high availability, automatic scaling, and robust security necessary to make your applications fault tolerant.
4. Amazon EC2 — Elastic Compute
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers.
Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use. Amazon EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate them from common failure scenarios.
5. Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances
Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances (RI) provide a significant discount (up to 75%) compared to On-Demand pricing and provide a capacity reservation when used in a specific Availability Zone.
Amazon EC2 Spot Instances let you take advantage of unused EC2 capacity in the AWS cloud. Spot Instances are available at up to a 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices. You can use Spot Instances for various stateless, fault-tolerant, or flexible applications such as big data, containerized workloads, CI/CD, web servers, high-performance computing (HPC), and other test & development workloads. Because Spot Instances are tightly integrated with AWS services such as Auto Scaling, EMR, ECS, CloudFormation, Data Pipeline and AWS Batch, you can choose how to launch and maintain your applications running on Spot Instances.
Moreover, you can easily combine Spot Instances with On-Demand and RIs to further optimise workload cost with performance. Due to the operating scale of AWS, Spot Instances can offer the scale and cost savings to run hyper-scale workloads. You also have the option to hibernate, stop or terminate your Spot Instances when EC2 reclaims the capacity back with two-minutes of notice. Only on AWS, you have easy access to unused compute capacity at such massive scale — all at up to a 90% discount.
7. Amazon EC2 Dedicated Instances
Dedicated Instances are Amazon EC2 instances that run in a VPC on hardware that’s dedicated to a single customer. Your Dedicated instances are physically isolated at the host hardware level from instances that belong to other AWS accounts. Dedicated instances may share hardware with other instances from the same AWS account that are not Dedicated instances. Pay for Dedicated Instances On-Demand, save up to 70% by purchasing Reserved Instances, or save up to 90% by purchasing Spot Instances.
You can also use Dedicated Hosts to launch Amazon EC2 instances on physical servers that are dedicated for your use. Dedicated Hosts give you additional visibility and control over how instances are placed on a physical server, and you can reliably use the same physical server over time. As a result, Dedicated Hosts enable you to use your existing server-bound software licenses like Windows Server and address corporate compliance and regulatory requirements. Visit this page to compare Dedicated Instances and Dedicated Hosts.
8. Amazon S3
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. This means customers of all sizes and industries can use it to store and protect any amount of data for a range of use cases, such as websites, mobile applications, backup and restore, archive, enterprise applications, IoT devices, and big data analytics. Amazon S3 provides easy-to-use management features so you can organise your data and configure finely-tuned access controls to meet your specific business, organisational, and compliance requirements. Amazon S3 is designed for 99.999999999% (11 9’s) of durability, and stores data for millions of applications for companies all around the world.
Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) provides persistent block storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances in the AWS Cloud. Each Amazon EBS volume is automatically replicated within its Availability Zone to protect you from component failure, offering high availability and durability. Amazon EBS volumes offer the consistent and low-latency performance needed to run your workloads. With Amazon EBS, you can scale your usage up or down within minutes — all while paying a low price for only what you provision.
Amazon EBS is designed for application workloads that benefit from fine tuning for performance, cost and capacity. Typical use cases include Big Data analytics engines (like the Hadoop/HDFS ecosystem and Amazon EMR clusters), relational and NoSQL databases (like Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL or Cassandra and MongoDB), stream and log processing applications (like Kafka and Splunk), and data warehousing applications (like Vertica and Teradata).
10. Amazon Glacier
Amazon S3 Glacier is a secure, durable, and extremely low-cost cloud storage service for data archiving and long-term backup. It is designed to deliver 99.999999999% durability, and provides comprehensive security and compliance capabilities that can help meet even the most stringent regulatory requirements. Amazon S3 Glacier provides query-in-place functionality, allowing you to run powerful analytics directly on your archive data at rest. Customers can store data for as little as $0.004 per gigabyte per month, a significant savings compared to on-premises solutions. To keep costs low yet suitable for varying retrieval needs, Amazon S3 Glacier provides three options for access to archives, from a few minutes to several hours.
11. AWS Snowball
Snowball is a petabyte-scale data transport solution that uses devices designed to be secure to transfer large amounts of data into and out of the AWS Cloud. Using Snowball addresses common challenges with large-scale data transfers including high network costs, long transfer times, and security concerns. Customers today use Snowball to migrate analytics data, genomics data, video libraries, image repositories, backups, and to archive part of data center shutdowns, tape replacement or application migration projects. Transferring data with Snowball is simple, fast, more secure, and can be as little as one-fifth the cost of transferring data via high-speed Internet.
12. AWS Data Migration Services
AWS Database Migration Service helps you migrate databases to AWS quickly and securely. The source database remains fully operational during the migration, minimising downtime to applications that rely on the database. The AWS Database Migration Service can migrate your data to and from most widely used commercial and open-source databases.
AWS Database Migration Service supports homogeneous migrations such as Oracle to Oracle, as well as heterogeneous migrations between different database platforms, such as Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server to Amazon Aurora. With AWS Database Migration Service, you can continuously replicate your data with high availability and consolidate databases into a petabyte-scale data warehouse by streaming data to Amazon Redshift and Amazon S3.
Amazon CloudFront is a fast content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally with low latency, high transfer speeds, all within a developer-friendly environment. CloudFront is integrated with AWS — both physical locations that are directly connected to the AWS global infrastructure, as well as other AWS services. CloudFront works seamlessly with services including AWS Shield for DDoS mitigation, Amazon S3, Elastic Load Balancing or Amazon EC2 as origins for your applications, and Lambda@Edge to run custom code closer to customers’ users and to customize the user experience.
14. Amazon Route 53
Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name System (DNS) web service. It is designed to give developers and businesses an extremely reliable and cost effective way to route end users to Internet applications by translating names like www.example.com into the numeric IP addresses like 192.0.2.1 that computers use to connect to each other. Amazon Route 53 is fully compliant with IPv6 as well.
Amazon Route 53 effectively connects user requests to infrastructure running in AWS — such as Amazon EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancing load balancers, or Amazon S3 buckets — and can also be used to route users to infrastructure outside of AWS. You can use Amazon Route 53 to configure DNS health checks to route traffic to healthy endpoints or to independently monitor the health of your application and its endpoints. Amazon Route 53 Traffic Flow makes it easy for you to manage traffic globally through a variety of routing types, including Latency Based Routing, Geo DNS, Geo-proximity, and Weighted Round Robin — all of which can be combined with DNS Failover in order to enable a variety of low-latency, fault-tolerant architectures. Using Amazon Route 53 Traffic Flow’s simple visual editor, you can easily manage how your end-users are routed to your application’s endpoints — whether in a single AWS region or distributed around the globe. Amazon Route 53 also offers Domain Name Registration — you can purchase and manage domain names such as example.com and Amazon Route 53 will automatically configure DNS settings for your domains.
15. AWS Shield
AWS Shield is a managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service that safeguards applications running on AWS. AWS Shield provides always-on detection and automatic inline mitigations that minimise application downtime and latency, so there is no need to engage AWS Support to benefit from DDoS protection. There are two tiers of AWS Shield — Standard and Advanced.
All AWS customers benefit from the automatic protections of AWS Shield Standard, at no additional charge. AWS Shield Standard defends against most common, frequently occurring network and transport layer DDoS attacks that target your web site or applications. When you use AWS Shield Standard with Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Route 53, you receive comprehensive availability protection against all known infrastructure (Layer 3 and 4) attacks.
For higher levels of protection against attacks targeting your applications running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Amazon CloudFront, AWS Global Accelerator and Amazon Route 53 resources, you can subscribe to AWS Shield Advanced.
DDOS protection, built in EC2 and Elastic Load Balancer, Cloud Front and Route 53 resources. There is an advanced version which you need to pay for to use otherwise the basic is free.
16. AWS WAF — Web Application Firewall
AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps protect your web applications from common web exploits that could affect application availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources. AWS WAF gives you control over which traffic to allow or block to your web applications by defining customisable web security rules. You can use AWS WAF to create custom rules that block common attack patterns, such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting, and rules that are designed for your specific application. New rules can be deployed within minutes, letting you respond quickly to changing traffic patterns. Also, AWS WAF includes a full-featured API that you can use to automate the creation, deployment, and maintenance of web security rules.
AWS Direct Connect is a cloud service solution that makes it easy to establish a dedicated network connection from your premises to AWS. Using AWS Direct Connect, you can establish private connectivity between AWS and your datacenter, office, or colocation environment, which in many cases can reduce your network costs, increase bandwidth throughput, and provide a more consistent network experience than Internet-based connections.
18. Amazon Relational Database Services
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while automating time-consuming administration tasks such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching and backups. It frees you to focus on your applications so you can give them the fast performance, high availability, security and compatibility they need.
Amazon RDS is available on several database instance types — optimised for memory, performance or I/O — and provides you with six familiar database engines to choose from, including Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle Database, and SQL Server. You can use the AWS Database Migration Service to easily migrate or replicate your existing databases to Amazon RDS.
19. Amazon Aurora
Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud, that combines the performance and availability of traditional enterprise databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases.
Amazon Aurora is up to five times faster than standard MySQL databases and three times faster than standard PostgreSQL databases. It provides the security, availability, and reliability of commercial databases at 1/10th the cost. Amazon Aurora is fully managed by Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), which automates time-consuming administration tasks like hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups.
20. Amazon DynamoDB
Amazon DynamoDB is a key-value and document database that delivers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale. It’s a fully managed, multi-region, multi-master database with built-in security, backup and restore, and in-memory caching for internet-scale applications. DynamoDB can handle more than 10 trillion requests per day and support peaks of more than 20 million requests per second.
21. Amazon Redshift
Amazon Redshift is a fast, scalable data warehouse that makes it simple and cost-effective to analyse all your data across your data warehouse and data lake. Redshift delivers ten times faster performance than other data warehouses by using machine learning, massively parallel query execution, and columnar storage on high-performance disk. You can setup and deploy a new data warehouse in minutes, and run queries across petabytes of data in your Redshift data warehouse, and exabytes of data in your data lake built on Amazon S3.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an easy-to-use service for deploying and scaling web applications and services developed with Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker on familiar servers such as Apache, Nginx, Passenger, and IIS.
You can simply upload your code and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment, from capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling to application health monitoring. At the same time, you retain full control over the AWS resources powering your application and can access the underlying resources at any time.
23. Amazon EMR
Amazon EMR provides a managed Hadoop framework that makes it easy, fast, and cost-effective to process vast amounts of data across dynamically scalable Amazon EC2 instances. You can also run other popular distributed frameworks such as Apache Spark, HBase, Presto, and Flink in EMR, and interact with data in other AWS data stores such as Amazon S3 and Amazon DynamoDB. EMR Notebooks, based on the popular Jupyter Notebook, provide a development and collaboration environment for ad hoc querying and exploratory analysis.
EMR securely and reliably handles a broad set of big data use cases, including log analysis, web indexing, data transformations (ETL), machine learning, financial analysis, scientific simulation, and bioinformatics.
24. Amazon Elastic Search Service
Amazon Elasticsearch Service is a fully managed service that makes it easy for you to deploy, secure, and operate Elasticsearch at scale with zero down time. The service offers open-source Elasticsearch APIs, managed Kibana, and integrations with Logstash and other AWS Services, enabling you to securely ingest data from any source and search, analyse, and visualise it in real time. Amazon Elasticsearch Service lets you pay only for what you use — there are no upfront costs or usage requirements. With Amazon Elasticsearch Service, you get the ELK stack you need, without the operational overhead.
25. Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose
Amazon Kinesis makes it easy to collect, process, and analyse real-time, streaming data so you can get timely insights and react quickly to new information. Amazon Kinesis offers key capabilities to cost-effectively process streaming data at any scale, along with the flexibility to choose the tools that best suit the requirements of your application. With Amazon Kinesis, you can ingest real-time data such as video, audio, application logs, website clickstreams, and IoT telemetry data for machine learning, analytics, and other applications. Amazon Kinesis enables you to process and analyse data as it arrives and respond instantly instead of having to wait until all your data is collected before the processing can begin.
26. AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. You pay only for the compute time you consume — there is no charge when your code is not running.
With Lambda, you can run code for virtually any type of application or backend service — all with zero administration. Just upload your code and Lambda takes care of everything required to run and scale your code with high availability. You can set up your code to automatically trigger from other AWS services or call it directly from any web or mobile app.
AWS CloudFormation provides a common language for you to describe and provision all the infrastructure resources in your cloud environment. CloudFormation allows you to use a simple text file to model and provision, in an automated and secure manner, all the resources needed for your applications across all regions and accounts. This file serves as the single source of truth for your cloud environment.
Amazon ElastiCache offers fully managed Redis and Memcached. Seamlessly deploy, run, and scale popular open source compatible in-memory data stores. Build data-intensive apps or improve the performance of your existing apps by retrieving data from high throughput and low latency in-memory data stores. Amazon ElastiCache is a popular choice for Gaming, Ad-Tech, Financial Services, Healthcare, and IoT apps.
Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and management service built for developers, system operators, site reliability engineers (SRE), and IT managers. CloudWatch provides you with data and actionable insights to monitor your applications, understand and respond to system-wide performance changes, optimise resource utilisation, and get a unified view of operational health. CloudWatch collects monitoring and operational data in the form of logs, metrics, and events, providing you with a unified view of AWS resources, applications and services that run on AWS, and on-premises servers. You can use CloudWatch to set high resolution alarms, visualise logs and metrics side by side, take automated actions, troubleshoot issues, and discover insights to optimise your applications, and ensure they are running smoothly.
30. AWS Cloud Trail
AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of your AWS account. With CloudTrail, you can log, continuously monitor, and retain account activity related to actions across your AWS infrastructure. CloudTrail provides event history of your AWS account activity, including actions taken through the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command line tools, and other AWS services. This event history simplifies security analysis, resource change tracking, and troubleshooting.
AWS Cost Explorer has an easy-to-use interface that lets you visualise, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time. Get started quickly by creating custom reports (including charts and tabular data) that analyse cost and usage data, both at a high level (e.g., total costs and usage across all accounts) and for highly-specific requests (e.g., m2.2xlarge costs within account Y that are tagged “project: secretProject”). Using AWS Cost Explorer, you can dive deeper into your cost and usage data to identify trends, pinpoint cost drivers, and detect anomalies.
32. AWS Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator
AWS helps you reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by reducing the need to invest in large capital expenditures and providing a pay-as-you-go model that empowers you to invest in the capacity you need and use it only when the business requires it.
Our TCO calculators allow you to estimate the cost savings when using AWS and provide a detailed set of reports that can be used in executive presentations. The calculators also give you the option to modify assumptions that best meet your business needs.
35. Shared Responsibility Model
Security and Compliance is a shared responsibility between AWS and the customer. This shared model can help relieve customer’s operational burden as AWS operates, manages and controls the components from the host operating system and virtualisation layer down to the physical security of the facilities in which the service operates. The customer assumes responsibility and management of the guest operating system (including updates and security patches), other associated application software as well as the configuration of the AWS provided security group firewall. Customers should carefully consider the services they choose as their responsibilities vary depending on the services used, the integration of those services into their IT environment, and applicable laws and regulations. The nature of this shared responsibility also provides the flexibility and customer control that permits the deployment. As shown in the chart below, this differentiation of responsibility is commonly referred to as Security “of” the Cloud versus Security “in” the Cloud.
If you are interested in reading further, here are a couple of links to get started
