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AWS services in a nutshell

AWS is a very powerful platform for your enterprise application. Do you wonder how to navigate through it? I've learned a wide range of topics and I just made it simple for you. Let's dive in.

Fundamentals

EC2: your physical server on the cloud.
EBS: your physical hard drive attached to EC2.
VPC: your private network in the cloud. A VPC spans all availability zones in a region.
Lambda: Execution tool triggered by the event, the "compute power".
Elastic Beanstalk: an orchestration service to deploy a web application in one click.

Storage & Content delivery

S3: Storage/File system for objects.
S3 Glacier: Cheaper storage solution for infrequently accessed files, e.g. log file.
DynamoDB: NoSQL DB with flexibility and scalability.
RDS: Relational DB management.
Redshift: Data warehouse for Big data, usually stores historical data. e.g. Redshift stores orders in the last 10 years. RDS stores orders within 1 year. It leverages machine learning to achieve fast queries. Data stored in S3.
CloudFront: a global content delivery network compatible with origin source such as: S3, Elastic Load Balancing, EC2, Lambda@Edge, AWS Shield, or non-AWS services. It offers the security setting as well.

Security

Shield: Your safeguard against DDoS (or Distributed Denial of Service) attack. You get the standard version "out of the box".
WAF: Web Application Firewall. Guard against SQL injections, cross-site scripting. It also can protect services not hosted on AWS through CloudFront.You can present an error page through CloudFront when the request is blocked.
IAM: Identify & Access management. You can use it to configure the access permission for a user/group to your AWS account, server, or applications.

Network & Elasticity

Route 53: Cloud DNS service. It's an address translation service used by servers around the globe.
EC2 Auto Scaling: Adding or removing EC2 instance based on your definition and the monitoring of  the EC2 instances. Work with Simple Messaging System to notify you about the change.
Elastic Load Balancing: Balance load between two or more servers. Provide redundancy. It also add more servers to the pool if one server starts having issues or bottlenecks. It works with EC2 instances, containers, IP addresses, and Lambda functions.

Messaging & Containers

SNS: Simple Notification Service. Messaging service sending notifications to users. It works in the publish/subscribe model. The subscriber could be a person or other AWS service such as: Amazon SQS queues, AWS Lambda functions, and HTTP/s webhooks.
SQS: Simple Queue Service. Typically used for system-to-system messaging. A message queuing service enables the asynchronous response. FIFO SQS deliver msg only once and in exact order. Standard SQS  processes msg deliver msg with best-effort ordering but no guarantee.
ECS: Elastic Container Service. An orchestration service for containers. It works well with Docker to launch/stop, autoscaling, and querying the status of your application.

AWS Management

CloudTrail: Provides the history of activities in your account in the last 90 days, whether it is from AWS management console, SDK, command-line tools, or other AWS services.
CloudWatch: Monitors resources and applications on AWS, collecting data in forms of logs, metrics, events. You can use it to set up triggers to other AWS resources. For instance, every time a EC2 is lanching, CloudWatch can give an update to an SNS topic, the subscriber of that topic will be notified.
Cloud Formation: AWS Infrastructure as Code service. It allows you to provision AWS resources based on the scripts you write and easier version control.
AWS Command Line Interface(CLI): Access and control AWS service running in your AWS account from command line.


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