AWS in 5 minutes

This post will give you a basic understanding of what Amazon Web Service is, how components in it works, what each component is responsible for at a very high level – all these in just 5 minutes.

This post is gives you a brief idea about the components used in aws. This will surely help you understand things when aws developers are discussing about topics and issues while at work.

EC2 – Elastic Cloud Computing instance is where you run your web app server or a micro-service server. This is one of the primary component of AWS. You can create multiple instances of the servers in multiple availability zone so that if one zone goes down your services to end users are not affected. Session maintainence can be configured here or in ELB

ELB – Elastic load balanacer automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets. It handles the traffic coming from the public networks (users/mobile/consumers). The major functionality of this component is route the traffic to different servers balancing the load from incoming traffic. It can handle the varying load of your application traffic in a single Availability Zone or across multiple Availability Zones.

ELB facing the public network will be inside a public subnet to make it accessible. Apart from this and S3 instance all other components will be inaccessible to public as they will be configured with private subnet. This would be the best place to have session stickiness.

S3 – Simple Storage Service is used for storing all static files like documents, audio, video, image files. This service is only used for storing and retrieving the files. Glacier is used in connection to S3 to archive the least used or unused files to reduce the storage space.

DataBases:

RDS – Relational DataBase is the place where you store and manage your application data. This service supports RDBMS solutions like MySQL, etc. This service also supports the Master-Slave architectures.

NoSQL DB are used if web app solution needs a document based databases like DynamoDB, etc.

Security Group – is used to manage the access to service anyone can have. Each service must ideally have a security group defined.

Route 53 is a highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name System (DNS) web service. It is designed to give developers and businesses a way to route end users to your application servers.

IAM – Identity and Access Management is the one where you can add/update/delete users and their permissions. Generally there will be end users, administrators, developers.

Elastic Cache is a managed, in-memory data store services. You can choose Redis or Memcached to power real-time applications. ElastiCache is a popular choice for Gaming, Ad-Tech, Financial Services, Healthcare, and IoT apps.

For administrators: CloudWatch monitoring service for AWS cloud resources and the applications you run on AWS. It keeps an eye your whole setup and triggers a notification using SNS service to email the administrators if there arises any warning or alert on servers using SES service.

Lambda services are generally used for solutions designed with serverless architectures.

Hope this would be useful to in one or the other way, at least giving you a sneak peak about what AWS is all about.