Offerings of the article-:
1. Cloud Computing Fundamentals
2. What is AWS
3. AWS Compute Services
4. AWS Storage Services
5. AWS Security Services
6. AWS Database Services
Cloud Computing Fundamentals:
Q. Why Cloud Computing?
To understand why cloud computing, we need to understand what was existing before the commencement of cloud technology.
Before the Cloud was introduced, people who wanted to, let us say, host an application had to buy servers. Servers were not only expensive, but the staffing to maintain them was also very limited and expensive. Pre-planning was also required to match the increase in traffic well before.
Thus before the introduction of cloud services, investments for application hosting had to be made exclusively, which led to the following problems-
a. Invest Heavily for Setup
b. Invest in Resources
c. Scalability Issues
d. Less Time to focus on business
Q. How Cloud Computing Changed this dilemma?
Cloud computing solved storage, Database, Computation problems by managing them and providing them as subscription packs.
Cloud Computing can be considered analogous to using electricity in our homes.
Q. What is Cloud Computing?
In simple words, Cloud Computing enables on-demand services like compute, storage, networking, Which can be accessed through the internet, and the user is not required to manage these resources.
Features of using Cloud Computing-:
a. Scalability
b. Pay-as-you-go model
c. Flexible
d. Secure and Disaster Recovery
Q. What are some Cloud Service Models-:
Following are the most common cloud service models being used:
a. IAAS (Infrastructure as a service)-
Here the owner requires only the infrastructure, and rest configurations are controlled by the user only. Here for an application, the user decides the amount of computation power, Operating System, Application, Data Management, Security, and network. Its example is AWS EC2.
b. PAAS (Platform as a service)-
Here the owner only requires the platform and has no authority over security or Configuration. Here the user uses an already configured platform.
c. SAAS (Software as a service)-
Here the user can directly run their software. Here configurations, platforms, applications used are ready-build, and the user will only run the software.
For example, while using Gmail, we do not care about storage or platforms. We use the platform.
Cloud deployment models:
Following are some standard cloud deployment models-
a. Public -
Here the data of the owner is in the public data center, i.e., other people can also have their data in the data center. It is the cheapest method of cloud deployment.
b. Private Cloud-
Here the data in the data center is entirely isolated. Here the resources are not being shared, unlike the public Cloud. It is also costly.
c. Hybrid Cloud-
Here, some data is stored in public, and some data is stored in a private cloud. It is intermediate between public and private.
d. Community Cloud-
It provides services so that different communities of users can use their data with a shared resource pool.
Major Cloud service providers:
a. Amazon Web services
b. Google Cloud Platform
c. IBM Cloud
d. Microsoft Azure
AWS:
AWS is a cloud service provider that enables on-demand services like compute, storage, networking which can be accessed through the internet, and the user is not required to manage these resources
Features:
a. Cost-Effective
b. Security
c. Pay-as-you-go
d. Availability and disaster recovery
e. Scalability
f. Flexible
Q. What are AWS Core Services?
a. Compute
b. Storage
c. Data-Base
d. Networking
e. Security
f. Migration
g. Management Tools
h. Messaging
i. Analysis
AWS compute Services:
a. Amazon Lambda-
It is a serverless compute service by AWS. Developers do not need to worry about which resources to launch or how to manage them. All they must do is just put the code on amazon lambda, and it should work.
b. AWS Elastic Load Balancer-
Elastic Load Balancer is a load balancer service by AWS which distributes incoming traffic across several targets such as Amazon EC2 instances, Lambda Function, containers, and a range of IP Addresses in multiple availability zones.
1. Causes of Instance crash:
a. Sudden Spike in Application Traffic
b. Application Crash due to unknown reasons
c. EC2 instance Crash
2. Features of Elastic Load Balancer:
a. Automatically Scales to meet the Incoming Traffic
b. Increases Availability and fault tolerance of Application
c. Improve overall performance of Application
d. Regular Health checks, to send only to healthy targets
3. Types of AWS Elastic Load Balancer:
a. Classic Load Balancer
b. Network Load Balancer
c. Application Load Balancer
c. Amazon EC2 Autoscaling-
Amazon EC2 Autoscaling ensures that one has enough EC2 instances to handle the load for one’s Application by automatically launching or terminating the Amazon EC2 instance.
a. Better Fault Tolerance
b. Better Cost Management
c. High Availability
Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable Compute Capacity in the Cloud. It is designed the make web-scale Cloud Computing Easier for developers.
Features of Amazon EC2-
a. Scalable
b. Flexible
c. Cost Efficient
Q. What are Amazon EC2 instances?
An instance is a virtual server for running applications on Amazon’s EC2. It can be a set of tiny computers on a single machine with separate hardware and networking with all existing virtually.
Q. What are the Amazon EC2 Instance types?
Following are the Amazon EC2 Instances
a. General Purpose Instance
b. GPU Instance
c. Compute Instances
d. Storage Instances
e. Memory Instance
Q. What are the Amazon EC2 pricing models?
a. On-Demand
b. Dedicated
c. On-spot
d. Reserved
Q. What is the Amazon EC2 Application based classification?
a. Burstable
b. EBS Optimized
c. Dedicated
d. Cluster Network
AWS Storage Services
AWS Cloud Storage is online storage available as a network and is a provider to consumers over a network as storage service.
Features of AWS Cloud Storage-
a. Data Backup
b. Application
c. Messaging Data
d. Multi-Media
Q. What are the Benefits of using AWS Cloud Storage?
a. Readily Available
b. Cost-Effective
c. Secure
d. Easy Processing
Q. What are some of the AWS Cloud Storage Services?
1. Both the below-mentioned services are Block Storage( Attached to instance)
a. EBS (persistent)
b. Amazon EC2 (ephemeral)
2. Both the below-mentioned services are object Storage
a. Amazon S3
b. Amazon Glacier
3. EFS
Q. What is Amazon Elastic Block Store:
As the name suggests, this storage is a type of block storage, i.e., made with Amazon EC2. It comes attached to Amazon EC2 Instances, just like a hard drive attached to one’s system. This storage is persistent.
If one is looking for a high transactional workload throughout, one can opt for Amazon Block Store.
Q. What is Amazon S3:
Amazon S3 has a simple web services interface that allows us to use to store and retrieve any amount of data at any time from anywhere on the web
Features of using Amazon S3:
a. Flexible
b. Durable
c. Available
d. Cost-Efficient
e. Secure
f. Scalable
Q. What is Amazon S3 CRR?
Amazon S3 Cross-region-replication (CRR) enables automatic, asynchronous copying of objects across buckets in different AWS regions. Buckets Configured for Cross-region replication can be accessed by the same AWS account or different accounts.
Q. What is Amazon S3 Versioning?
We require Versioning to keep multiple versions of an object in one bucket.
Q. What are the different Amazon S3 Classes?
Q. What is Amazon Glacier?
This service provides archival storage, meaning one can store data here which is not accessed frequently. Here the retrieval time is more, but it is affordable and cheaper. This service is rightly named glacier as it used to store cold or archival data.
Q. What are the features of using Amazon Glacier?
Following are the features of using Amazon Glacier
a. Data retrieval
b. Glacier Select
c. Integration AWS Snowball and direct Connect
d. Vault Access Policy and Inventory
e. Data durability and reliability
Amazon Security Services:
AWS offers a shared security model to its consumers, which means AWS controls few security aspects, and the owner as consumers controls some. As a consumer, one gets to control identity and access management aspects of security. Let us take a look at some security services
a. AWS IAM
b. AWS KMS
c. AWS WAF
d. AWS Shield
e. AWS Trusted Advisor
Q. What is AWS IAM?
AWS’s security web service ensures that users get to access resources at appropriate levels of permission. It offers shared access, deals with the user and group level access. It also controls Centralized level access.
Q. What is AWS WAF?
If one is from a technical background, he must have heard of firewalls. These help to protect one’s web applications over a network from cyber network threats. WAF does this over the internet by configuring rules to allow, monitor, or even block web applications access requests as per rules defined
Q. What is AWS KMS?
Data encryption is a common practice to preserve data over networks. With Amazon Key Management Service, one can safely encrypt data over the AWS platform network while the network keys are also kept safe by using hardware security modules.
Q. What is AWS Shield?
It is managed Distributed Denial Of Service(DDOS) protection Service. It helps protect applications that run on AWS Infrastructure. It comes with two levels of protection. Those are AWS Standard and AWS Shield Advanced.
Q. Who are AWS Trusted Advisors?
Trusted Advisors act as an inspection in one AWS Environment to make recommendations that help save money, improve system performance, or close security gaps.
AWS Data Base Services:
Database services are critical to dealing with data, and these days data comes in a different format. Hence we need those databases that can handle this data. AWS provides reliable relational and non-relational database instances that AWS manages.
Types of database services
a. Amazon Relational Database Services(RDS)
b. Amazon Aurora
c. Amazon Elasticache
d. Amazon Redshift
e. Amazon Dynamo DB
f. Amazon Kinesis
Q. What is Amazon Relational Database Services(RDS)?
Amazon RDS or Relational Database Services is easy to set up the scale and operate database service. It is cost-efficient, resizeable, and automates administrative tasks.
Q. What is Amazon Redshift?
Amazon Redshift is a data warehouse that is fully managed database services that can scale in PETA bytes, and this can happen in minutes. Think of it as a web service that is easy to set up, manage and scale a distributed and cached environment on an AWS cloud platform.
Q. What is Amazon Aurora?
It is compatible with SQL database, gives high performance and high availability just like any enterprise database that is very cost-effective and simple like open-source database it ensures low latency and good scalability.
Q. What is Amazon Dynamo DB?
As mentioned already, these days, data can come in a different format; hence no SQL databases are widely used and are very important for extensive data application. AWS does its bits by providing fully managed SQL database service; it provides low latency and high scalability.
Q. What is Amazon Kinesis?
Kinesis is a data analysis service by Amazon that provides an easy way to collect, process, and analyze real-time streaming data to get on-time insight to respond quickly to the information.
Q. What is Amazon Elasticache?
If the requirement is to work with in-memory data storage on Cloud that is open source in nature, then Amazon elastic cache is a database service to set up a run and scale these datastores with ease using database services.
I hope this article helped you to learn the basics of Cloud technology. I would be continuing with the advanced cloud computing topics in the following article with some in-depth technical insight.
