Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a secure cloud services platform, offering compute power, database storage, content delivery and other functionality to help businesses scale and grow. Explore how millions of customers are currently leveraging AWS cloud products and solutions to build sophisticated applications with increased flexibility, scalability and reliability.

In November 2004, the first AWS service launched for public usage is Simple Queue Service (SQS). Thereafter Pinkham and lead developer Christopher Brown developed the Amazon EC2 service, with a team in Cape Town, South Africa. Amazon Web Services was officially re-launched on March 14, 2006, combining the three initial service offerings of Amazon S3 cloud storage, SQS, and EC2.

AWS Global Infrastructure

AWS has developed and created its highly available global infrastructure allowing users to deploy and manage their estates all across the world through the use of the region, Availability Zone and Edge Location geographical components.

The AWS Cloud Operates 61 Availability Zones within 20 geographic regions around the world, with announced plans for 12 more Availability Zones and four more AWS Regions in Bahrain, Cape Town, Hong Kong SAR, and Milan.

Region: An AWS Region is a geographical location with a collection of availability zones mapped to physical data centers in that region. Each Amazon Region is designed to be completely isolated from the other Amazon Regions. This achieves the greatest possible fault tolerance and stability.

Availability Zone: An Availability Zone is an isolated location inside a region.  This is the place where actual compute, Storage, network and database resources are hosted. Each Availability Zones belong to a single region. Each Availability Zones is isolated, but the AZs in a region are connected through low-latency links.

Edge Location: An edge location is where end users access services located at AWS. They are located in most of the major cities around the world and are specifically used by CloudFront (CDN) to distribute content to end user to reduce latency. It is like frontend for the service we access which are located in AWS cloud.

Type Of Amazon Web Services

Each type of AWS service is categorized under a domain, the few domains which are widely used.

• Compute
• Storage
• Database
• Migration
• Network and Content Delivery
• Management Tools
• Security & Identity Compliance
• Messaging
• Analytics

Compute

The Compute domain includes services related to compute workloads, it includes the following services:

1. EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)
2. Lambda
3. Elastic Beanstalk
4. Auto Scaling
5. Elastic Load Balancing

Storage
The Storage domain includes services related data storage, it includes the following services:

1. S3 (Simple Storage Service)
2. EBS (Amazon Elastic Block Store)
3. Amazon Glacier
4. AWS Snowball

Database

The Database domain is used for database related workloads, it includes the following services:

1. Amazon Aurora
2. Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service)
3. Amazon DynamoDB
4. Amazon RedShift

Migration

The Migration domain is used for transferring data to or from the AWS Infrastructure, it includes the following services:

1. AWS database Migration Service
2. AWS SnowBall

Networking and Content Delivery
The Networking and Content Delivery domain is used for isolating your network infrastructure, and content delivery is used for faster delivery of content. It includes the following services:

1. Amazon Route 53
2. VPC (Virtual Private Cloud)
3. AWS CloudFront
4. AWS Direct Connect

Management 
The Management Tools domain consists of services which are used to manage other services in AWS, it includes the following services:

1. AWS CloudWatch
2. AWS CloudFomation
3. AWS CloudTrail

Security
The Security & Identity, Compliance domain consist of services which are used to manage to authenticate and provide security to your AWS resources. It consists of the following services:

1. AWS IAM
2. Amazon Cognito

Messaging
The Messaging domain consists of services which are used for queuing, notifying or emailing messages. It consists of the following services:

1. Amazon SQS (Simple Queue Service)
2. Amazon SNS (Simple Notification Service)
3. Amazon SES (Simple Email Service)

Analytics 
The Analytics domain consists of services, which are used for quickly and easily build and manage a data lake for analytics. It consists of the following Services:

1. EMR (Amazon Elastic Map-Reduce)
2. Amazon Kinesis Streams
3. AWS Data Pipeline

How to Become AWS Certified

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner: This certification provides individuals in a larger variety of cloud and technology roles with a way to validate their AWS Cloud knowledge and enhance their professional credibility. This exam covers four domains, including cloud concepts, security, technology, and billing and pricing.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect-Associate: This certification validates your ability to effectively demonstrate knowledge of how to architect and deploy secure and robust applications on AWS technologies. This exam is for anyone with at least one year of hands-on experience designing available, cost-efficient, fault-tolerant, and scalable and distributed systems on AWS.

AWS Certified Developer-Associate: This certification validates proficiency in developing, deploying, and debugging cloud-based applications using AWS. This exam is for anyone with one or more years of hands-on experience developing and maintaining an AWS-based application, plus in-depth knowledge of at least one high-level programming language.

AWS Certified SysOps Administrator-Associate: This certification validates your technical expertise in deployment, management, and operations on the AWS platform. This exam is for anyone with one or more years of hands-on experience operating AWS-based applications.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect-Professional: This certification validates your advanced technical skills and experience in designing distributed applications and systems on the AWS platform. This exam is anyone two or more years of hands-on experience designing and deploying cloud architecture on AWS.

AWS Certified DevOps Engineer-Professional: This certification validates your technical expertise in provisioning, operating, and managing distributed application systems on the AWS platform. This exam is for anyone with two or more years of hands-on experience provisioning, operating, and managing AWS environments.

AWS Certified Security-Specialty: This certification validates your technical expertise in securing the AWS platform. This exam is for anyone in an experienced security role.

AWS Certified Big Data-Specialty: This certification validates your technical expertise in designing and implementing AWS services to derive value from data. This exam is for anyone who performs complex Big Data analyses.

AWS Certified Advanced Networking-Specialty: This certification validates your technical expertise in designing and implementing AWS and hybrid IT architectures at scale. This exam is for anyone who performs complex networking tasks.

AWS Certified Machine Learning-Specialty: This certification validates your technical expertise in building, training, tuning, and deploying machine learning (ML) models using AWS Cloud. This exam is for anyone who performs a development or data science role.

Prerequisite and Validity for Certification.

1. You will be required to update your certification (or recertify) every three years.
2. Candidates are no longer required to have an Associate-level certification before pursuing Professional-level certification, and they are no longer required to have Foundational or Associate certification before pursuing Specialty certification.
3. You can renew your certification by using your 50% off voucher code to take the current, full exam at 50% off.

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Cloud Computing

Cloud is a term referring to accessing computer, information technology (IT), and software applications through a network connection. The term Cloud refers to a Network or Internet. In other words, we can say that Cloud is something, which is present at remote location

What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud Computing is the on-demand delivery of computer Power,Database store,Application and other IT-resources through a cloud services platform via the internet with pay-as-you-go pricing.

Benefit of Cloud Computing

Trade Capital expense for variable Expense

Instead of having to invest heavily in data center and server before you know how your going to use them, you can only pay when you consume computing resources and only pay for how much you consume.

Stop Guessing Capacity

Eliminate guessing on your infrastructure capacity needs.When you make a capacity decision prior to deploying an application either sitting with expensive resources or dealing with limited capacity. Using cloud you can access as much or as little as you need.

Increase speed & agility

In a cloud Computing environment ,reduce the time it takes to make IT resources available to your developer from weeks to just minutes.

Stop Spending Money on running and maintaining data center.

Focus on project that differentiate your business, not the infrastructure.

Go global in minutes

Easily deploy your application in multiple region around the world.This means you can provide a lower latency and better experience for your costumers.

Essential Cloud Computing Characteristics

On-demand self-service

Cloud services are expected to be available on-demand. A consumer can unilaterally provision computing capabilities, such as server time and network storage, as needed automatically without requiring human interaction with each service provider.

Broad network access

Capabilities are available over the network and accessed through standard mechanisms that promote use by heterogeneous thin or thick client platforms (e.g., mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and workstations).

Resource pooling

The provider's computing resources are pooled to serve multiple consumers using a multi-tenant model, with different physical and virtual resources dynamically assigned and reassigned according to consumer demand. There is a sense of location independence in that the customer generally has no control or knowledge over the exact location of the provided resources but may be able to specify location at a higher level of abstraction (e.g., country, state or data center). Examples of resources include storage, processing, memory and network bandwidth.

Rapid elasticity

Capabilities can be elastically provisioned and released, in some cases automatically, to scale rapidly outward and inward commensurate with demand. To the consumer, the capabilities available for provisioning often appear to be unlimited and can be appropriated in any quantity at any time.

Measured service

Cloud systems automatically control and optimize resource use by leveraging a metering capability at some level of abstraction appropriate to the type of service (e.g., storage, processing, bandwidth and active user accounts). Resource usage can be monitored, controlled and reported, providing transparency for the provider and consumer.

Cloud Deployment Models

Private Cloud: The Private Cloud allows systems and services to be accessible within an organization. It may be owned, managed and operated by organization or third party and it may exist on or off  premises.

Benefits

• Private cloud operations are not available to general public so its provide high security and privacy.
• It provide more control on its resources because it is accessed only within an organization.
• Private cloud resources are not as cost effective as public clouds but they offer more efficiency.

Disadvantage

• Private cloud is only accessible locally and is very difficult to deploy globally
• Private cloud can be scaled only within capacity of internal hosted resources.
• To maintain the cloud, Organization requires more skilled and expertise.

Community Cloud: The Community Cloud allows systems and services to be accessible by group of organizations.It may be owned, manage and operated by one or more organizations. It may exist on or off premises.

Benefits

• Community cloud provides an infrastructure to share cloud resources and capabilities among several organizations.
• Community cloud is comparatively more secure than the public cloud.

Disadvantages

• Data might be accessible by others.
• Challenging to allocate responsibilities of governance, security and cost.

Public Cloud: The Public Cloud allows systems and services to be easily accessible to the general public. It may be owned, managed and operated by business or government organization. It exist on the premises of cloud provider.

Benefits

• Public cloud share same resources with large number of consumer, it has low cost.
• Easy to integrate public cloud with private cloud, hence gives consumers a flexible approach.
• Public cloud services are delivered through Internet, therefore ensures location independence.
• Public cloud is also based on pay-per-use model.
• Resources can be scaled up or down according the requirement.

Disadvantages

• Public cloud model, Resources are shared publicly, therefore low level of security.
• It is comparatively less customizable than private cloud.

Hybrid Cloud: The Hybrid Cloud is composition of public and private cloud. However, the critical activities are performed using private cloud while the non-critical activities are performed using public cloud.

Benefits

• It offers both features of public cloud scalability and private cloud scalability.
• Private cloud in hybrid cloud ensures higher degree of security.
• Public cloud are more cost effective than private, therefore hybrid cloud can have this saving.

Disadvantages

• Networking becomes complex due to presence of private and public cloud.
• It is necessary to ensure that cloud services are compliant with organization's security policies.
• Hybrid cloud model is dependent on internal IT infrastructure.

Cloud Service Models

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) IaaS is the delivery of technology infrastructure as an on demand scalable service. IaaS provides access to fundamental resources such as physical machines, virtual machines, virtual storage, etc

Advantages

• Consumer gets access to the Infrastructure to deploy their stuff.
• Manage OS, Storage, Network Component and deployed Application.
• Does not manage or control core Infrastructure.

Examle of Iaas: EC2

Platform as a Service (PaaS): Platform as a Service (PaaS) PaaS provides the runtime environment for applications, development & deployment tools, etc. PaaS provides all of the facilities required to support the complete life cycle of building and delivering web applications and services entirely from the Internet. Typically applications must be developed with a particular platform in mind.

Advantages

• Consumer control over deployed application on a cloud
• No need  to bother about the administration because it's the responsibility of cloud provider.
• No need to manage or control OS, Storage, Network Component .
• Very easy to scale up or down automatically based on application resource demands.

Example of Paas: Elastic Beanstalk

Software as a Service (SaaS): Software as a Service (SaaS) SaaS model allows to use software applications as a service to end users. SaaS is a software delivery methodology that provides licensed multi-tenant access to software and its functions remotely as a Web-based service.

Advantages

• No need to manage or control cloud infrastructure, OS, Storage, Network Component and individual application. 
• They can be scaled up or down on demand.
• They are automatically upgraded and updated.
• Application make it available over a network.

Example of Saas: Microsoft Office 365, DropBox.

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