AWS in a Nutshell

I was very recently involved with a customer on providing Amazon Web Services (AWS) (mainly with Auto scaling and Route53 DNS services). It’s then I realized, how vast the AWS area is, and why it is on top of every other cloud services (like Microsoft, Google and IBM mainly). It is not in the number of services I am impressed, but the intuitive way of configuring, monitoring and connecting services each other to work and the benefits it confers to the business. Honestly, I did work with Azure first and then came to AWS. So I was missing all the fancy colours and icons in AWS unlike in Azure. Azure is good in its own way and AWS is one another level.

My intention here is not to do a comparison, but to list the major services in a capsule model. This will help you realize, how much AWS is evolving and what all it is capable of.

Some terminologies good to be aware of:

Regions: Geographical locations with 2 or more availability zones.

Availability Zones (AZ): Simple data centres to retrieve data in case of any calamity or so.

Edge location: Mainly to cache contents, Cloudfront services (AWS CDN), 96 exactly, when I am writing this article.

Every service in AWS is categorized under some headings. I have my own doubts whether certain services fall under the category as it is now. But that’s irrelevant for us as of now. This is not the complete list of services obviously, but in a nutshell, this helps you to realize the power of AWS and to identify the use cases yourself!

COMPUTE
1. EC2: Elastic Compute Cloud, VM and/or Dedicated machines it is simply
2. EBS: Elastic Beans Stalk – Those who don’t care about infrastructure, but only their own code. Just provisions infrastructure for us. More developer friendly
3. Lambda: Code that upload and execute within AWS with some fancy behaviours. Keeps updating every time, C#, Python, NodeJS, java supported as of now
4. Lightsail: AWS VPS, Virtual Private services as such Fixed IP address, RDP services, SSH with Management console. Server access restrictions & so on
5. Batch: Batch computing in the cloud.

STORAGE
1. S3: Simple Storage services, Buckets as the containers
2. EFS: Elastic File System with network attached storage on multiple VMS
3. Glacier: is the long duration storage, with low cost, Data Archival for long term that needs check in a year only
4. Snowball: Terabytes of data can be send to AWS and store in it. Like in disk or USB etc.
5. Storage gateway: Virtual appliances to store data in AWS data centres

DATABASES
1. RDS: Relational Database Services like MSSQL, ORACLE, Aurora
2. Dynamo DB – Non RDS
3. ElasticCache – Caching commonly queried things (eg: Top 10 products)
4. Redshift – built for Data warehousing, complex queries, big reports

MIGRATIONS
1. AWS Migration Hub: A tracking service that logs all migration results of AWS service with 3rd party tool
2. ADS: Application Discovery service: Automated set of tool on applications we have and its dependencies
3. Database Migration Services: Migration from on premise to AWS, exclusively for DB
4. Server migration services: Helps you migrate the physical server to AWS cloud to a VM

NETWORKING & CDN
1. VPC: Virtual Private Cloud – It’s a virtual data centre, Network ACL, Route tables etc. It’s the heart of course
2. Cloudfront: Amazons CDN. All contents can be cached easily nearby geographical edge location
3. Route53: AWS DNS service (like a telephone book)
4. API Gateway: is a way of creating API services for other services to communicate
5. Direct Connect: is a direct connection possibility (Dedicated line) from your office to AWS

DEVELOPER TOOLS
1. CodeStar: a way of getting a group of developers together. Project Managing code
2. CodeCommit: place to store your code. A source control in AWS
3. CodeBuild: It will compile the code and package it to deploy
4. CodeDeploy: Deployment services with an automated service
5. CodePipeline: A Continuous Delivery service for your application
6. Xray: To debug and analyse your application. Request tracing with performance analysis
7. Cloud9: IDE inside AWS console… to write and develop code (Acquired by AWS on 2017)

MANAGEMENT TOOLS
1. Cloudwatch: is the monitoring service
2. Cloudformation: way of scripting infrastructure (firewalls, machines, network). Templates are available for specific needs. Can reuse it too. In JSON format
3. CloudTrail: Everytime we log in, this service logs every activity by default for one week. It’s the auditing service
4. Config: Monitors the configuration of AWS environment
5. OpsWorks: Similar to EBS. A configuration management service that enables your system administrators to configure and operate your web applications using Chef.
6. Service Catalog: Manage a catalog of all IT service for decades
7. Systems Manager: Interface for managing AWS services… To roll out a security patches for selected applications or services
8. Trusted Advisor: gives you advice around security, ports open, risks involved, services recommended, cost effectiveness etc.
9. Managed services: AWS manage services for those who has no time to check routine in portal

MEDIA SERVICES (New in 2017)
1. Elastic Transcoder: Every time a video is coded and uploaded is managed via this, the sizes and format gets optimized for all resolutions/devices
2. MediaConvert: File based media transcoding service
3. MediaLive: Live media processing service for broadcasting
4. MediaPackage: prepares and protects the media for broadcasting
5. MediaStore: Storage service optimised for media

MACHINE LEARNING
1. SageMaker: easy for developers to deep learning
2. Comprehend: analysis around the data/feedbacks posted on you (to analyse good or bad)
3. DeepLens: artificially aware camera.. Eg: Create an app that detects somebody coming to your front door. Physical hardware it is
4. Lex: way of communicating customers via AI features
5. Machine Learning: entry level Sagemaker. Works based on data sets and its results
6. Polly: takes texts and turns into speech, in a very intuitive manner by selecting accents and languages
7. Rekognition: supports video and image, so that it recognizes what is inside
8. Amazon Translate: machine translation services just as like google translate
9. Transcribe: service speech to text for big audience

ANALYTICS
1. Athena: service that allows to runs SQL queries against S3 buckets
2. EMR: Elastic Map reduce, processing large amounts of data like BigData
3. Kinesis: injecting large amount to data into Aws on a live feed (social media tweets, hashtag)
4. Kinesis Media Services: Millions of people streaming video services
5. QuickSight: AWS Business Intelligence tool. Cost effective compared to others
6. Data pipeline: way of moving data between various AWS services
7. Glue: used for ETL, (Extract-Transform-Load) . Format large amount of data securely

SECURITY, IDENTITY, COMPLAINCE
1. IAM: Identity Access Management. Creates and manage users, roles, policy, permissions etc
2. Cognito: way of doing device authentication (fb, gmail etc) for temp access to AWS resources
3. GuardDuty: monitors malicious activities on AWS account
4. Inspector: agent that can be installed on VM or EC2 and run some texts (security). Scheduled and report generation possible
5. Macie: Scan your S3 buckets and look for information’s
6. Certificate Manager: SSL generation and managing
7. CloudHSM: Hardware Security Module, is a dedicated bits of hardware used to store public and private keys and other data. Expensive it is of course
8. Directory Services: way of integrating MS ADS with AWS services
9. WAF: Web Application Firewall – looks at the application layer for SQL injection, cross scripting etc
10. Shield: helps to prevent DDOS attacks
11. Artifact: Portal for on-demand access to check and download compliance documents. Payment/personal info.

MOBILE SERVICES
1. Mobile Hub: A management console for mobility applications
2. Pinpoint: Push notifications for mobile engagements
3. AWS AppSync: automatically updates the data for mobile and web applications
4. Device farm: Testing apps on real live devices
5. Mobile analytics: Analytics service for mobile apps specifically

AR/VR (Augmented/Virtual Reality)
1. Sumerian: Still a work in progress by AWS

APPLICATION INTEGRATION
1. Step Functions: managing different lambda functions
2. MQ: Message Queues like RabbitMQ
3. SNS: Notification service (e.g. Billing Alarm)
4. SQS: Decoupling your infrastructure with a queue
5. SWF: Simple Workflow Service… (e.g. ordering a package). Just helps follows a workflow prewritten

CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT
1. Connect: a contact centre as a service in the cloud
2. Simple Email Service: an email service to send large amount of emails with customizable templates

BUSINESS PRODUCTIVITY
1. Alexa for Business: basically dial into meeting room, and much more various business services
2. Chime: Video conferencing with records
3. WorkDocs: Dropbox for AWS
4. WorkMail : AWS version of Office 365

DESKTOP & APP STREAMING
1. Workspaces: VDI solution that helps run windows or Linux (Desktop in cloud)
2. Appstream 2.0: Streaming applications like Citrix

IOT
1. IOT: service that includes Thousands of devices sending information’s To and fro
2. iOT Device Management: service that handles devices included
3. AWS FreeRTOS: Free operating system for microcontrollers

GAME DEVELOPMENT
1. Gamelift : VR game development in AWS
Fair enough I do admit that, it’s a very long list of services for a capsuled way of learning. Trust me, that’s just a subset of the whole list which I went through. And even if you need more a refined and frequently used list of services I recommend the below marked services to be referred as a must-know list.

If you need more detailed help in any service, feel free to contact us. Go indulge in AWS Cloud in no time!!!