A basic understanding of common IT terminology and practices is required for you to follow the content of this chapter.

Amazon Web Services essentially put the words cloud and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS, in its abbreviated form) into the IT dictionary. I'm not implying that Amazon Web Services invented cloud computing, not at all! The creation of cloud computing is a multi-faceted story that took time and organic growth to become what it is today. I am simply implying that Amazon Web Services was the one that really made your typical enterprise start thinking of IT as services instead of investments.

Cloud computing can be broken down into three categories that define what kind of service is being consumed from the cloud, that is, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). The following diagram illustrates the services that are offered by each service layer:

Once we begin consuming cloud resources, we need to be aware that we are operating our application on some kind of provider-managed infrastructure and that both parties have a different level of access to the environment.

The following diagram represents an overview of the shared responsibility model:

There are quite a few differences between the shared responsibilities depending on whether a customer is running an IaaS or a PaaS. For example, if the customer is using IaaS and running a virtual machine with a database instance on the cloud, the provider has access to and responsibility for securing the following:

• The underlying hardware in their data center
• The server and hypervisor where the VM instance is running
• The storage subsystem where the data volume is residing
• The physical network devices that connect the hypervisor to the internet
...

Any conversation about cloud computing will eventually lead to the question "Why? What's the benefit and why should I be using cloud computing?" There are multiple factors that contribute to cloud computing outperforming the traditional, on-premises data center-oriented approach to computing, but the following capabilities are the ones that are the most likely to make on-premises data centers a thing of the past:

• The ability to trade capital expenses for operational expenses when running IT
• The ability to use inexpensive compute units on demand
• Increased application delivery speed and agility
• Capacity matched to demand
• The ability to go global in minutes

Perhaps the most prominent advantage when using Amazon Web Services is the ability to deploy your services globally within minutes. Using scripts, templates or 3rd party tools, you can...

Amazon Web Services defines two service layers a bit more loosely than the standard IaaS and PaaS models. The underlying layer of AWS services is called AWS Foundation Services and includes all of the IaaS deliveries that AWS provides, as well as some services that fall squarely into the PaaS, and even SaaS layers of cloud computing. AWS Foundation Services can be divided into the following functional groups:

• Network services
• Compute services
• Storage services
• Security and identity services
• End user applications

Network services are sub-divided into different offerings that deliver services that allows for the complete management of our network infrastructure. Examples include the...

Platform Services provide users with platform and software options that allow developers to easily provision, deploy, and deliver services to their application without the typical infrastructure management overhead. AWS Platform Services can be divided into the following functional groups:

• Databases
• Management tools
• Analytics
• Application services
• Developer tools
• Mobile and IoT services

Database services are sub-divided into different offerings that deliver database services and allow for the acceleration of the delivery of data. Examples include the following service offerings:

• Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS): A fully managed relational database service that allows for the seamless...

When the AWS environment was conceived, the initial requirement for the creation and consumption of resources was that they were simple, easy, and intuitive to consume, with no training required. If we look back to 2006-2007, the early years of AWS, this was very true. AWS had a simple design and the creation and consumption of the limited number of resources was relatively simple for anyone with an appropriate level of general IT knowledge so that they could come along and create resources with very little adjustment to the way AWS defined them. Nowadays, this is starting to become less and less true. Over the past decade or so, the AWS platform has evolved, seemingly at an exponential speed, to a point where it has so many services and so many offerings that you would be hard pressed to find anyone who would say that they clearly understand and are able to...

When we talk about cloud-native applications, we are simply defining them as applications that are built to run on the cloud and have the ability to access the cloud environment they are running on in one way or another. This capability can allow an application to be self-managed and, among other factors, can allow it to do any or all of the following:

• Provision its own resources, such as instances, databases, storage, and networks
• Access services in the cloud, such as monitoring and enumerating services to determine its own state
• Have the ability to scale itself according to events or metrics that are retrieved from the cloud
• Manage other applications running in the cloud

On the other hand, applications that have been designed with a server less approach in mind are designed in a way that they consume no visible server instance resources...

One of the most important aspects of running your application in an efficient and highly available manner is the correct selection of the location of your AWS services. AWS is designed to offer multiple facilities in several different regions so that it can provide both high availability of services within a single region and the ability for us to architect solutions that are distributed and replicated across different regions.

Based on the experience gained from running Amazon since the 90s, AWS has set out to create a world-class infrastructure architecture that is composed of the following components:

• Datacenter
• Availability zones
• Region

The lowest infrastructure component in the AWS architecture is the datacenter. A datacenter is essentially designed to hold raw compute, network, and storage capacity and to provide no redundancy to...

Amazon Web Services provides a unified environment where cloud computing infrastructure, platform, and software services can be consumed by the end user. It enables us to be able to build an application by utilizing any combination of the AWS services on offer.

In this chapter, we learned how easy it is to create an AWS account and started using those services to build complex and powerful applications before making them available on the internet or on our internal network by using a VPN or Direct Connect uplink. AWS is a great environment when ease of management, the ability to provision quickly and globally, and financial constraints require us to build compute capacity from operating expenditures.

Although it is fairly simple to build applications on AWS, there are several challenges when using cloud computing systems as a standalone solution or as a hybrid model...

1. What is the difference between Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service?
2. Which layers is the cloud vendor responsible for when looking at Platform as a Service?
3. What are the most obvious advantages of using AWS?
4. List the five AWS Foundation service categories.
5. Define the three ways of accessing the AWS environment outlined in this book.
6. Essentially, what is a cloud-native application?
7. What is the difference between regions and availability zones?
8. Would running two virtual machine instances in two datacenters in one availability zone make your application highly available?

• Overview of the AWS Platform: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aws-technical-content/latest/aws-overview/introduction.html
• Using the AWS CLI: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/setup-awscli.html
• AWS developer tools and SDKs: https://aws.amazon.com/tools/
• Cloud-native computing: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/cloud-native-computing/
• AWS regions and AZs: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/Concepts.RegionsAndAvailabilityZones.html