AWS (Amazon Web Services) Cloud IT – At A Glance

AWS is a comprehensive cloud services platform that offers compute power, storage, content delivery, and other functionality that organizations can use to deploy applications and services cost-effectively—with flexibility, scalability, and reliability. AWS self-service means that you can proactively address your internal plans and react to external demands when you choose.

Compute

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use.

Auto Scaling

Auto Scaling allows you to scale your Amazon EC2 capacity up or down automatically according to conditions you define. With Auto Scaling, you can ensure that the number of Amazon EC2 instances you’re using increases seamlessly during demand spikes to maintain performance, and decreases automatically during demand lulls to minimize costs. Auto Scaling is particularly well suited for applications that experience hourly, daily, or weekly variability in usage.

Elastic Load Balancing

Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances. It enables you to achieve even greater fault tolerance in your applications, seamlessly providing the amount of load balancing capacity needed in response to incoming application traffic. Elastic Load Balancing detects unhealthy instances and automatically reroutes traffic to healthy instances until the unhealthy instances have been restored. Customers can enable Elastic Load Balancing within a single Availability Zone or across multiple zones for even more consistent application performance.

Networking

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) lets you provision a private, isolated section of the AWS cloud where you can launch AWS resources in a virtual network that you define. You have complete control over your virtual networking environment, including selection of your own IP address range, creation of subnets, and configuration of route tables and network gateways. You can easily customize the network configuration for your Amazon VPC.  you can create a hardware virtual private network (VPN) connection between your corporate data center and your VPC and leverage the AWS cloud as an extension of your corporate data center.

Amazon Route 53

Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service. It answers DNS queries with low latency by using a global network of DNS servers. For instance, by using the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) service with Route 53, you can control who in your organization can make changes to your DNS records.

AWS Direct Connect

AWS Direct Connect makes it easy to establish a dedicated network connection from your premises to AWS. AWS Direct Connect lets you establish a dedicated network connection between your network and one of the AWS Direct Connect locations using VPNs (logical connections). Logical connections can be reconfigured at any time to meet your changing needs.

Storage

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)

Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web.

Amazon Glacier

Amazon Glacier is an extremely low-cost storage service that provides secure and durable storage for data archiving and backup.

Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS)

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provides block level storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon EBS volumes are network-attached, and persist independently from the life of an instance. Amazon EBS provides highly available, highly reliable, predictable storage volumes that can be attached to a running Amazon EC2 instance and exposed as a device within the instance.

AWS Storage Gateway

AWS Storage Gateway is a service connecting an on-premises software appliance with cloud-based storage to provide seamless and secure integration between an organization’s on-premises IT environment and AWS’s storage infrastructure. The service enables you to securely upload data to the AWS cloud for cost-effective backup and rapid disaster recovery. Using AWS Storage Gateway, you can back up point-in-time snapshots of your on-premises application data to Amazon S3 for future recovery.

AWS Import/Export

AWS Import/Export accelerates moving large amounts of data into and out of AWS using portable storage devices for transport. AWS transfers your data directly onto and off of storage devices using Amazon’s high-speed internal network and bypassing the Internet.  AWS Import/Export supports importing and exporting data into and out of Amazon S3 buckets and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) snapshots.

Database

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while managing time-consuming database administration tasks, freeing you up to focus on your applications and business. Amazon RDS gives you access to the capabilities of a familiar MySQL, Oracle or SQL Server database. This means that the code, applications, and tools you already use today with your existing databases can be used with Amazon RDS. Amazon RDS automatically patches the database software and backs up your database, storing the backups for a retention period that you define and enabling point-in-time recovery. You benefit from the flexibility of being able to scale the compute resources or storage capacity associated with your relational database instance by using a single API call.

Deployment & Management

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

You can use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to securely control access to AWS services and resources for your users. IAM enables you to create and manage users in AWS, and it also enables you to grant access to AWS resources for users managed outside of AWS in your corporate directory. IAM offers greater security, flexibility, and control when using AWS.

IAM enables identity federation between your corporate directory and AWS services.

Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch provides monitoring for AWS cloud resources and the applications customers run on AWS. Developers and system administrators can use it to collect and track metrics, gain insight, and react immediately to keep their applications and businesses running smoothly. Amazon CloudWatch monitors AWS resources such as Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS DB Instances, and can also monitor custom metrics generated by a customer’s applications and services. With Amazon CloudWatch, you gain system-wide visibility into resource utilization, application performance, and operational health.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an easy way for you to quickly deploy and manage applications in the AWS cloud. You simply upload your application, and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto scaling, and application health monitoring. At the same time, with Elastic Beanstalk, you retain full control over the AWS resources powering your application and can access the underlying resources at any time. Most existing application containers or platform-as-a-service solutions, while reducing the amount of programming required, significantly diminish developers' flexibility and control.

AWS CloudFormation

AWS CloudFormation gives developers and systems administrators an easy way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, provisioning and updating them in an orderly and predictable fashion.

You can use AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates or create your own templates to describe the AWS resources, and any associated dependencies or runtime parameters, required to run your application.

AWS OpsWorks

AWS OpsWorks is a DevOps solution for managing applications of any scale or complexity on the AWS cloud. AWS OpsWorks features an integrated experience for managing the complete application lifecycle, including resource provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, software updates, monitoring, and access control.