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AWS for Beginners: Understanding AWS Terminologies: Part 1
AWS for Beginners: What is AWS EC2: Part 2
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a public cloud services platform that offers various IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service ), and PaaS (Platform as a service) services on a pay-as-you-go model (PAYG). For any service offerings, there are key backend or core services. Customer requirements mostly fall under web & mobile app hosting, data processing & warehousing, and storage & archiving. All these requirements can be achieved by leveraging AWS core services like Compute, Storage, Database, Security, Management, and Networking
AWS Compute is a basic building block. You can develop, deploy and run at scale in the AWS cloud. One of the most widely used cloud services is EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing) which falls under AWS compute category. Here is the list of the AWS Compute services.
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2 offers virtual server instances in the cloud at scale. You can resize the compute capacity on demand and pay for what you use. EC2 provides elasticity to choose T-shirt size instances based on your requirement. It offers full control of the server instances. It provides flexibility to turn off the instances during off business hours. EC2 can be integrated with other AWS services on the go. For example, You can use AWS SSM for instance automation easily. It’s highly reliable with a guaranteed uptime of 99.99%. It’s cost-effective compared to the on-premise instances and easy to manage using the AWS console and CLI. AMI stands for Amazon Machine Image which will be available on the amazon marketplace. You can also use the custom image on AWS.
Amazon EC2 Autoscaling
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling provides horizontal scaling to increase or decrease the number of instances based on your need. Pools of instances will be responsible to provide the service and automatically add/remove instances to adapt to the demand. This dynamic computing environment can be configured based on the health of the running instances, replace the impaired instances and balance the capacity across availability zones.
Amazon Elastic load Balancing
The elastic load balancing service is responsible to distribute the incoming traffic to the compute instances in the backend as per the defined policy. ELB increases the availability and fault tolerances when you use Amazon EC2 Autoscaling or more than one EC2 instance to host the service. ELB also helps to offload the encryption and decryption. The following types of ELBs are available in AWS.
- Application load balancer (app layer)
- Network load balancer (network layer)
- Classic load balancer (classic instances)
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda falls under the serverless computing model. It runs the code in response to events. In other words, customers will not be owning any compute instances but they will pay per execution. You can save costs rather than provisioning and managing the EC2 instances. You will be paying only for the computing time that you use. Lambda will be used in file processing, stream processing, web applications, IoT, and mobile backend processing. This is primarily used for event-driven applications for decoupled services.
Amazon Elastic container service
Amazon Elastic Container service is a highly available container platform to deploy container images at scale. It’s a fully managed service by AWS. Similar to the EC2 instances, ECS helps you to deploy, and manage containerized applications at scale. In the backend, ECS uses fargate to deploy the containers in a proprietary control plane which is similar to EKS/K8s.
Conclusion :
AWS offers various computing services to reduce Capital expenses and Optional expenses for their customers. In the compute segment, you have multiple options to choose services based on your requirement starting from traditional virtual instances EC2 to container services like ECS. As you know, Power comes with responsibility. AWS provides limitless power, but you need to carefully select each service and configure it to meet your business requirements. Choose the right instance size to keep the bill down and try to use services like AWS lambda and ECS, wherever possible. EC2 Auto scaling group provides flexibility to reduce the instance count based on workload.
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