What is AWS and How to Get Started? (Part 1)
AWS is a pretty popular word, when it comes to cloud computing, but no one actually knows what AWS is. With terms like lambda, servlets, serverless people often get confuse, as to from where to start studying AWS, what is the starting point ?
This Blog tends to answer all those lurking question, and provide a base into “what you will be studying exactly and what’s the scope”, “are al those fancy words like lambda, just fancy or they have a deeper technical meaning”.
Lets start….
We will be setting up our first instance and learn what all this means.
AWS or Amazon Web Service is the current leader of public cloud market followed by well know Microsoft’s Azure and google cloud.
AWS offers a 1-year free tier , you might wanna look into it : https://aws.amazon.com/free/
After logging in, you will be in the world of AWS, which has tons of things to offer, all listed right in front, from here you can select all available service and go on building your dream project.
You must know what IAAS and PAAS is, general terms in cloud computing that stand for Infrastructure as a service (IAAS) and platform as a service (PaaS), in this blog we will take a quick look at all these service that our aws has to offer, so that you all can have a brief idea about what’s all this aws fuss is about and is it worth it ? ( kinda yeah)
AWS Foundation Services
AWS Platform Services
How does AWS maintain services globally ?
Well just like any billion dollar industry, AWS has multiple datacenters around the world, these datacenters provide cloud services. And obviously, users from the closes region can use the resources from that particular datacenter, just like you would go to your nearest mall to buy stuff, not some mall which is 250 miles away in sahara desert ( yes Sahara has a mall).
While some services are global , some services are region exclusive ( your local mall maybe >>> sahara mall)
You said Regions, What tf are regions ?
Yeah, i used another fancy word region, lemme explain that duh. Region is a geographical location with a collection of availability zones mapped to physical data centers in that region. Every Region is physically isolated from and independent of every other Region in terms of location, power, water supply, etc.
That's too technical right ? layman terms, every country has states ? each state has autonomous power of culture, power, water supply. Similarly AWS regions are zones mapped to physical datacenter.
Availability zone duh ?
Availability Zones are distinct locations within an AWS Region that are engineered to be isolated from failures in other Availability Zones. They provide inexpensive, low-latency network connectivity to other Availability Zones in the same AWS Region
Wanda-vision tip 1 : To achieve high availability you deploy virtual machines, services and applications across multiple Availability Zones, so that you guarantee they are deployed in Data Centers that are isolated.
EC2-Elastic Cloud Compute
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers. Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment.
Also, EC2 VM instances are built from an AMI, we will be asked to select an AMI while creating a new EC2 instance ( virtual machine )
Instances are based on an AMI, and several open source and commercial os sys.
Amazon Machine Image ( AMI) consists of Template for the root volume for the instance, Launch Permission that controls which aws can use the AMI to launch instances and a block mapping that specifies the volume to attach to the instance.
What are the types of EC2 Instances ?
Users can select the type of EC2 instances that they want, instances are customized based on the hardware level for different use cases.
Choosing the right type of instance is necessary as it can improve the performance by some bits.
You can find more info about instances at :https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/
What's next ? This seems easy till now
Well we are just getting started, after configuring options for instance, its time for others fancy named configs
Step number 3 is configuring Instance details; Add Storage. It is now possible to add additional disk capacity, either in the form of EBS volumes (persistent storage) or instance stores (ephemeral storage that only persist for the life of your instance).
We can add some tags to manage instances next, these enable us to categorize our ec2 instances. i.e. webserver/appserver etc.
Security groups act as firewalls that operate at the EC2 instance level or the ENI level (elastic network interface). You can allow or disallow specific types of traffic to your instance, a large number of protocols are supported (SSH, TCP, HTTP, HTTPS, RDP, LDAP, UDP, ICMP etc.).
Well this sets up your instance, your first step into world of cloud and aws.
You can now connect to your instance easily — https://docs.aws.amazon.com/quickstarts/latest/vmlaunch/step-2-connect-to-instance.html
Resources :
AWS Reference Arch : https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/
Docs : https://aws.amazon.com/documentation/
Tutorial : https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/tutorials/