The first edition of AWS Administration - The Definitive Guide covered a lot of the core AWS services, such as EC2, EBS, Auto Scaling, ELB, RDS, S3, and so on. In this edition, we will be exploring and learning things a bit differently by exploring a lot of the services and functionalities that work in conjunction with the core services:
- EC2 Systems Manager: EC2 Systems Manager is a service that basically provides a lot of add-on features for managing your compute infrastructure. Each compute entity that's managed by EC2 Systems Manager is called a managed instance and this can be either an EC2 instance or an on-premise machine! EC2 Systems Manager provides out-of-the-box capabilities to create and baseline patches for operating systems, automate the creation of AMIs, run configuration scripts, and much more!
- Elastic Beanstalk: Beanstalk is a powerful yet simple service designed for developers to easily deploy and scale their web applications. At the moment, Beanstalk supports web applications developed using Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, and Go. Developers simply design and upload their code to Beanstalk ,which automatically takes care of the application's load balancing, auto-scaling, monitoring, and so on. At the time of writing, Elastic Beanstalk supports the deployment of your apps using either Docker containers or even directly over EC2 instances, and the best part of using this service is that it's completely free! You only need to pay for the underlying AWS resources that you consume.
- Elastic File System: The simplest way to define Elastic File System, or EFS, is an NFS share on steroids! EFS provides simple and highly scalable file storage as a service designed to be used with your EC2 instances. You can have multiple EC2 instances attach themselves to a single EFS mount point which can provide a common data store for your applications and workloads.
- WAF and Shield: In this book, we will be exploring quite a few security and compliance providing services that provide an additional layer of security besides your standard VPC. Two such services we will learn about are WAF and Shield. WAF, or Web Application Firewall, is designed to safeguard your applications against web exploits that could potentially impact their availability and security maliciously. Using WAF you can create custom rules that safeguard your web applications against common attack patterns, such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and so on.
Similar to WAF, Shield is also a managed service that provides security against DDoS attacks that target your website or web application:
- CloudTrail and Config: CloudTrail is yet another service that we will learn about in the coming chapters. It is designed to log and monitor your AWS account and infrastructure activities. This service comes in really handy when you need to govern your AWS accounts against compliances, audits, and standards, and take necessary action to mitigate against them. Config, on the other hand, provides a very similar set of features, however, it specializes in assessing and auditing the configurations of your AWS resources. Both services are used synonymously to provide compliance and governance, which help in operational analysis, troubleshooting issues, and meeting security demands.
- Cognito: Cognito is an awesome service which simplifies the build and creation of sign-up pages for your web and even mobile applications. You also get options to integrate social identity providers, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon, using SAML identity solutions.
- CodeCommit, CodeBuild, and CodeDeploy: AWS provides a really rich set of tools and services for developers, which are designed to deliver software rapidly and securely. At the core of this are three services that we will be learning and exploring in this book, namely CodeCommit, CodeBuild, and CodeDeploy. As the names suggest, the services provide you with the ability to securely store and version control your application's source code, as well as to automatically build, test, and deploy your application to AWS or your on-premises environment.
- SQS and SNS: SQS, or Simple Queue Service, is a fully-managed queuing service provided by AWS, designed to decouple your microservices-based or distributed applications. You can even use SQS to send, store, and receive messages between different applications at high volumes without any infrastructure management as well. SNS is a Simple Notification Service used primarily as a pub/ sub messaging service or as a notification service. You can additionally use SNS to trigger custom events for other AWS services, such as EC2, S3, and CloudWatch.
- EMR: Elastic MapReduce is a managed Hadoop as a Service that provides a clustered platform on EC2 instances for running Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark frameworks. EMR is highly useful for crunching massive amounts of data as well as to transform and move large quantities of data from one AWS data source to another. EMR also provides a lot of flexibility and scalability to your workloads with the ability to resize your cluster depending on the amount of data being processed at a given point in time. It is also designed to integrate effortlessly with other AWS services, such as S3 for storing the data, CloudWatch for monitoring your cluster, CloudTrail to audit the requests made to your cluster, and so on.
- Redshift: Redshift is a petabyte scale, managed data warehousing service in the cloud. Similar to its counterpart, EMR, Redshift also works on the concept of clustered EC2 instances on which you upload large datasets and run your analytical queries.
- Data Pipeline: Data Pipeline is a managed service that provides end users with an ability to process and move datasets from one AWS service to another as well as from on-premise datastores into AWS storage services, such as RDS, S3, DynamoDB, and even EMR! You can schedule data migration jobs, track dependencies and errors, and even write and create preconditions and activities that define what actions Data Pipeline has to take against the data, such as run it through an EMR cluster, perform a SQL query over it, and so on.
- IoT and Greengrass: AWS IoT and Greengrass are two really amazing services that are designed to collect and aggregate various device sensor data and stream that data into the AWS cloud for processing and analysis. AWS IoT provides a scalable and secure platform, using which you can connect billions of sensor devices to the cloud or other AWS services and leverage the same for gathering, processing, and analyzing the data without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure or scalability needs. Greengrass is an extension of the AWS IoT platform and essentially provides a mechanism that allows you to run and manage executions of data pre-processing jobs directly on the sensor devices.
With these services out of the way, let's quickly look at how we plan to move forward with the rest of the chapters in this book!
