Amazon Cloud Directory | General Flashcards
What is Amazon Cloud Directory?
General
Amazon Cloud Directory | Security, Identity & Compliance
Amazon Cloud Directory is a cloud-native, highly scalable, high-performance, multi-tenant directory service that provides web-based directories to make it easy for you to organize and manage all your application resources such as users, groups, locations, devices, and policies, and the rich relationships between them. Cloud Directory is a foundational building block for developers to create directory-based solutions easily and without having to worry about deployment, global scale, availability, and performance.
Unlike existing traditional directory systems, Cloud Directory does not limit organizing directory objects in a single fixed hierarchy. In Cloud Directory, you can organize directory objects into multiple hierarchies to support multiple organizational pivots and relationships across directory information. For example, a directory of users may provide a hierarchical view based on reporting structure, location, and project affiliation. Similarly, a directory of devices may have multiple hierarchical views based on its manufacturer, current owner, and physical location.
Cloud Directory provides virtually unlimited directories. It scales each directory to hundreds of millions of nodes automatically while offering consistent performance. Cloud Directory is optimized for a high rate of low-latency, eventually consistent reads. Developers model directory objects using extensible schemas to enforce data correctness constraints automatically and to make it easier to program against. Cloud Directory offers rich information lookup based on customer-defined indexed attributes, thus enabling fast tree traversals and searches within the directory trees. Cloud Directory data is encrypted at rest and in transit.
What are the important characteristics of Amazon Cloud Directory?
General
Amazon Cloud Directory | Security, Identity & Compliance
Important characteristics include:
Support for the multi-hierarchical organization of information to capture rich relationships between entities.
Optimization for fast lookups and searches to retrieve values.
Support of a high rate of eventually consistent read operations.
Extensible object schema support to simplify application development and ease interoperability across multiple applications interacting with common directory information.
Seamless scaling to millions of objects and classifications.
The ability to define various types of application-specific policies on directory objects.
Encryption at rest and in transit.
What are core use cases for Cloud Directory?
General
Amazon Cloud Directory | Security, Identity & Compliance
Customers can use Cloud Directory to build applications such as IoT device registries, social networks, network configurations, and user directories. Each of these use cases typically needs to organize data hierarchically, perform high-volume and low-latency lookups, and scale to hundreds of millions of objects with global availability.
What kind of customers can use Cloud Directory?
General
Amazon Cloud Directory | Security, Identity & Compliance
Customers of all sizes can use Amazon Cloud Directory to build directory-based applications easily.
How is Cloud Directory different than traditional directories?
General
Amazon Cloud Directory | Security, Identity & Compliance
Amazon Cloud Directory is a foundational service for developers to build cloud-native directories for hundreds of millions of objects and relationships. It provides the necessary APIs for you to create a directory with a schema, add objects and relationships, and attach policies to those objects and relationships.
Traditional LDAP-based directories are designed as IT tools for organizations to manage users and devices. They provide authentication and policy frameworks, but lack the scalability to manage hundreds of millions of objects and relationships. Traditional directories are optimized for IT use cases, not for developers building cloud, mobile, and IoT applications.
