AWS Core Services Flashcards
Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
- A web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud
- Designed to make cloud computing easier for developers as it provides complete control of your computing resources
What does ‘elastic’ refer to within EC2?
The fact that if your servers (EC2 instances) are configured properly, you can increase or decrease the amount of servers required by an application automatically
What does ‘compute’ refer to within EC2?
The server (EC2 instances) that resources are being presented from
What does ‘cloud’ refer to within EC2?
The fact that the resources are cloud-hosted compute resources
Benefits of EC2 instances
- Pay as you go — you only pay for running instances
- Broad selection of hardware/software and selection of where to host your instances
Steps to build and configure an EC2 instance
- Choose the region where the instance will be hosted
- Launch the EC2 wizard
- Select the Amazon Machine Image (AMI) — which provides a software platform for the instance
- Select the instance type — which refers to the hardware capabilities
- Configure the network, storage, and key pairs
- Launch & connect
Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
An easy to use, high performance block storage service designed for use with Amazon EC2 for both throughput and transaction intensive workloads at any scale
Benefits of Amazon EBS volumes
- Can be used as a storage device for Amazon EC2 instances
- Gives you the ability to create point-in-time snapshots of your volumes and recreate a new volume from a snapshot at any time in order to provide an even higher level of data durability
- Have the ability to increase capacity and change to different types — such as a hard disk to an SSD disk (and vice versa)
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
- A fully managed storage service that provides a simple API for storing and retrieving data
- Ability to place unlimited objects in the service as it holds trillions of objects and regularly peaks at millions of requests per second
- Provides low-latency access to data over the internet by HTTP or HTTPS — that way you can retrieve data anytime and from anywhere
- Ability to create buckets to store data
- Can access this service via the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, AWS SDK, or in your bucket directly via the rest endpoints
What is a “key”?
- A string that can be used to retrieve the object later (Example– media.welcome.mp4)
- Common practice is to set these strings in a way that resembles a file path
Amazon S3 common use cases:
- Storing application assets
- Static Web Hosting
- Backup & disaster recovery
- Staging area for Big Data
AWS Global Infrastructure includes:
- AWS Regions
- Availability Zones
- Edge locations
AWS Regions
Geographic areas that host two or more Availability Zones and are the organizing level for AWS services
Details about AWS Regions:
- Picking the right region is important to optimize latency while minimizing costs and adhering to regulatory requirements
- Ability to deploy resources in multiple regions
- Regions are separate from one another — resources and services are not automatically replicated in other regions
Availability Zones
Collection of data centers within a specific region