Posted by With growth of 37% in Q2 2019, Amazon Web Services aka AWS is staggering ahead from it’s competitors.[1] Though AWS revenue performance in the second quarter is less than the Q1 2019, but the world market share from public cloud perspective make AWS a leader yet again. With 47% of cloud market share, AWS is way ahead of the race from it’s rival Microsoft Azure, which is at 22%.[2]
Bezos has said, “AWS had the unusual advantage of a seven-year head start before facing like-minded competition. As a result, the AWS services are by far the most evolved and most functionality-rich.” – which is of-course a primary reason for exponential growth of AWS.
Coming to this post, we’ll closely look at core building blocks and frequently used AWS services across the board. And here are they
Furthermore, we look at each area in detail depicted above. For an instance, we’ll delve deep into Core Architecture and see what are they and what are the best practices to follow while setting them up.
Now let’s look at the Network piece. As networking is inevitable for any deployment, – a thorough and careful measure must be taken before considering its architecture. In AWS, networking called as Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) / EC2-VPC.
AWS’s major grosser in terms of bringing revenue is compute services. From the inception, AWS has provided numerous compute options for cloud computing. Eventually, they are classified into general purpose, compute optimized, memory optimized, storage optimized and accelerated computing etc. Again they can be on-demand, reserved, spot or scheduled instances. Few best practices to note below.
AWS S3 was first introduced in 2006 and continually improved there on. Now there are numerous options for storage and database in AWS. They are summarized below.
In AWS, security is a shared responsibility. Security and governance in AWS is evolving. A common paradigm of authentication in AWS is driven through user, role, federation, instance profile and assumed roles etc. An authorization can be driven majorly through policy. Here are few different authentication and authorization services in AWS. (Pic courtesy: Michael Wittig)
Speaking about governance in AWS, “The Trusted Advisor” is one of the best place to start with and it comes at no charge. It became immensely popular with it’s inception since 2014, I suppose. Of-course there are few other services through which security can be monitored and they are Config, Cloud Trail, Inspector etc.
In 2015, AWS announced Well-Architected Framework which provides the core strategies and best practices for architecting resources in cloud. It’s core concept based on 5 pillars:
Operational Excellence – Running and managing systems to deliver business value.
Security – Protecting information and systems.
Reliability – Preventing and quickly recovering from failures.
Performance Efficiency – Using IT and compute resources efficiently.
Cost Optimization – Avoiding unnecessary costs/spending in cloud.
Last but not the least, it’s imperative to decide on success criteria before choosing any cloud services and AWS is no exception. They can be measured by following:
Sources:
[1] Amazon’s cloud business reports 37%
[2] AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud Market Share 2019
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