Written by Carlos Requena
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[AWS] An Introduction to Amazon Web Services Part 2

AWS Fundamentals

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a secure cloud services platform, AWS provides on-demand delivery of IT resources via the Internet on a secure cloud services platform, offering compute power, storage, databases, content delivery, and other functionality to help businesses scale and grow.

AWS provides the key advantages of cloud computing: Capacity exactly matches your need, you pay only for what you use, economies of scale result in lower costs, and the service is provided by a vendor experienced in running large-scale networks.

The AWS Cloud provides a broad set of infrastructure services, such as computing power, storage options, networking and databases, delivered as a utility: on-demand, available in seconds, with pay-as-you-go pricing. From data warehousing to deployment tools, directories to content delivery, over 50 services are available in just a few mouse clicks with AWS.

New services are quick to provision, without upfront capital expense, allowing enterprises, start-ups, SMBs and customers in the public sector to access the building blocks they need to respond quickly to changing business requirements.

AWS Global Infrastructure

AWS serves over one million active customers in more than 190 countries, and it continues to expand its global infrastructure steadily to help organizations achieve lower latency and higher throughput for their business needs.

AWS provides a highly available technology infrastructure platform with multiple locations worldwide. These locations are composed of regions and Availability Zones. Each region is a separate geographic area. Each region has multiple, isolated locations known as Availability Zones.

AWS enables the placement of resources and data in multiple locations. Resources aren’t replicated across regions unless organizations choose to do so.

Each region is completely independent and is designed to be completely isolated from the other regions. This achieves the greatest possible fault tolerance and stability.

Each Availability Zone is also isolated, but the Availability Zones in a region are connected through low-latency links.

Availability Zones are physically separated within a typical metropolitan region and are located in lower-risk flood plains (specific flood zone categorization varies by region).

Availability Zones are all redundantly connected to multiple tier-1 transit providers. By placing resources in separate Availability Zones, you can protect your website or application from a service disruption impacting a single location.

AWS Well-Architected Framework

The Well-Architected framework has been developed to help cloud architects build the most secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure possible for their applications. This framework provides a consistent approach for customers and partners to evaluate architectures, and provides guidance to help implement designs that will scale with your application needs over time.

AWS Well-Architected Framework Principles

1. Stop guessing capacity needs
2. Test systems at production scale
3. Automate to ease architectural experimentation
4. Allow for evolutionary architectures
5. Drive your architecture using data
6. Improve through Game Days

The AWS Well-Architected framework includes strategies to help you to obtain guidance to produce stable and efficient systems so you can focus on functional requirements.

You can get started by downloading the AWS Well-Architected Framework whitepaper PDF

AWS Well-Architected Framework Pillars

Operational Excellence

The operational excellence pillar focuses on running and monitoring systems to deliver business value, and continually improving processes and procedures. Key topics include managing and automating changes, responding to events, and defining standards to successfully manage daily operations.

Download The Operational Excellence whitepaper PDF | Kindle

Security and Compliance

The security pillar focuses on protecting information & systems. Key topics include confidentiality and integrity of data, identifying and managing who can do what with privilege management, protecting systems, and establishing controls to detect security events.

Download The Security Pillar whitepaper PDF | Kindle

Reliability

The reliability pillar focuses on the ability to prevent, and quickly recover from failures to meet business and customer demand. Key topics include foundational elements around setup, cross project requirements, recovery planning, and how we handle change.

Download the Reliability Pillar whitepaper PDF | Kindle

Performance Eficiency

The performance efficiency pillar focuses on using IT and computing resources efficiently. Key topics include selecting the right resource types and sizes based on workload requirements, monitoring performance, and making informed decisions to maintain efficiency as business needs evolve.

Download the Performance Efficiency whitepaper PDF | Kindle

Cost Optimization

Cost Optimization focuses on avoiding un-needed costs. Key topics include understanding and controlling where money is being spent, selecting the most appropriate and right number of resource types, analyzing spend over time, and scaling to meet business needs without overspending.

Download the Cost Optimization whitepaper PDF | Kindle

Compute and Networking Services

AWS provides a variety of compute and networking services to deliver core functionality for businesses to develop and run their workloads.

These compute and networking services can be leveraged with the storage, database, and application services to provide a complete solution for computing, query processing, and storage across a wide range of applications.