AWS

    • Assume everything will fail someday.
    • Prevent single point of failure by adding backup instances.

    Simple Storage Service

    • it is good for data that does not change fast, because it has a delayed effect to refresh
    • stores using Elastic Block Storage
    • provides access via REST API and ftp.
    • uses Object Storage (key-value)
    • it has a caching effect
    • stores in flat organization containers called buckets
    • object retrieval by keys
    • by keeping it flat, it is very fast to query

    Glacier

    • like S3 but for archiving
    • 3 to 5 hour retrieval time
    • super cheap
    • use it for backups
    • uses Object Storage

    CloudFront

    Content Delivery Network (CDN)

    • uses Object Storage

    CloudFormation

    Templates for AWS environments

    • text template files of your AWS environment written in json
    • can pass parameters
    • this would be helpful to create an instance of certain environment, for example staging environment for QA.

    ELB

    Elastic Load Balancer

    • balances traffic (HTTP, HTTPS, TCP) between EC2 instances using round-robin
    • scales
    • single CNAME for DNS config

    CloudWatch

    Monitoring (similar to NewRelic)

    • monitoring CPU, Network traffic, etc.
    • can set alarms

    RDS

    Relational Database Service

    • supports MySQL, Postgres, SQL, Oracle
    • quick recovery backups, security, scalability
    • no ssh access or root access
    • has development mode (way cheaper)
    • you can access it from EC2
    • Similar to RabbitMQ
    • uses a pull (polling) flow

    SWF

    Simple Work Flow

    • eg. e-commerce work-flow
    • looks like a sequence diagram
    • has a Decider which decides if should proceed with workflow or abort.
    • this can help decouple complex work-flows

    SNS

    Simple Notification Service

    • publish messages from app or console
    • uses subscribers
    • eg. CloudWatch alerts
    • uses a push flow
    • email
    • SMS
    • SQS
    • HTTP
    • app json

    Dynamo DB

    • uses Solid State Drives (super fast)
    • used for stateless apps (eg. sessions)
    • the user session state can be saved in NoSQL instead of the client. It wouldn’t be possible to keep state in the server when using load balancing.
    • recommended for using AWS SDKs
    • that way the EC2 doesn’t need to instantiate SDK with creds because it gets them from the EC2 metadata.