Understanding Cloud Computing Basics

Introduction to Cloud Computing

• Cloud computing is on-demand access to compute power, databases, storage, and applications over the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing.
• Cloud resources are located in large data centers globally.
• AWS owns the computers its cloud service uses.
• Cloud resources work together to build solutions for business and tech needs.
• Cloud computing lets users think of infrastructure as software.
• Users select cloud services that match needs, provision/terminate resources on-demand, and pay for what they use.
• It is possible to elastically scale resources up/down in an automated way.
• Cloud resources can be treated as temporary/disposable.
• Cloud computing's flexibility helps businesses implement new solutions quickly with low upfront costs.

Cloud Computing Deployment Models

• Cloud deployment means the whole application runs in the cloud.
• Cloud deployment is either created in the cloud or migrated from existing infrastructure.
• Hybrid deployment connects cloud-based and existing on-premises resources.
• The hybrid model lets organizations grow infrastructure into the cloud while connecting cloud resources to internal systems.
• On-premises deployment uses virtualization and resource management tools, which is sometimes called private cloud.
• On-premises deployment can provide dedicated resources.
• On-premises deployments are often legacy IT infrastructure, but they might use application management and virtualization to increase resource utilization.

Similarities Between AWS and On-Premises IT

• AWS security groups, network ACLs, and IAM are similar to firewalls, ACLs, and administrators.
• Elastic Load Balancing and Amazon VPC are like routers, network pipelines, and switches.
• Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances are like on-premises servers.
• Amazon EBS, Amazon EFS, Amazon S3, and Amazon RDS are similar to direct attached storage (DAS), storage area networks (SAN), network attached storage (NAS), and relational database management service (RDBMS).

Advantages with AWS

• Capital expenses are traded for variable expenses.
• AWS has higher economies of scale and passes savings to customers.
• It eliminates guessing capacity.
• AWS increases speed and agility.
• You stop spending money on running and maintaining data centers
• Focus on projects that differentiate your business instead of focusing on infrastructure.
• Applications can be deployed globally with just a few clicks.

Web Services

• Web services use a standardized format, such as XML or JSON, for API interactions.

AWS Specifics

• AWS is a secure cloud platform
• AWS offers many global cloud-based products.
• AWS offers on-demand access to compute, storage, network, database, other IT resources, and management tools.
• AWS services offer flexibility
• You only pay for the individual services you need, for as long as you use them.
• AWS services work together.

AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF)

• AWS CAF guidance and best practices help organizations identify gaps in skills and processes to build a cloud approach across the organization and throughout the IT lifecycle, to accelerate cloud adoption.

Business Perspective in AWS CAF

• Stakeholders use AWS CAF to prioritize cloud adoption to align with business' strategies and goals with IT.

People Perspective in AWS CAF

• Stakeholders use AWS CAF to evaluate skills and process requirements to build an agile organization.

Governance Perspective in AWS CAF

• Stakeholders focus on aligning IT strategy and goals with business strategy and goals through skills and processes.

Platform Perspective in AWS CAF

• Stakeholders describe the architecture of the target state environment, and communicates using architectural dimensions and models.
• The AWS CAF includes principles and patterns for implementing new cloud solutions and migrating on-premises workloads.

Security Perspective in AWS CAF

• Stakeholders ensure security objectives are met by structuring the selection and implementation of security controls that meet the organization's needs.

Operation Perspective in AWS CAF

• Stakeholders define how day-to-day business is conducted and align with the operations of the business to define how current operating procedures.

Cloud Economics and Billing

• Compute is charged per hour/second and varies by instance type.
• Storage is charged typically per GB.
• Data transfer outbound is charged.
• There is no charge for data transfer inbound.
• Users pay for what you use.
• Reserved instances save money.
• AURI
• PURI
• NURI
• AWS offers custom pricing for high-volume projects.
• AWS Free Tier enables hands-on experience.

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

• TCO is a financial estimate that helps determine the direct and indirect costs of a service

AWS Pricing Calculator

• It is useful for estimating monthly costs of AWS services.
• For identifying opportunities for cost reduction.
• Before building, its useful for modeling solutions.
• AWS estimates allow users to explore price points and calculations behind their estimate.
• Users can find available instance types and contract terms that meet their needs.

AWS Global Infrastructure

• The AWS Global Infrastructure is designed to deliver a flexible, reliable, scalable, and secure cloud computing environment.

AWS Regions & Availability Zones

• AWS Regions are a geographical areas/locations with one or more Availability Zones.
• Availability zones consist of one or more data centers.
• China AWS account provides access to Beijing and Ningxia Regions only.
• US GovCloud Region is designed to allow US Gov agencies and customers to move sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing regulatory and compliance requirements.

Selecting a Region

• Local laws might require that data is kept within geographical boundaries which restrict where content or services are offered.
• It is desirable to run applications and store data in a Region as close as possible to the user to reduce latency.
• Services are available within the region.
• Costs vary by region.

Availability Zones

• AZs provide the ability to operate applications and databases more highly available, fault-tolerant, and scalable.
• Each AZ can include multiple data centers, typically three.
• AZs are interconnected with high-bandwidth, low-latency networking over fully redundant, dedicated fiber that provides high throughput.
• Network accomplishes synchronous replication between Zones.
• The user is responsible for selecting where their systems will reside.

AWS Data Centers

• Data centers are the foundation for AWS infrastructure.
• Critical system components are backed up across multiple AZs.
• AWS continuously monitors service usage to deploy infrastructure to support commitments and requirements.
• AWS’ data center locations are not disclosed and restrict access to them.
• AWS custom network equipment is sourced from multiple original device manufacturers (ODMs)

Points of Presence

• Points of presence are located in most of the major cities around the world.
• Provides a better user experience through the continuous connection, performance and computing by finding the best route to request.

Amazon CloudFront

• Amazon Cloudfront is a content delivery network used to distribute content to end users to reduce latency.

Regional Edge Caches

• They are used by default with Amazon CloudFront when content isn't accessed frequently enough to remain in an edge location.

AWS Infrastructure Features

• AWS has elastic and scalable resources.
• Built-in component redundancy.
• AWS requires minimal to no human intervention, while also providing high availability with minimal downtime.

Amazon Electic File System (Amazon EFS)

• It provides a scalable, fully managed elastic Network File System (NFS) file system.
• Amazon EFS is built to scale on demand to petabytes, growing and shrinking automatically.

Amazon Simple Storage Service Glacier

• It is low-cost for data archiving and long-term backup.

Compute Service Category

• Compute capacity as virtual machines. Useful to provision an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

• It automatically adds or removes EC2 intances container orchestration to support Docker container.

Storage Service Category

• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) Offers scalability, data availability, security, and performance. Use it to store and protect any amount of data

Amazon Elastic Block Store

• Amazon Elastic Block Store High-performance block storage designed for use with Amazon EC2

Aws Lambda

• Run code with provisioning or managing servers; pay only for compute time used

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)

• Deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications that use Kubernetes

AWS Fargate

• Compute engine for ECS that allows you to run containers without managing services or clusters

Aws Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS)

• Set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud with automation.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)

• Provision logically isolated sections of the AWS Cloud

AWS Transit Gateway

• Connect Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) and on-premises networks to a single gateway

AWS Direct Connect

• A dedicated private network connection

AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS)

• Create and manage encryption keys; use to control the encryption across applications

AWS Shield

• Managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDos) protection service that safeguards applications running on AWS.

AWS Cost Management Service

AWS Config

• Provides assessment, auditing and evaluation of your AWS resources

Amazon CloudWatch

• Monitor resources and applications.

Iaas

• It Provides highest level of flexibility and management control over IT resources

AWS CloudTrail Tracks

• Tracks user and API usage