Introduction to AWS Cloud

Introduction to AWS Cloud

Welcome to AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials. Today we’re going to talk about the AWS Cloud.This course is all about becoming a cloud practitioner, so let’s start by defining cloud computing.

Cloud Computing

“Cloud Computing” refers to the on-demand delivery of IT resources and applications via the internet. Before cloud computing, we had to build data centers based on guessing what our maximum peaks might be. If our design didn’t meet our actual maximum peaks, our customers would suffer. If we over-planned and exceeded our maximum need, we ended up paying for resources that we didn’t really need.

With cloud computing, instead of having to design and build our own data centers, we access a data center and all of its resources, via the internet - allowing us to scale up or down based on our actual needs, without having to plan for the worst-case scenario. With AWS, we can access servers, databases, storage, and higher-level application components in seconds. We can treat these as temporary and disposable resources, free from the inflexibility and constraints of a fixed and finite IT infrastructure. By harnessing the power of the AWS Cloud, our approach to change management, testing, reliability, and capacity planning is more agile and efficient.

By using the AWS Cloud, we can reduce risks, automatically scale our computing to meet our needs, ensure reliable coverage even in the face of a natural disaster, and secure our data. I’ll give you a brief overview of how the AWS Cloud helps you do all that, starting with reducing risks.

Cloud computing can help you reduce risk by being agile-being able to learn and quickly adapt to change. This agility reduces the cost of change.So how do you reduce the risk of a large IT investment not returning enough benefits? You insist on results while the investment is being made, and you pivot as soon as possible if you aren’t seeing those results. And how do you reduce your security risk? Test often, patch quickly, and respond to incidents at lightning speed - these are a large part of new security models.All of these approaches to risk management are enabled by the cloud.

Cloud computing allows enterprises to respond quickly and elastically to changing market conditions. This facilitates scalability, agility, and innovation. And with pre-developed services that can be quickly assembled as building blocks. It’s possible to automate software delivery and create security and compliance guardrails.Let’s talk about that scalability. One of the key benefits of AWS is the ability to use services at your own pace. In cloud computing, the term scalability means the ability to resize your resources as necessary.

Let’s say you’re a florist. Every year in February, you need to hire more staff and rent more delivery vans so that you’re ready for Valentine’s Day. That’s scaling up. Then after the holiday you need to scale back down to normal levels. It works the same way in the cloud.

By using AWS, customers can grow, shrink, and adapt their consumption of services to meet seasonal requirements, launch new services or products, or simply accommodate new strategic directions. The AWS Cloud delivers a scalable computing platform designed for high availability and dependability, providing tools to help you run a wide range of applications.

One main reason companies are moving to the cloud is increased agility. Let’s talk about that for a minute. Three of the main factors that influence agility are:

• Increasing speed
• The ease of experimentation
• And cultivating a culture of innovation

So let’s take a closer look at how these factors help organizations become more agile.It can be cost-prohibitive to put your data centers where your customers are, especially if they’re all over the globe. But using AWS can help without necessitating a huge investment. Because AWS facilities are all over the world, you can literally have a global reach with just a moment’s notice. In cloud computing, new resources are only a click away-so you can make those resources available to your developers in just minutes.In cloud computing, it’s easy to access new resources, which can help you be more agile and more innovative-and spend less time focusing on infrastructure.

For example, with AWS you can:

• Spin up servers in minutes, and

• Shut down servers when you don’t need them or put them to work for another purpose with virtual and automatable resources, you can quickly carry out comparative testing using different types of instances, storage, or configurations.

For example, by using AWS CloudFormation, you to have access to a consistent, template-based environment for development, test, and production purposes with increasing levels of operational control.

Cloud computing allows you to experiment quickly, with low cost and low risk. This allows for more experimentation, more often, which can lead to the discovery of innovations and new configurations. So like agility, elasticity is also a powerful force in cloud computing.

Elasticity is the power to scale computing resources up or down easily. So let’s talk about that. Because the AWS Cloud is elastic, you can:

• Quickly deploy new applications
• Instantly scale up as the workload grows, and
• Instantly shut down resources that are no longer required.

So, whether you need one virtual server or thousands, whether you need computing resources for a few hours or 24/7, AWS provides an elastic infrastructure that can meet your needs. Using AWS tools like Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing, your application can automatically scale up or down based on demand. Backed by Amazon’s massive infrastructure, you have access to compute and storage resources whenever you need them.With AWS, you can easily deploy your system in multiple regions around the world while providing lower latency and a better experience for your customers at minimal cost. Thanks to efficiencies of scale, customers can use innovative services and cutting-edge technology without having to go through multiple procurement cycles and expensive evaluations.

AWS provides capabilities to support virtually any workload. This level of innovation gives customers continued access to the latest technology.

Reliability is the ability of a system to recover from infrastructure or service failures. In cloud computing, reliability means being able to acquire computing resources to meet demand and mitigate disruptions. In order to achieve reliability, your architecture and systems must have a well-planned foundation that handles changes in demand, detects failures, and automatically heals itself.

By using AWS, organizations can achieve greater flexibility and capacity, reducing the uncertainty of forecasting hardware needs. Additionally, the scale of AWS gives customers the capacity and reliability that is difficult for on-premises solutions to match. Reliability is a key component of the AWS Cloud. That’s why Amazon’s data centers are hosted all over the world in what we call AWS Regions. Each region is a separate geographic area that has multiple isolated locations known as Availability Zones. Availability Zones consist of one or more discrete data centers, with each with redundant power, networking, and connectivity, housed in separate facilities. So when you use the AWS Cloud, you can place resources like instances and data in multiple locations. That lends itself nicely to reliability because if you host all of your instances in a single location, and that location were to fail, none of your resources would be available. Using Availability Zones lets you operate production applications and databases that are more highly available, fault-tolerant and scalable than is possible from one single data center.

The structure of our Availability Zones is intentional, and directly related to fault tolerance. Fault tolerance means a system can remain operational even if some of the components of that system fail. Think of it as the built-in redundancy of an application’s components. High availability ensures that your systems are always functioning and accessible, and that downtime is minimized as much as possible, WITHOUT the need for human intervention.Finally, let’s go over the security of our customers’ data. This is a top priority for Amazon. If you’re an AWS customer, you retain complete control and ownership over your data, including which region you store it in, how you handle encryption, and who holds the encryption keys, making it easy to meet regional compliance and data residency requirements.Before cloud computing, auditing an infrastructure’s security was a time-consuming and manual process. Because it was so laborious, it was usually done intermittently. Now, the AWS Cloud provides the ability to monitor your IT resources continually, so that you can spot any changes at once and respond if necessary.

AWS also offers industry-leading capabilities across facilities, networks, software, and business processes so that our services meet the strictest security requirements. Let’s go over why our security capabilities are world-class. Our highly secure data centers use state-of-the-art electronic surveillance and multi-factor access control systems. Our data centers are also staffed twenty-four seven by trained security guards, and access is strictly regulated. Our environmental systems are designed to minimize the impact of disruptions to operations. And our multiple geographic regions and Availability Zones allow you to remain resilient in the face of most failures, including natural disasters or system failure.Since AWS assets are programmable resources, your security policy can be built into the infrastructure from the get-go. At the end of the day, AWS offers a broad set of global cloud-based products, including compute, storage, databases, analytics, networking, mobile, developer tools, management tools, internet of things (or IoT), security, and enterprise applications. These services help organizations move faster, lower IT costs, and scale. This is why AWS is trusted by the largest enterprises and the hottest start-ups to power a wide variety of workloads, like web and mobile applications, game development, data processing and warehousing, storage, archive, and many others.

Throughout the entirety of this course, we’ll talk more about specific services and features of the AWS cloud. So I hope you’ll join me for more discussions on AWS Cloud computing.Again, I’m Kirsten Dupart with AWS Training and Certification. Thanks for watching!

Introduction to AWS Intefaces

Welcome to the AWS Management Interfaces. In this module, you’ll learn about the convenient options for accessing and using AWS resources.

AWS users can create and manage resources in three unique ways: using the AWS Management Console, the AWS Command Line Interface (also called the AWS CLI), or the AWS software development kits (or SDKs). All three of these options are built upon a common interface, or API, that serves as the foundation for AWS.

·The AWS Management Console provides a graphical interface to access AWS features.

·The AWS CLI lets you control AWS services from the command line.

·And of course, AWS also provides SDK that enable you to access AWS using a variety of popular programming languages.

Now, before we explore how to use these options, let’s briefly look at the tools.

AWS Management Console

The AWS Management Console lets you open and use various AWS services and features. There’s even an app you can use with iOS or Android platforms, so that you can view your existing resources and alarms, and perform operational tasks at your convenience.

AWS CLI

The AWS CLI will allow you to automate and repeat the deployment of AWS resources in a way that is programming language-agnostic.

AWS SDK

Where the AWS SDKs can help you use AWS in your existing applications, create applications that can deploy and monitor complex systems using only code.

The AWS CLI and the SDKs give you the flexibility to customize AWS features and create your own tools specific to your businesses.

You can use all three of these modes interchangeably, they’re not exclusive.

For example, you might create an Amazon EC2 instance using an SDK call, describe it then, using the AWS CLI, and shut it down later with just a few clicks in the console. Now, let’s examine each tool, beginning with the console itself.

The console will facilitate cloud management for all aspects of your AWS account, including monitoring your monthly spending, managing security credentials, setting up new users.

It’ll give you several ways to find and open services. Here on the console home page, you can search for what you need, select recently visited services, or expand the “All services” section to browse through all of the AWS services. The Services option is always displayed in the top navigation bar, allowing you to search for what you need at any time, list services by groups, or arrange alphabetically.

You can personalize your experience in the console by creating shortcuts to the services that you visit the most often. The pin icon will allow you to drag and drop service links right onto the toolbar.•You can use Resource Groups to streamline your use of the console. You can create a resource group for each application, service, collection of related resources you frequently use. And then quickly navigate to each saved resource group using the “AWS” menu. Resource groups are specific to identities, so each user in your account can create unique resource groups for their own frequently-accessed resources and their common tasks. You can share these resource group definitions with others in the same account just using a URL.

The Tag Editor allows you to easily manage tags for resource types that support tags. You can apply tag keys and values to multiple resources at one time. The Tag Editor supports global tag searching, bulk editing, so you can find all resources with a particular tag, or make a tag change across multiple resources with just a few clicks.

From the console, you can also access helpful resources to learn about AWS services and features so you can get started building your solutions. The "Build a solution" section features automated wizards and workflows that can help you create the resources you need for the solution you are seeking. The "Learn to build" section includes learning resources organized by solution type and use case. Resources might include tutorials, videos, self-paced labs, project guides, and or course documentation.

To access the console remotely using your remote device, simply download our mobile app from the Amazon Appstore, Google Play, or iTunes. It’s helpful to note that it may take time for some changes made using another interface to update and show in the console. For example, if you make changes to a feature using the CLI, it might not be readily viewable from the console when it initially launches. The AWS CLI is an open-source tool that lets you interact with the AWS services without having to do a lot of configuration. You can start using all the functionality of AWS from the command line, including things like running commands for Windows, Linux, macOS, or Unix. You’ll learn more about how to do that later on in this course.

The AWS SDK and the supporting interfaces enable applications built on AWS to manage your infrastructure as code. The concept of infrastructure as code is powerful, disruptive, it’s what sets the cloud apart from the old IT world. These language-specific SDKs contain APIs that allow you to easily incorporate the connectivity and functionality of the wider range of AWS Cloud services into your code without the diculty of writing the functions yourself. AWS provides extensive resources for these SDKs, including getting started guides, developer guides, API references, as well as community forums and blogs.

Alright, let’s wrap up by summarizing what we’ve covered. AWS offers three different ways to create and manage AWS resources on your platform: the console, the AWS CLI, and the SDKs. All of which reference the AWS API. You have the flexibility to create your own resources and access features on the go. With multiple interfaces, you have what you need to get the job done.

Knowledge check

Which of following terms refers to the power to scale computing resources up or down easily?

​ ⭕️ Elasticity

​ ❌ Efficiency

​ ❌ Expediency

​ ❌ Economy