Exploring Amazon Web Services (AWS)

The AWS Well-Architected Framework serves as a guide in designing an effective, secure, reliable, efficient and cost effective cloud infrastructure.  This consists of design principles specifically discussing the 5 pillars of a well-architected framework.  Based on industry best practices it'll help you assess your designs for any gaps or limitations that you may have overlooked and will give you a basis to work on in creating a holistic solution. When should you use it? Ideally, you should review this documentation thoroughly and have a clear understanding or the 5 pillars before designing your cloud infrastructure or solution.  However, in most cases when the solution might have already been deployed beforehand,  you can use it as a guide to assess the solution design implemented and make corrective actions where deemed necessary based on your finding. What are the 5 Pillars? The 5 Pillars comprises the following: Operational Excellence Security Reliabil...

The Game Development category currently only has 1 service available.  This service is designed for deploying game servers in the cloud. Below is the service available in this category. Amazon GameLift        - Amazon GameLift is a fully managed service for deploying, operating, and scaling session-based multiplayer game servers in the cloud. Built on the AWS computing environment, GameLift lets you scale high performance game servers up and down to meet player demand.        - Save thousands of engineering hours and reduce cost with Amazon GameLift, the dedicated game server hosting and matchmaking solution built on AWS.

The IoT or Internet of Things category is a collection of services that are specifically designed for the management and implementation of IoT technology.  These allows you to easily integrate IoT models or functions into your application. Below are the various IoT services available in this category. IoT Core        - AWS IoT provides secure, bi-directional communication between Internet-connected devices such as sensors, actuators, embedded micro-controllers, or smart appliances and the AWS Cloud. This enables you to collect telemetry data from multiple devices, and store and analyze the data. You can also create applications that enable your users to control these devices from their phones or tablets. IoT 1-Click       - AWS IoT 1-Click is a service that makes it easy for simple devices to trigger AWS Lambda functions that execute a specific action. Some examples of possible actions include calling technical support, reordering goods and ...

The End User Computing category comprises of services which cater to Workstation Services needs.  It provides virtualized computer terminals as well as an Application Streaming service in a client-server setup. Here are the two services that are currently in this category. WorkSpaces        - Amazon Workspaces enables you to provision virtual, cloud-based Microsoft Windows desktops for your users, known as WorkSpaces.  It eliminates the need to procure and deploy hardware or install complex software.  You can quickly add or remove users as your needs change.  Users can access their virtual desktops from multiple devices or web browsers.        - Virtual terminals (VDI).  A way of having your desktop in the cloud. WorkDocs        - Amazon WorkDocs is a fully managed, secure, enterprise storage and sharing service with strong administrative controls and feedback capabilities that improve user prod...

The Business Applications category lists services that supports business productivity functions. Here is the list of the available services in this category. Alexa for Business        - Alexa for business makes it easy for you to use Alexa in your organization.  It gives you the tools you need to manage Alexa devices, enroll your users, and assign skills at scale.  You can build youe own context-aware voice skills using Alexa Skills Kit, and the Alexa for Business APIs, and you can make therse available as provate skills for your organization.  Alexa for Business also makes it easy to voice-enable your products and services, providing contect-aware voice experiences for your customers. Amazon Chime        - Amazon Chime is a secure, real-time, unified communications service that transforms meetings by making them more efficient and easier to conduct.  The service delivers high-quality audio and video through an applicati...

The Customer Engagement category is a collection of services that makes it easy for your applications to interact with your end users. See below a list of the available services in this category. Amazon Connect        - Amazon Connect makes it easy for you to setup and manage a customer contact center and provide reliable customer engagement at any scale.  With Amazon Connect you can deploy a customer contact center with just a few clicks in the AWS management console, on-board agents from anywhere, and quickly begin to engage with your customers. Pinpoint        - Enables you to understand and engage with your app users.  Amazon Pinpoint helps you understand app user behavior, define who to engage, determine which notification to send, decide when to deliver the notifications, and track the results of your campaign.        - Enables push-notifications.  Ex.  When a mobile app user is close to a rest...

The Application Integration category hosts a suite of services that would help you manage your application functions and provide you a means to decouple them.  It also contains services that can manage message handling, distribution and queueing. Below are the list of current services under this category. Step Functions               - AWS Step Functions makes it easy to coordinate the components of distributed applications as a series of steps in a visual workflow.  You can quickly build and run state machines to execute the steps of your application in a reliable and scalable fashion.         - It is a way of visualizing what is going on in your environment. Amazon MQ        - Amazon MQ is a managed message broker service for Apache ActiveMQ that makes it easy to migrate to a message broker in the cloud.  A message broker allows software applications and components to communicat...

The AR & VR category is all about Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality.  At the moment, there is only one service available in this category, but nevertheless is cutting edge technology. Sumerian        - Amazon Sumerian lets you create and run virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and 3D applications quickly and easily without requiring any specialized programming or 3D graphics expertise.  With Sumerian, you can build highly immersive and interactive scenes that run on popular hardware such as Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and iOS mobile devices (support for Android ARCore coming soon).  For example, you can build a virtual classroom that lets you train new employees around the world, or you can build a virtual environment that enables people to tour a building remotely.  Sumerian makes it easy to create all the building blocks needed to build highly immersive and interactive 3D experiences including adding objects, and designing...

The AWS Mobile Services category caters to mobile application developers as it hosts the group of services all concerned about mobile application integration and development. Below is the list of services in this category.  AWS Amplify        - AWS Amplify enables developers to develop and deploy cloud-powered mobile and web apps.  The Amplify Framework is a comprehensive set of SDKs, libraries, tools, and documentation for client app development.  The Amplify console provides a continuous delivery and hosting service for web applications.  AWS AppSync               - AWS AppSync automatically updates the data in web and mobile applications in real time, and updates data for offline users as soon as they reconnect.  AppSync makes it easy to build collaborative mobile and web applications that deliver responsive, collaborative user experiences. You can use AWS AppSync to build native mo...

The Security, Identity & Compliance Services category is the second place you would mostly go to after creating your VPC.  Here is where you will find services that will help you: setup user and application access to your VPC secure your VPC configure access controls, policies and permissions connect your on-premise directory service with your AWS VPC services It's basically a collection of services for Identity and Access Management, Security, and Compliance. Below is the list of services in this category.  IAM (Identity, Access Management)        - AWS Identity and access Management (IAM) is a web service that helps you securely control access to AWS resources for your users.  You use IAM to control who can use your AWS resources (authentication) and how they can use the resources (Authorization) Cognito        - Amazon Cognito makes it easy for you to have users sign up and sign in to your apps, federate iden...

The AWS Analytics Services category comprises of services typically used for data collection, processing and analysis.  These are mostly used by data scientists, business information analysts, financial analysts, or anyone in need of processing vast amounts of data to generate desired outputs. Below is the list of services in this category.  Athena        - Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL.  Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries you run.         - This turns flat files into searchable databases. EMR (Elastic Mapreduce)        - Amazon EMR provides a managed Hadoop framework that makes it easy, fast, and cost-effective to process vast amounts of data across dynamically scalable Amazon EC2 instances.  You can also run other popular distributed frameworks suc...

The Machine Learning Services category comprises of several services that cater to the use of machine learning technology.  The managed services make it easy for application developers to build smart and robust application that make use of ML models.   Here is a list of all the current Machine Learning services available.  Amazon SageMaker        - Build, train, and deploy machine learning models at scale.  This allows for the quickest way to get ML Models from idea to production. Amazon Comprehend        - Amazon Comprehend is a continuously-trained natural language processing service.        - It's free to try and easy to get started analyzing unstructured text like customer reviews and news articles. DeepLens        - Deep learning-enabled video cameras.  AWS DeepLens is powerful enough for experts, but designed to help developers get started quickly with litt...

Media Services as the name implies is all about managing media content such as audio and video.  The services' functions include capture, processing, transcoding, broadcast, and live streaming. Here are the services under this category. Elastic Transcoder        - Amazon Elastic Transcoder lets you convert digital media stored in Amazon S3 into audio and video codecs and the containers required by consumer playback devices.  For example, you can convert large, high-quality digital media files into formats that users can play back on mobile devices, tablets, web browsers, and connected televisions.  Kinesis Video Streams        - Capture, process, and store video streams for analytics and machine learning. Amazon Kinesis Video Streams is a fully managed AWS service that you can use to stream live video from devices to the AWS Cloud, or build applications for real-time video processing or batch-oriented video analytics. Medi...

The Management Tools Services suite is where Solutions Architects and Cloud Administrators go to in order to design, administer, audit and control their cloud services.  It hosts a selection of services that perform management functions. See below the list of all the current Management & Governance services available. Cloud Watch            - Amazon Cloudwatch is a monitoring service for AWS cloud resources and the applications you run on AWS.  You can use Amazon CloudWatch to collect and track metrics, collect and monitor log files, set alarms, and automatically react to changes in your AWS resources.  Amazon CloudWatch can monitor AWS resources such as Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon DynamoDB tables, and Amazon RDS DB instances, as well as custom metrics generated by your applications and services, and any log files your applications generate.  You can use Amazon CloudWatch to gain system-wide visibility into resource utilizatio...

The Developer tools Services category is what DevOps people are most interested at.  The services found within this suite caters to the needs of application developers in such a way that it helps them develop, debug, test and run the applications they are building. Here you'll find the list of all the current Developer Tools Services available. CodeStar        - AWS CodeStar lets you quickly develop, build and deploy applications on AWS. Code Commit        - AWS CodeCommit is a version control service hosted by Amazon Web Services that you can use to privately store and manage assets (such as documents, source code, and binary files) in the cloud.         - This is similar to GitHub.  It is a place to store your codes in the cloud. CodeBuild        - AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed build service in the cloud.  AWS CodeBuild compiles your source code, runs unit tests, and prod...

The Network and Content Delivery Services suite contains multiple services that control how your cloud services connect and interface with each other as well as with your on-premise data center. This basically holds services that will help you design your infrastructure's interconnectivity, and traffic and content distribution. See below the current list of available services within this category. VPC (Virtual Private Cloud)        - Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) enables you to launch Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources into a virtual network that you've defined.  This virtual network closely resembles a traditional network that you'd operate in your own data center, with the benefits of using the scalable infrastructure of AWS.        - In short, this is a virtual data center. CloudFront        - Amazon CloudFront is a global Content Delivery Network (CDN) service that securely delivers data, videos, applica...