AWS Cloud Essentials

Taking the first steps as you start building on the cloud can seem overwhelming. Adjusting to a cloud-native approach can take time, especially if you are accustomed to the traditional on-premises way of provisioning hardware and building applications. Gaining familiarity with core concepts of cloud computing and the AWS Cloud will help give you confidence as you begin your cloud journey. In the following sections, we answer common questions about cloud computing and explore best practices for building on AWS.  

Before the cloud, companies and organizations hosted and maintained hardware in their own data centers, often allocating entire infrastructure departments to take care of their data centers. This resulted in costly operations that made some workloads and experimentation impossible.

The demand for compute, storage, and networking equipment increased as internet use became more widespread. For some companies and organizations, the cost of maintaining a large physical presence was unsustainable. Cloud computing emerged to solve this problem.

To help differentiate between running workloads on premises compared to in the cloud, consider a scenario in which a team of developers wants to deploy a few new features in their app. Before they deploy, the team wants to test the features in a separate quality assurance (QA) environment that has the same configurations as production.

In an on-premises solution, an additional environment requires you to buy and install hardware, connect the necessary cabling, provision power, install operating systems, and more. These tasks can be time consuming and expensive. Meanwhile, the team needs to delay the release of the new features while they wait for the QA environment. In contrast, if you run your application in the cloud, you can replicate an entire production environment, as often as needed, in a matter of minutes or even seconds. Instead of physically installing hardware and connecting cabling, the solution is managed over the internet.

Using cloud computing saves time during setup and removes the undifferentiated heavy lifting. If you look at any application, you’ll see that some of its aspects are very important to your business, like the code. However, other aspects are no different than any other application you might make – for instance, the computer the code runs on. As a developer, you likely want to focus on what is unique to your app, not the common tasks, like provisioning a server, that don’t differentiate your app. As one example, a group of researchers from Clemson University achieved a remarkable milestone while studying topic modeling, an important component of machine learning associated with natural language processing (NLP). In the span of less than 24 hours, they created a high-performance cluster in the cloud by using more than 1,100,000 vCPUs on HAQM EC2 Spot Instances running in a single AWS Region. This is just one example of how AWS can help you innovate faster.

Try it out: Deploy a LAMP Web App on HAQM Lightsail

Dive deeper with these additional resources
Cloud Computing Deployment Models

Cloud computing provides developers with the ability to focus on what matters most and avoid infrastructure procurement, maintenance, and capacity planning, or undifferentiated heavy lifting.

With the growing popularity of cloud computing, several different service models have emerged to help meet specific needs of different users. Each type of cloud service provides you with different levels of abstraction, control, flexibility, and management. Understanding the differences between Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) can help you decide what service type is right for your needs as a developer.

With the cloud, you can expand to new geographic regions and deploy globally in minutes. For example, AWS has infrastructure all over the world, so developers can deploy applications in multiple physical locations with just a few clicks. By putting your applications in closer proximity to your end users, you can reduce latency and improve the user experience.

AWS is steadily expanding global infrastructure to help our customers achieve lower latency and higher throughput, and to ensure that their data resides only in the AWS Region they specify. As our customers grow their businesses, AWS will continue to provide infrastructure that meets their global requirements.

AWS Cloud infrastructure is built around AWS Regions and Availability Zones. A Region is a physical location in the world where we have multiple Availability Zones. Availability Zones consist of one or more discrete data centers, each with redundant power, networking, and connectivity, housed in separate facilities. These Availability Zones offer you the ability to operate production applications and databases that are more highly available, fault tolerant, and scalable than would be possible from a single data center.

AWS Cloud infrastructure is extensive, offering 200 fully featured services from data centers globally. With the largest global infrastructure footprint of any cloud provider, AWS provides you the cloud infrastructure where and when you need it.

Similar to the way software developers write application code, AWS provides services that enable the creation, deployment, and maintenance of infrastructure in a programmatic, descriptive, and declarative way.

AWS CDK v2

What is AWS CloudFormation?

• AWS Well-Architected Framework

• AWS Well-Architected hands-on labs

• AWS Well-Architected Tool

Customers, or anyone building on the cloud, are responsible for security in the cloud. When using any AWS service, you’re responsible for properly configuring the service and your applications, in addition to ensuring that your data is secure.

Your level of responsibility depends on the AWS service. Some services require you to perform all the necessary security configuration and management tasks, while other more abstracted services require you to only manage the data and control access to your resources.

Due to the varying levels of effort, customers must consider which AWS services they use and review the level of responsibility required to secure each service. They must also review how the shared security model aligns with the security standards in their IT environment, in addition to any applicable laws and regulations.

A key concept is that customers maintain complete control of their data and are responsible for managing the security related to their content.

This short summary of cloud security introduces core concepts only. Browse the Security Learning page to learn more about key topics, areas of research, and training opportunities for cloud security on AWS.

Security
AWS Shared Responsibility Model
Security Learning

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