Services, part 1 - Amazon Web Services (AWS) Tutorial

- Okay, I told you that Amazon evolved over time and Amazon Web Services evolved with it. And as Amazon needed new features a lot of those features got into AWS. And then stuff that just AWS customers wanted as well. So there are a lot of different services that are available in AWS. The good news is not all of them are a heavy focus of any given certification exam, though most of them are covered somewhere in some certification exam. So I'm going to go through these services and I'm going to highlight some of the key ones you need to know for the Amazon Web Services certification that we're focused on so that you understand, "Okay those are some good areas for me to get some practice with." Now, as we begin to look at this I want to emphasize, you can go anytime to aws.amazon.com and register for a free tier AWS account. And then you can use anything that's available in the free tier for 12 months. 750 hours of compute time per month. So that's plenty of time to work with this stuff at home. So even if you have AWS at work and you want to get some hands-on experience working with it at home, go ahead and do it, absolutely free, to get what you need to practice, to drill, to use some of these various features and services and just to explore what they're all about. So let's begin looking at these particular services. Now, when you look at them here in the AWS management console they do break them apart for you into different categories. So we have Compute, Storage, Database management tools, and so on. I'm going to go through each of these categories and help you understand what they're about, and where your focus might need to be for the exam and just for learning the materials in general. So first of all, in the Compute category, we have EC2, Lightsail, ECS, EKS, Lambda, Batch, and Elastic Beanstalk. Of these services in compute, the key services to know about are EC2. This is a primary focus of the exam because this is actually how you build an instance. It's how you launch a virtual machine within AWS. And that's the first one in the list. And then the last one in the list is Elastic Beanstalk. It's also a way you launch an instance. but the big difference between just EC2 and Elastic Beanstalk, is that with EC2 you're manually going through the process of setting up an instance, what kind of processor and memory do you want to use? What operating system do you want it to run, and so forth. With Elastic Beanstalk, you're saying, I have an application, it's coded in Microsoft .NET, so I want you to build for me an environment that can run this .NET application. And then Elastic Beanstalk takes care of launching any instances that are needed, any databases that are needed, anything that's required to make a .NET application typically work, it does it for you. So that's the difference between EC2 and Elastic Beanstalk. Both are key. Lambda is also important for the exam and we'll get into that a little later in the course too. Here we're talking about web applications. And even the Elastic Container Service can have implications on the exam, so we'll get into that as well. Those are the primary ones from this category you want to be aware of. In the Storage category, you need to know all four. We're talking about S3, EFS, Glacier, and Storage Gateway. So S3 is your Simple Storage Service. This is that primary storage service that was introduced all the way back when Amazon first technically launched this as AWS. And so this is your object-based, put things in buckets, storage service. And we'll look at that throughout the course. Then you have EFS, which is the Elastic File System. And here you have to understand how this file system works within the EC2 connections. So basically you're going to have an EC2 instance that uses the EFS. So you have to understand how that works. Then Glacier. I love some of the names they use in AWS because the name itself helps you remember what it's about. A glacier is a large chunk of frozen water, it is a large chunk of ice, right? It's cold. Okay, so what might I put in a glacier? Probably something I don't need very often. Something that you might even think of as cold data, and that's exactly right. So Glacier is used for archival purposes. We're going to put stuff there we don't need very often, if ever. Some of it may sit there in archives for years and never be touched. The point is it's the least expensive kind of storage you have in AWS, and so we can put stuff in there we don't access very often. Why? Because network bandwidth is not required in order to access it, because you're not accessing it. And it doesn't have to be on super fast storage because your response times to get it are three to five hours. So you literally go in and make a request to restore something from a Glacier vault, and it can be three to five hours later before it's even available to you. So archival data. We'll get into that a little bit more. And then finally, you have the Storage Gateway. Also important for this. The Storage Gateway is basically what allows you to access storage that is in the cloud, locally, or locally that is in the cloud, seamlessly. Making it look like it's just part of your data center. So we'll get into that a little bit more as we go along. The next one is also key for the exam, and that's Databases. So we need to understand the relational database system that's available in Amazon Web services. That's RDS. We need to understand DynamoDB, which is the NoSQL database solution within AWS. We also have ElastiCache which makes it faster to retrieve data because it's retained in memory for fast retrieval. And then you have Neptune, which is not really covered in the exam, but more database technology. And Amazon Redshift, which is lightly addressed. So we'll get into these databases specifically later on in this course. We're going to be talking about database design concepts and actually implementing or deploying databases in AWS. Next we have the Migration category. Now the Migration category is all about how do I get my stuff into AWS? That's really a great way to think about it. So for example, there's the Migration Hub where we can take existing VMware virtual machines or Hyper-V virtual machines and get them into AWS as an instance. We have application database and server migration capabilities. And then here's one that's key. You just have to know what it's used for. It's called Snowball. So kind of playing off Glacier, dealing with large data archives. In this case, we got a bunch of data we need to throw at Amazon, okay? That's the way to keep it in mind. A bunch of data, I need to throw it at AWS and get it into the cloud. So what they do is they actually ship you a Snowball. Now, don't worry, it's not a real snowball. They ship you a computer, effectively, that you plug in, put all your data on it. Could be terabytes and more worth of data, send it back to AWS, and then they import it locally into the region where you want the data to be. So this way you don't have to upload 10 or 12 or 15 or more terabytes of data across a slow internet connection. So that's the concept of snowball. The next category is Network and Content Delivery. This is all about the virtual networking stuff that's in AWS. So this is where your Virtual Private Cloud exists, VPC. CloudFront, which lets you take data and cache it locally to where someone might be accessing the website. Route 53, which is your DNS. The API gateway to allow you to hook into AWS. That one's more covered in the AWS developer certifications and less here. And then Direct Connect which lets you get basically a VPN between your data center and the Amazon Cloud. So an important area, we'll be covering that. The Developer Tools area we don't really address within this course. That's more for the developer certifications, but they do have several tools to help with that concept. Then you have your management tools. Some of these are really important to us. Things like CloudWatch, which monitors your cloud to make sure everything's healthy and working like it should. AWS Auto Scaling, which allows you to scale out or scale in depending on your needs at any given time. CloudFormation and CloudTrail. All of these are covered here in this course. We'll talk briefly about OpsWorks, though it's not in depth in this course. And then you have the Trusted Advisor which is also important to know about in this course. Some of the other areas we don't focus heavily on, like Config, and Service Catalog, and Managed Services, and Systems Manager. So these are not as big of a concern to us. As you can see there are a lot of things to understand within AWS. But we've also seen that you don't have to know everything at this level of learning and for this certification. But it is essential to understand some of these that I've already mentioned we need to focus on. Now, we're still not done. We have more to look at, but this certainly is a beginning. And please keep in mind the areas of Compute and Storage. They're the two biggest areas by far that we've looked at so far. (upbeat music)