Discover the Benefits the Cloud Provides
Working in the cloud provides many benefits for businesses and individuals. Using infrastructure as a service increases adaptability and allows resources to be aligned with the real activity of a company. Here are the main benefits of a cloud infrastructure:
Accessibility: In the cloud, data will always be accessible wherever your users are located, thanks to the provider’s worldwide network.
Adaptability: Cloud resources are provided on-demand, so you can request more or fewer resources depending on your needs.
Speed: Resources are provided almost immediately.
Cost reduction: Because servers in the cloud are shared, the cloud provider can make significant economies of scale, which are reflected in the service price. This allows you to make considerable savings compared with what you could do with your own data center.
Security: In the cloud, you can easily encrypt your data as you go along.
The Particular Case of AWS
Not only does the AWS cloud provide all of the benefits described above, but its architecture also offers high fault tolerance, as you’re about to see.
AWS Regions
To understand how AWS works, you need to see how Amazon organizes its data centers. The global infrastructure is based on Regions and Availability Zones. AWS has over 20 Regions worldwide that all use different networks and equipment— all physically separate from each other, often in different countries.
Availability Zones
AWS Regions contain Availability Zones that are physically separate and isolated, linked by a high-performance network. Each Region comprises at least two Availability Zones so that the infrastructure can be deployed in two separate data centers within the same Region. Availability Zones are all located in the same country as the Region they correspond to.
Currently, the AWS Cloud is present in more than 60 Availability Zones worldwide.
Manage the AWS Cloud
From an Internet Browser
AWS provides several ways of accessing its resources, including a web interface. For example, there is a console on the Amazon Web Services website that is a website acting as a central location for your resources in the cloud. Using the Amazon Web Services Web Console, you can:
Start or shut down virtual machines.
Start or shut down databases.
Run code on demand.
Schedule startup and shutdown for your machines.
And many other things!
Each AWS component, known as a service, carries out specific tasks.
From the Command Line
Because the infrastructure of Amazon Web Services is based on automation and APIs, you can carry out all tasks directly from the command line, for example, sh or bash with Linux systems or Batch and PowerShell with Windows.
The AWS command line is made up of the following:
aws <service> <command> <parameters>
aws represents the name of the command.
<service> should be replaced with the name of the service to be called, such as EC2 or RDS.
<command> is the command to be performed on the service, for example describe-instances.
<parameters> represents the parameters of the request, such as --instance-id, for example.
Using Programming
AWS provides an SDK in several programming languages to manage the creation of resources and their interactions with the cloud, including:
Java
.NET
Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
C++
All of these languages, like command line calls, are based on HTTPS requests to the AWS REST API. The AWS public communication interface is an API based on service endpoints.
Understand the Regional Endpoints
Due to the way it’s structured into self-contained, regional services, AWS relies on endpoints to function.
For example:
ec2.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com
This URL is composed of the following:
ec2 is the name of the AWS service concerned.
eu-west-2 is the name of the Region, as the service is regional. When a global service is concerned, this isn’t required.
A corresponding Regional endpoint is also created when a service is put online in a Region. When calls are made using the command line or SDK, the requests are propagated to the relevant endpoint. This structure allows separation of concerns—each service is responsible for the content of its endpoint.
Let’s Recap!
You’ve seen how AWS provides and distributes its network service:
The cloud provides several advantages, such as adaptability, accessibility, and speed.
AWS infrastructure is divided into regions. Each region is a set of different data centers and is isolated from the others.
Each AWS Region has at least two Availability Zones.
An Availability Zone is a geographically separate site.
You can manage the AWS cloud using:
An internet browser
The command line
Programming
Now you know more about the Amazon and AWS ecosystem and you’ve learned how the cloud and automation work, let’s test your new skills! Then, in the second part of the course, you’ll learn the different stages of setting up a network with AWS.
