Cloud Computing

  • On-demand delivery of IT resources. Can scale up and down based on needs.
  • Fosters agility (number one reason why customers switch to cloud computing): Speed (global reach), experimentation (operations as code, templated environments with CloudFormation) and culture of innovation (experiment quickly with low cost)
  • Region vs Availability Zone (AZ): Region is a physical location in the world which contains multiple AZs. AZs contain one or more discrete data centers with independent resources and housed in different facilities.
  • Using Auto Scaling and ELB, scale up and down and only pay for what you use.
  • Ability to deploy systems in multiple regions (lower latency)
  • Ability to choose the region where data is stored
  • AWS is responsible for data center security
  • Security policy can be formalized (as code)
  • Ability to recover from failures

Core Services

  • Global Infrastructure:

    • Regions: Have multiple AZs
    • Availability Zones: Have one or more data centres. They all have different power supplier companies.
    • Edge Locations: Used by CloudFront.

  • Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

    • Uses same concepts as on-premise networking
    • VPC can span across multiple AZs
    • Supports multiple subnets (each of which can be deployed in a different AZ)
    • Can create public-facing subnets and private-facing subnets within the same VPC
    • Each account can create multiple VPCs
    • Using fewer VPCs is recommended to avoid complexity
    • Can assign Internet Gateways to specific subnets to allow public access

  • Security Groups

    • Act like a built-in firewall
    • Best practice: Allow what’s required only and block everything else

… [TRUNCATED CONTENT FOR BREVITY] …