Cloud Diary

Introduction to Amazon Web Services (AWS) (Part : 1)

Nayan Tank's photo
Nayan Tank
·

4 min read

Introduction to Amazon Web Services (AWS) (Part : 1)

Table of contents

AWS (Amazon Web Services) is a cloud computing platform provided by Amazon that offers a wide range of cloud services and tools for building and running applications, managing data, and accessing other computing resources on-demand. AWS is designed to provide high performance, scalability, and reliability, and is used by organizations of all sizes, from small startups to large enterprises. With AWS, customers can easily provision resources and pay only for what they use, and can access a wide range of tools and resources for managing and monitoring cloud resources.

AWS Global Infrastructure

Infrastructure, like data centers and networking connectivity, still exists as the foundation of every cloud application. In AWS, this physical infrastructure makes up the AWS Global Infrastructure, in the form of Regions and Availability Zones.

Regions

The AWS Cloud spans 93 Availability Zones within 29 geographic Regions around the world

Regions are geographic locations worldwide where AWS hosts its data centers. AWS Regions are named after the location where they reside. For example, in the United States, the Region in Northern Virginia is called the Northern Virginia Region, and the Region in Oregon is called the Oregon Region. AWS has Regions in Asia Pacific, China, Europe, the Middle East, North America, and South America. And we continue to expand to meet our customers' needs.

Each AWS Region is associated with a geographical name and a Region code.

Here are examples of Region codes:

  • us-east-1 is the first Region created in the eastern US area. The geographical name for this Region is N. Virginia.

  • ap-northeast-1 is the first Region created in the northeast Asia Pacific area. The geographical name for this Region is Tokyo.

Choosing the right AWS Region

AWS Regions are independent from one another. Without explicit customer consent and authorization, data is not replicated from one Region to another. When you decide which AWS Region to host your applications and workloads, consider four main aspects:

  • Latency

  • Price

  • Service Availability

  • Data Compliance.

Availability Zones

Inside every Region is a cluster of Availability Zones. An Availability Zone consists of one or more data centers with redundant power, networking, and connectivity. These data centers operate in discrete facilities in undisclosed locations. They are connected using redundant high-speed and low-latency links.

Availability Zones also have code names. Because they are located inside Regions, they can be addressed by appending a letter to the end of the Region code name. Here are examples of Availability Zone codes:

  • us-east-1a is an Availability Zone in us-east-1 (N. Virginia Region).

  • sa-east-1b is an Availability Zone in sa-east-1 (São Paulo Region).

Therefore, if you see that a resource exists in us-east-1c, you can infer that the resource is located in Availability Zone c of the us-east-1 Region.

Within a Region, an Availability Zone consists of one or more data centers.

Edge locations

Edge locations are global locations where content is cached. For example, if your media content is in London and you want to share video files with your customers in Sydney, you could have the videos cached in an edge location closest to Sydney. This would make it possible for your customers to access the cached videos more quickly than accessing them from London. Currently, there are over 400+ edge locations globally.

Amazon CloudFront delivers your content through a worldwide network of edge locations. When a user requests content that is being served with CloudFront, the request is routed to the location that provides the lowest latency. So that content is delivered with the best possible performance. CloudFront speeds up the distribution of your content by routing each user request through the AWS backbone network to the edge location that can best serve your content.

Interacting with AWS

Every action that you make in AWS is an API call that is authenticated and authorized. In AWS, you can make API calls to services and resources through the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or AWS SDKs.

AWS Management Console

One way to manage cloud resources is through the web-based console, where you log in and choose the desired service. This can be the easiest way to create and manage resources when you first begin working with the cloud.

AWS CLI

The AWS CLI is a unified tool that you can use to manage AWS services. You can download and configure one tool that you can use to control multiple AWS services from the command line, and automate them with scripts. The AWS CLI is open source, and installers are available for Windows, Linux, and macOS.

AWS SDKs

API calls to AWS can also be performed by running code with programming languages. You can do this by using AWS SDKs. SDKs are open source and maintained by AWS for the most popular programming languages, such as C++, Go, Java, JavaScript, .NET, Node.js, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, and Swift.

Developers commonly use AWS SDKs to integrate their application source code with AWS services. Here is an example of code that you can implement to work with AWS resources using the SDK for Python.

import boto3
ec2 = boto3.client('ec2')
response = ec2.describe_instances()
print(response)
AWSDevopsCloud