You have heard about Cloud Computing. You looked at Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Services, and maybe others. But, where to start?
If you choosed AWS, as I did, I’ll try to make it easier for you to start your experience. Because, their documentation can be difficult to understand. In fact, most of their services are easy to use, but sometimes, they use words or services names that are not related to our own vocabulary.
You know firewall. That’s clear to your mind what it means. But, they call it a Security Group.
AWS contains lots of services, that allows you to run a virtual machine (linux / windows), Database, API, nosql, data storage, queue, mail, etc … You looked at the service list, but there is tons of them, and it’s unclear which one is what you need.
And, sometimes, multiple services can do almost the same job. Data Storage, for instance, is available from these 3 services: S3, EBS and EFS.
Let’s try to define some of the most popular services.
- EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing)
- These are virtual machines, like you may have used with products like vmware, virtualbox, running Windows or Linux.
- EBS (Elastic Block Store)
- These are your Disk Drive Storage from EC2 service. When linked to a Windows EC2 instance, it can be formatted, and mapped to a drive letter. Your “C:\” drive, is a ntfs partition an EBS entity. So an EBS is a virtual disk drive. They are all based on SSD technology, but for a lower cost, you can still get magnetic drives.
- Route 53
- This is where all your domain name are managed.
- You can buy a domain name, (Domain Name Registration), and you can also manage your DNS. The DNS you manage can have been bought from AWS, or somewhere else like GoDaddy.
- You just need to configure your NameServer to use Route53 as your primary DNS service.
- S3 (Simple Storage Service)
- This allow to stock “blobs” of information, usually files. You can then access them from API, or url. You upload these files using API, or you can use helper aplications like TNTDrive.
- You can also store a web site on this service, if your site contains static files. You can map an “end point” (url) to one of your S3 container (bucket).
- Also, it’s the least expensive of the 3 storage services available, but it’s not meant to be used like EBS or EFS. You can’t directly “mount” a drive letter from Windows to S3, without a third party app.
- Cloudfront
- It a “proxy”, used to serve your web site files all over the world. See it as a CDN (Content Delivery Network). They keep a copy of your files all over the world, and serve them to your visitors on the nearest available proxy. Usually, you put your static files to a S3 bucket, and use cloudfront to serve them. I don’t recommend to use that service immediatly, you should start serving your files directly from S3 instead.
- It can be compared to other services like Cloudflare or Akamai.
- RDS (Relational Database Service)
- They are like EC2 virtual machine, but you can’t login directly on them. They are already configured with a database of your choice, and amazon take care of updating these machines. You manage your databases with the tool you used normally, like SQL Server Management Studio, MySQL Workbench, etc.
- If you’re a MySQL fan, take a look at Aurora. It’s a RDS service built by Amazon, compatible with MySQL, but it can be up to 5 times faster.
- EFS (Elastic File System)
- It works like a “NAS”. If you need a disk drive shared between multiple instances of EC2, that’s the service to use. It is accessible as a “network drive” in Windows. The price is based on amount of data stored on it, unlike EBS, that is charged on the maximum capacity of the drive.
- Cloudwatch is used to diagnose all your AWS services
- Scan your current and past CPU and Memory usage
- Receive an alert if your monthly usage is over a defined amount
- Detect if you lose all your “cpu credit” and get alert of it
- etc