Intro to AWS - The Most Important Services To Learn

learning aws can be pretty intimidating

there's hundreds of services and it can

be difficult to understand which one is

the right tool for what you're trying to

accomplish this video is going to help

you navigate the complex world of aws

services we're going to approach this by

examining a standard three-tier

application architecture like you can

see here so let's take a look at this

architecture now before peeling back the

layers and revealing the aws services

behind the scenes so what do we have

here in this application architecture we

have a pretty standard three-tier

architecture here with a web backend

layer we have our application layer here

which is kind of if you're in an

organization with a service-oriented

architecture this will be pretty

familiar this is where all your backend

services will be and then you have your

third tier here which is your database

layer this includes uh can be relational

could be a nosql database you can also

have some caching in there as well and

then we have a bunch of other components

related to this so we have deployment

orchestration to hold on to our source

code and then facilitate deployment we

also have a monitoring component here

for monitoring the state of the system

uh we have a load balancer here with a

dns pointing to that load balancer to

distribute traffic and then we have some

other toolkits here on the right for

event coordination say for instance um

this application did some kind of

something like google where you have

search query submission and like every

time that gets saved to a database you

want to trigger some kind of event in

this layer over here we have storage for

that event we have some analytical

processing a data warehouse and finally

some dashboarding for end users to

examine that content we also have some

toolkits for rapid development to deploy

a little bit faster as well and over

here finally on the left hand side these

two elements so for user pools to define

different users that are going to be

interacting with your application and

then of course to serve cache content so

this is our pretty standard application

here let's take a look now at some of

the aws services behind the scenes that

replace each of these different elements

so the first one is for dns so what is

the service that we want to use for dns

and aws

so for aws that's going to be amazon

route 53 and row 53 is the service where

you define all your dns configuration

including you know where you're going to

route traffic to from the internet also

supports other things like you know

health checks on your endpoints and any

traffic shaping that you want to do

that's going to all be done in your

rel53 service so it's great to be

familiar with rel53 you're probably

going to be using it all the time if you

were defining kind of externally facing

apis or endpoints

now from there your dns will typically

point to an endpoint for a load balancer

so for aws there's a couple options for

load balancers but the kind of top level

category here

is something called the elastic load

balancer service and there's two

variations for elastic load balancer

there's what's called the application

load balancer which operates at the l7

layer and that's more applicable for

those you that want to use content from

your http headers to route your traffic

and for those of you that are looking

for something a little bit more lower

level aws also offers a network load

balancer which operates at the l4 level

which is a little bit

more cost effective and supports higher

throughput limits as well so that's an

elastic load balancer and some of the

different options that you may want to

use now in terms of your web backend

layer over here this is going to be the

first kind of

time that a request from the front end

touches the back end now with compute

there's a couple different options that

you can decide to leverage and those

compute options it doesn't really matter

if it's your web backend layer or your

application layer the compute options

that you select for either of these two

things will be the same so what are the

options that are available to us so the

first option is amazon ec2 ec2 stands

for elastic compute cloud very very old

service and the basic gist of this

service is that you rent

virtual machines that you pay for by the

hour and they're really convenient

because with ec2 machines you can set

them up to do whatever you please you

can use them to host

back-end databases if you want you can

host a wordpress blog on it you can

create and deploy your application for a

rest api so it's a really flexible

service that allows you to do whatever

you want but some of the drawbacks with

ec2 can include just the all the setup

and configuration that you're going to

have to go through to use it so some

folks shy away from ec2 in favor of

something a little bit more hands-off

and for those of you that are interested

in serverless that's where our next

point comes in and that's aws lambda so

aws lambda is a serverless compute

infrastructure option and what that

basically means is that you define what

are called functions and these functions

are just snippets of code they can be

small or large pieces of code and aws

does not require you to have to worry

about any of the infrastructure as you

had to do with ec2 you just basically

write and deploy your functions and aws

worries about deploying your application

onto a container and then scaling that

application whenever the number of

requests to your lambda function

increase

so this is a really really attractive

model because

lambda is paper invocation so it's

really cost effective for application

workloads that have bursty traffic

patterns

or for applications that have traffic

during the day and then it kind of

recedes down to nothing in the evening

so lambda is a really really popular

service it's getting more and more

popular by the day and it's definitely

one to consider if you want to learn

more about aws lambda you should check

out my brand new udemy course in the top

right of this video now if you're not

into kind of deploying your

infrastructure onto machines directly

and you're not into using this

serverless model there is a third option

for those you that are more kind of

docker folks or docker fans

and that third option is amazon ecs so

ecs stands for elastic container service

and there's also a variation of ecs

called eks or elastic kubernetes service

and essentially ecs is just a service to

help you manage your containers helps

you set up servers with integrated load

balancing and auto scaling helps you

facilitate your deployments to those

containers so it's kind of like

something in the middle between ec2 and

lambda and if you're interested in

learning more about like these three

services and different compute options

that are available to you i have a video

where i compare these three things i'll

put that in the comments or the

description section below

so like i was kind of saying uh the

application layer doesn't really change

in terms of the compute options you have

the same kind of fundamental building

blocks that are available to you

regardless of if it's your web backend

layer or your kind of business logic

heavy heavy application layer here now

another service that helps kind of

facilitate the creation of your rest

apis and hosting those apis is one

that's called api gateway over here an

api gateway is a super super powerful

service because it offers additional

functionality on top of just kind of

using a load balancer to distribute your

traffic to different nodes here and the

types of uh kind of features that api

gateway offers are things like api

throttling or authorization on an api

say for example you you're building kind

of a private api that you only want to

be accessible from users in a user pool

which we're going to talk about next

year

you can set up your api gateway to

validate that you know a token is valid

uh by integrating with the user pool

service or you can define your own also

offers other features such as model

validation so you can define what types

of models your api supports and then

have that validation performed before

the request actually gets to your

backend layer here

so you can do like a bunch of different

combinations here you can do your dns

pointing to your api gateway which

points to your load balancer which

points to your infrastructure layer and

that is if you want to take advantage of

some of those features that i just

described so speaking of user pools we

just kind of touched on that we might as

well reveal the service here and that's

one called amazon cognito so amazon

cognito is kind of a very very powerful

but underrated service and what it

allows you to do is to create user pools

and these user pools kind of similar to

what you'd have on any kind of login and

registration website you know you create

a user they provide a login a username a

phone number a recovery option all that

kind of stuff and so with cognito you

can

have users sign up for accounts directly

within cognito using the hosted ui

or you can integrate with other

third-party identity providers such as

google facebook amazon so anytime you've

seen like login with amazon or log in

with google or facebook or any other

identity provider

that could be integrated with cognito as

well so very very useful for

applications that require user

registration and if you combine that

with api gateway you can do things like

ensuring that a user is part of a

certain user group before the request

can be validated and that flows through

to your backend layer here so that's a

little bit about cognito let's kind of

finish this three-tier architecture

discussion and talk a little bit about

the database layers now or the storage

slash persistence layer

so a lot of applications have caching

enabled on them just to increase

performance on some

lookups of items that are quite common

or maybe you just want increased

performance so what's the aws service

that allows that to happen so that

service is called elastic cache and

elastic cache kind of comes in two

different flavors you can either go with

the flavor that

is memcache based or you can choose

redis now redis is probably the most

popular one people when people think

about caches i think redis comes to mind

almost immediately but regardless of

what you choose when using elastic cache

it is a caching service so it's going to

be based on key value lookups and you

are going to have to worry about hosting

that infrastructure essentially you kind

of own a cluster of nodes and

these are memory optimized nodes where

they have plenty of memory to facilitate

your application's needs um but you

still have to worry about the

maintenance of that cluster you know and

node replacement hardware failures

things like that it's a relatively

hands-off service but there are some

nuances that you may need to know about

in terms of maintenance and alarming and

all that now in terms of what should we

store our database in should we store it

in a relational database or a nosql

database so there's a bunch of different

options here that you can choose from so

the one that aws likes to push a lot is

a relatively popular one called amazon

aurora now amazon aurora is a in-house

built amazon database that is compatible

with both my sequel and postgres i

believe postgres is still in preview

mode now so it's a fully managed rds

database that kind of makes your life

easier in terms of worrying about things

like administration monitoring

auto scaling storage auto scaling and

compute auto scaling also offers

something called the data api that you

can use to

call your rds database using a rest api

as opposed to a traditional kind of

database connection so there's a lot of

features that are coming with aurora and

you may really want to consider it if

you're thinking about using a relational

database now a relatively similar

service to that is amazon rds or

relational database service and where

these two are different is that rds is a

database service that allows you to

select which database configuration that

you would like so you get to pick from

common database uh platforms such as

mysql postgres microsoft sql server

oracle cassandra and probably a couple

other ones that i'm missing as well so

rds is probably what i would think most

people are familiar with but a lot of

customers are deciding to go with aurora

just because it's more of a hands-off

option and just makes life easier one

other thing about aurora is that it does

offer a serverless compute model as well

where you don't need to worry about

provisioning any type of hardware behind

the scenes as you would with an rds

database you can use the serverless

model and it's kind of like an auto

scaling type of database thing similar

to what lambda did for ec2 aurora server

list is doing for rds so it's it

provisions your infrastructure whenever

the request rate requires it so if you

have a bursty workload it'll add more

nodes and scale you up so that your

database can handle more volume

so that's a little bit for rds here

let's talk about nosql database options

now now definitely the most popular

nosql database that you're going to hear

about a lot is dynamodb now dynamodb is

a nosql database that is optimized for

key value lookups it is a fully managed

database service so that means that you

don't worry about anything with regards

to infrastructure or hardware all you

really worry about is your scaling

configuration and dynamodb handles the

auto scaling for you behind the scenes

and so it's a really really powerful

nosql database and it's kind of used as

the building block for much of the

internet really if you take a look at

one of the aws white papers where

dynamodb unfortunately went down one day

it brought down with it a large part of

the internet including common

services that we all love like netflix

and other websites as well

so dynamodb is a super super powerful

and popular nosql database on aws and

really this is this service is kind of

at the heart of many other aws services

as well like behind the scenes

so yeah that's it for dynamodb now if

you're a mongodb type of person and

you're coming to aws you don't want to

learn dynamodb

there is a service option for you so aws

also offers what's called documentdb

like you see here and documentdb similar

to dynamo is a fully managed service but

this time it is compatible with mongodb

so that you can you know use mongodb as

you normally would in a fully managed

way so that should satisfy any mongodb

lovers and if you're looking for

something that supports more flexible

querying at scale

you may want to consider a service

called open search open search is the