Deployment and Connectivity Options
What are the options for deployment of your IT solutions in the modern era? There are three you should know as an AWS Cloud practitioner:
On premises: In this model, you are keeping everything fully under the control of your organization. You can consider this the “traditional” approach to IT, where all of the hardware and software you need to run your tech are kept within facilities that your company owns. Notice that if everyone followed this model today, there would be no cloud. Gulp.
Cloud: With the cloud model, you take full advantage of a technology like AWS.
Hybrid: A hybrid model features the use of both on-premises hardware and/or software and the cloud. Taking a hybrid approach is a typical first step for companies today. With this approach, an organization can use the on-premises approach for services it excels at and use the cloud for services that can benefit from the many advantages of cloud. For example, perhaps your company produces and creates videos for education. Let’s say your company handles all the IT needs for this business perfectly fine on premises, with the expectation of video archive storage and a worldwide, high-speed content distribution network (CDN). Your company can use AWS (or one of its competitors) for the archiving and CDN.
What about connectivity options to the AWS Cloud? Sure enough, there are plenty, including options like these:
Public Internet: A major advantage of the AWS Cloud is the fact that your resources can be accessed (if needed and permitted) using nothing more than a simple public Internet connection. This anytime, anywhere access is, in fact, one of the things that qualifies the AWS Cloud as a true cloud solution.
AWS Virtual Private Network (VPN): An organization can establish encrypted connections between its on-premises networks and its AWS VPCs over the public Internet. AWS VPN supports various protocols, including Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) and OpenVPN, providing flexibility in configuring secure and scalable connections.
AWS Direct Connect: AWS Direct Connect gives you your own private connection to the AWS Cloud. We cover this option in detail in Chapter 12, “The AWS Global Infrastructure.”
Exam Preparation Tasks
As mentioned in the section “How to Use This Book” in the Introduction, you have a few choices for exam preparation: the exercises here, Chapter 22, “Final Preparation,” and the exam simulation questions in the Pearson Test Prep Software Online.
Review All Key Topics
Review the most important topics in this chapter, noted with the Key Topics icon in the outer margin of the page. Table 11-2 lists these key topics and the page number on which each is found.