Security The job of the security pillar is to help protect your assets, your systems, and your information associated with AWS. This pillar should also assist you with risk assessments and your mitigation practices. This pillar consists of the following important design principles: Use strong identity practices in your architecture: Fortunately, AWS provides tools to…

Operational Excellence The overall objective of the operational excellence pillar is to make sure you run and monitor systems to ensure that they are providing value for the business goals of the organization. This pillar focuses on operational best practices for running and monitoring systems and continuously improving processes and procedures. Note While many of…

The AWS Well-Architected Framework You might think that really smart engineers sat down to pen the AWS Well-Architected Framework based on their experience with cloud design. That is only partially true. To provide you with a document as critical as the Well-Architected Framework, engineers and architects also analyzed actual implementations of successful designs by some…

Agility Thanks to the pay-as-you-go model of AWS, engineers can really focus on innovation and new business solutions instead of worrying about infrastructure and other resource shortfalls. Before the broad adoption of AWS solutions, engineers would waste time and money overprovisioning resources in an attempt to provide reliability and performance, even under peak load conditions….

High Availability (HA) High availability (HA) involves designing an AWS solution in a way that keeps systems and services operational and accessible for long, extended periods of time. High availability is commonly presented as a percentage of uptime. Most companies today are looking for 99.9% to 99.999% uptime. Incredibly, various services of AWS offer well…

The Benefits of the Global Infrastructure Perhaps at the very core of AWS is what makes it all possible: the AWS global infrastructure (also termed the global architecture). This is what makes the incredible elasticity, scalability, and reliability possible across a vast number of IT services. The AWS global infrastructure is made up of many…

Economic Benefits It is not a big surprise that various public cloud vendors (led by AWS) are experiencing more success than ever before. The list of advantages continues to grow. In this section of the chapter, we are going to present just some of the economic advantages available with the use of AWS services. One…

Automation and Application Support Many tools enable the deployment of applications and automation in AWS. Here are some of the major ones: CodeDeploy: AWS CodeDeploy is a fully managed deployment service that automates software deployments to a variety of compute services, such as EC2, Lambda, and your on-premises servers. CodeDeploy makes it easier for you…

Database Services There are many different approaches to databases these days, as our data needs have grown more varied and complex. AWS does a great job of keeping up with the advancements in a variety of services: Relational Database Service (RDS): AWS RDS makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database…

Network Services Where would we be without networks? Well, back to the Sneakernet, I suppose (the days when employees in offices would carry disks from desk to desk as a method of transferring data). Thanks to modern advancements in networking, the cloud is now possible. Here are some of the critical networking services we discuss…