JellyTech Perspective -> AWS (Selected Services)

First, a few important pieces of information.

AWS is considered the current leader among cloud platforms. On the market continuously since 2006. It holds the leader position, among other reasons, because it currently accounts for 32% of all cloud solutions overall and offers the widest range of available services. It offers over 200 services covering data storage and migration, network infrastructure and security, machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT), monitoring, and more. So what is it exactly? It's the all-in-one toolset of the entire IT world. It allows for development, and account and permissions management in Cognito. You can use AWS to handle the entire CI/CD process.

Amazon Web Services covers 99 availability zones in 31 geographic regions around the world, including 8 zones in Europe. Poland has not yet received such a zone, though we have heard announcements on the topic.

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Platform management is possible via the AWS Console web portal. AWS infrastructure can also be conveniently managed from the command line.

Now a little about applications.

The cloud is a tool dedicated to administrators. It solves many infrastructure-related pain points. Over the years, AWS has developed a significant number (as we mentioned, over 200) of services and functionalities that help administrators and DevOps engineers — and not only them — to efficiently manage infrastructure.

In this article, we will focus on the mentioned use cases: data storage, application deployment, and application testing. Why? For us these form the foundation. Additionally, a second Britannica could be written about AWS 😉 So we need to focus on specific services. We have prepared a glossary related to these three areas.

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What are the basic services related to data storage and what are their main characteristics:

•  Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) — a service that enables storing and retrieving data in the form of files, as well as objects that can be used in applications.
•  Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) — a service that enables storing data on hard drives of EC2 virtual machines, as well as creating disk volumes that can be attached to virtual machines.
•  Amazon Glacier — enables storing data in archival form, i.e., data that is rarely used but must be retained for a long time.
• Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) — a relational database management service that enables easy creation and management of databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and many others.

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AWS also offers a range of services that enable application deployment. Which ones?

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) — a service that enables deploying virtual machines, as well as scaling applications up or down depending on need.
• AWS Lambda — enables running code without a server, i.e., in response to events such as HTTP requests, database changes, or adding a file to S3.
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk — a service that enables deploying and managing web applications and microservice services. It automates many deployment-related tasks, such as environment configuration, scaling, monitoring, and application management.
• Amazon ECS — enables deploying applications in containers, as well as managing them in a scalable and flexible manner.
• AWS CodeDeploy — enables automatic deployment of code to virtual machines, containers, or physical servers. This tool provides automatic rollback in case of failure.
• Amazon Lightsail — offers a simple user interface and tools for managing applications such as databases, containers, and network devices.
• Amazon CloudFormation — a service that enables automated deployment of AWS infrastructure; allows creating and managing stacks containing all required resources, such as EC2, RDS, S3, and many others.

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Finally, application testing.

And here AWS comes to the rescue. It has dedicated tools and modules within services with broader applications:

• AWS Device Farm — a service enabling testing of mobile applications on various devices and platforms without the need to own those devices. Both automated and manual tests can be carried out on it.
• AWS CodeBuild — a tool enabling automatic application building and execution of unit tests. Building and testing applications in different environments can be easily configured.
• AWS Lambda — already mentioned; unit tests of code can easily be run in it and results monitored.
• Amazon EC2 — also mentioned above; this service enables server virtualization, allowing easy testing of applications on various hardware configurations and operating systems.
• And working with both Lambda and EC2 — AWS CodeDeploy — a tool enabling automatic application deployment to various environments; the deployment process can be easily configured in it.

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It would probably also be interesting to know how much this might cost? 😉

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AWS uses a payment model based on actual resource usage — such as virtual machine uptime, data transfer, or function calls in serverless services. Billing typically follows the Pay-as-You-Go model, and costs are charged for the time resources are used; some services bill per hour, others per minute.

A popular billing form is also Reserved Instances, where customers can make a low, one-time payment for reserved capacity and dedicated hosts — meaning running their applications on dedicated servers.

It is also possible to simply sign what is essentially a commitment with this provider — for example, for a fixed amount of computing power usage. This often results in two-year or even longer cooperation agreements. As is common with such agreements, however, we can negotiate discounts 😉

Some AWS resources belong to the Free Tier — these are free resources, but they are typically only suitable for infrastructure experiments. You can also try the Spot Instances option. This allows you to bid on unused Amazon EC2 computing power and run applications at lower cost.

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Is it worth it? 😉

AWS services are not cheap. But if someone asks whether it is worth investing in the cloud — the answer is positive. In exchange for a negotiated level of financial commitment, we get scalability, security, and a global architecture. The downside seems to be a kind of dependency on AWS services. Once you choose this cloud, you may encounter difficulties later when trying to move your data. Additionally, AWS can initially be complex to handle for those unfamiliar with cloud computing.

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Subjective summary

The services described above can be used in any organization and industry. AWS originated from e-commerce but also performs well in finance, medicine, and science. Wherever you need to host a website or application, store data, create backups, build IoT and Big Data solutions, manage IT resources, or manage databases — without wanting to use your own infrastructure — AWS will come with an appropriate solution.

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We know we haven't exhausted the topic yet. At JellyTech itself, we work with many different services and verify the cost-effectiveness of cloud use for our clients. So if you have any questions regarding AWS, we invite you to get in touch. To close, a quote from a classic 😉:

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"Be stubborn on vision, but flexible on details."‍

Ave Jeff Bezos 😉