AWS

OpsWorks: Application life cycle management

Codedeploy:

AWS CodeDeploy is part of a family of AWS deployment services that includes AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS CodePipeline, AWS CloudFormation, and AWS OpsWorks. AWS CodeDeploy coordinates application deployments to Amazon EC2 instances, on-premises instances, or both. (On-premises instances are physical devices that are not Amazon EC2 instances.)

An application can contain deployable content like code, web, and configuration files, executables, packages, scripts, and so on. AWS CodeDeploy deploys applications from Amazon S3 buckets and GitHub repositories.

You do not need to make changes to your existing code to use AWS CodeDeploy. You can use AWS CodeDeploy to control the pace of deployment across Amazon EC2 instances and to define the actions to be taken at each stage.

AWS CodeDeploy works with various systems for configuration management, source control, continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment. For more information, see Product and Service Integrations.

ElastiCache is a web service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale an in-memory cache in the cloud. The service improves the performance of web applications by allowing you to retrieve information from fast, managed, in-memory caches, instead of relying entirely on slower disk-based databases. ElastiCache supports two open-source in-memory caching engines:

• Memcached - a widely adopted memory object caching system. ElastiCache is protocol compliant with Memcached, so popular tools that you use today with existing Memcached environments will work seamlessly with the service.
• Redis – a popular open-source in-memory key-value store that supports data structures such as sorted sets and lists. ElastiCache supports Master / Slave replication and Multi-AZ which can be used to achieve cross AZ redundancy.

AWS CloudFormation gives developers and systems administrators an easy way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, provisioning and updating them in an orderly and predictable fashion.

You can use AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates or create your own templates to describe the AWS resources, and any associated dependencies or runtime parameters, required to run your application. You don’t need to figure out the order for provisioning AWS services or the subtleties of making those dependencies work. CloudFormation takes care of this for you. After the AWS resources are deployed, you can modify and update them in a controlled and predictable way, in effect applying version control to your AWS infrastructure the same way you do with your software. You can also visualize your templates as diagrams and edit them using a drag-and-drop interface with the AWS CloudFormation Designer.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers.

Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use. Amazon EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate themselves from common failure scenarios.

Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) provides persistent block level storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances in the AWS Cloud.  Each Amazon EBS volume is automatically replicated within its Availability Zone to protect you from component failure, offering high availability and durability. Amazon EBS volumes offer the consistent and low-latency performance needed to run your workloads. With Amazon EBS, you can scale your usage up or down within minutes – all while paying a low price for only what you provision.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while managing time-consuming database administration tasks, freeing you up to focus on your applications and business. Amazon RDS provides you six familiar database engines to choose from, including Amazon Aurora, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL and MariaDB.

Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances in the cloud. It enables you to achieve greater levels of fault tolerance in your applications, seamlessly providing the required amount of load balancing capacity needed to distribute application traffic.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) comprises dozens of services, each of which exposes an area of functionality. While the variety of services offers flexibility for how you want to manage your AWS infrastructure, it can be challenging to figure out which services to use and how to provision them.

With Elastic Beanstalk, you can quickly deploy and manage applications in the AWS Cloud without worrying about the infrastructure that runs those applications. AWS Elastic Beanstalk reduces management complexity without restricting choice or control. You simply upload your application, and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, scaling, and application health monitoring. Elastic Beanstalk uses highly reliable and scalable services that are available in the AWS Free Usage Tier.

Amazon Simple Storage Service is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Amazon S3 has a simple web services interface that you can use to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.

Amazon CloudFront is a global content delivery network (CDN) service that accelerates delivery of your websites, APIs, video content or other web assets. It integrates with other Amazon Web Services products to give developers and businesses an easy way to accelerate content to end users with no minimum usage commitments.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) lets you provision a logically isolated section of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud where you can launch AWS resources in a virtual network that you define. You have complete control over your virtual networking environment, including selection of your own IP address range, creation of subnets, and configuration of route tables and network gateways.

You can easily customize the network configuration for your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud. For example, you can create a public-facing subnet for your webservers that has access to the Internet, and place your backend systems such as databases or application servers in a private-facing subnet with no Internet access. You can leverage multiple layers of security, including security groups and network access control lists, to help control access to Amazon EC2 instances in each subnet.

Additionally, you can create a Hardware Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection between your corporate datacenter and your VPC and leverage the AWS cloud as an extension of your corporate datacenter.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a web service that helps you securely control access to AWS resources for your users. You use IAM to control who can use your AWS resources (authentication) and what resources they can use and in what ways (authorization).

Amazon WorkSpaces is a fully managed, secure desktop computing service which runs on the AWS cloud. Amazon WorkSpaces allows you to easily provision cloud-based virtual desktops and provide your users access to the documents, applications, and resources they need from any supported device, including Windows and Mac computers, Chromebooks, iPads, Kindle Fire tablets, and Android tablets. With just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, you can deploy high-quality cloud desktops for any number of users at a cost that is competitive with traditional desktops and half the cost of most Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solutions.

AWS Lambda is a compute service where you can upload your code to AWS Lambda and the service can run the code on your behalf using AWS infrastructure. After you upload your code and create what we call a Lambda function, AWS Lambda takes care of provisioning and managing the servers that you use to run the code. You can use AWS Lambda as follows:

• As an event-driven compute service where AWS Lambda runs your code in response to events, such as changes to data in an Amazon S3 bucket or an Amazon DynamoDB table.
• As a compute service to run your code in response to HTTP requests using Amazon API Gateway or API calls made using AWS SDKs.

AWS Lambda runs your code on a high-availability compute infrastructure and performs all of the administration of the compute resources, including server and operating system maintenance, capacity provisioning and automatic scaling, code monitoring and logging. All you need to do is supply your code in one of the languages that AWS Lambda supports (currently Node.js, Java, and Python).

Currently, there are three ways of running code in AWS cloud: Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS, and AWS Elastic Beanstalk. EC2 is a full-blown IaaS while ECS is the hosted container environment. Finally, Elastic Beanstalk is a PaaS layer. AWS Lambda forms the fourth service with the capability to execute code in the cloud. But it’s unique in a sense that it is at the intersection of EC2, ECS, and Elastic Beanstalk.

Since Amazon Elastic Beanstalk is a PaaS layer, developers push the code along with the metadata. The metadata contains the details of the AMI, language, framework, and runtime requirements along with connection information of databases or dependencies. Based on the metadata, AWS Elastic Beanstalk launches an appropriate AMI and configures it to run the code. Similar to other PaaS offerings, developers push the code and configuration to Elastic Beanstalk. The configuration or metadata can be simple or comprehensive depending on the application architecture. Lambda is much simpler than PaaS. It just expects the code and its association with a set of IAM roles. Of course, allocating RAM and defining the timeout may be considered as the configuration and metadata but they are much simpler and consistent across any Lambda function. Most of the code running within PaaS is exposed to the outside world as a Web page or REST endpoint. But Lambda functions are inaccessible from the public Internet. They need to be invoked only through the supported data sources.

Thanks to Docker and containers, microservices are becoming popular. AWS Lambda is one of the first microservices environment on the public cloud. Its innovative pricing model based on the number of requests, execution time, and allocated memory makes it very attractive for moving parts of web-scale applications. When AWS adds additional languages like Ruby, Python, and Java and brings support for EC2, CloudTrail, RDS and other custom event sources,

Amazon Elasticsearch Service is a managed service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale Elasticsearch in the AWS Cloud. Elasticsearch is a popular open-source search and analytics engine for use cases such as log analytics, real-time application monitoring, and click stream analytics. You can set up and configure your Amazon Elasticsearch cluster in minutes from the AWS Management Console. Amazon Elasticsearch Service provisions all the resources for your cluster and launches it. The service automatically detects and replaces failed Elasticsearch nodes, reducing the overhead associated with self-managed infrastructure and Elasticsearch software. Amazon Elasticsearch Service allows you to easily scale your cluster via a single API call or a few clicks in the AWS Management Console. With Amazon Elasticsearch Service, you get direct access to the Elasticsearch open-source API so that code and applications you’re already using with your existing Elasticsearch environments will work seamlessly.

Welcome to the Amazon Redshift Cluster Management Guide. Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud. You can start with just a few hundred gigabytes of data and scale to a petabyte or more. This enables you to use your data to acquire new insights for your business and customers.

The first step to create a data warehouse is to launch a set of nodes, called an Amazon Redshift cluster. After you provision your cluster, you can upload your data set and then perform data analysis queries. Regardless of the size of the data set, Amazon Redshift offers fast query performance using the same SQL-based tools and business intelligence applications that you use today.