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Cloud services or pay as you go models are on boom. The cloud infrastructure services market has many big players such as Amazon web services (AWS), Microsoft Azure , Google cloud (GCP), Alibaba, Oracle cloud and many more. Amazon web services is one of the popular cloud services providers with 32% of market share globally. It is one of the most secure cloud computing environments offering a plethora of services including storage of databases, delivery of content and APIs, businesses, companies, and government organizations. It provides a wide range of infrastructure tools and basic building blocks which aid in computing.
Today we look more in detail about Amazon Web services, AWS architecture, its major components and features etc.
What is AWS Architecture?
Elastic cloud compute of AWS EC2 is the backbone of AWS computing infrastructure. It allows users to use virtual machines of varied configurations as per their requirements. It allows several configuration options, mapping to individual servers, and pay as you go subscription pricing models. We will look at its architecture and various components and their purpose and functions more in detail in this section.
In this diagram S3 stands for storage which lets users store and retrieve data using various API calls.
The typical process how AWS architecture works is as under: –
- The users send request to AWS server via email for registration or transfer of domain
- The request along with required information, transferred to Amazon API gateway
- The gateway channel the user information to AWS Lambda function
- AWS Lambda function create an email and send to 3rd party server using Amazon SES
Features of Amazon Architecture
- Scalability of architecture to render services to small- and large-scale deployments
- Greater compatibility and speed up quick deployments
- Easy to use and storage capacity offered is unlimited
- Storage, data backups, and data restoration is provided by AWS
- Clients have access to information from any corner of the world once registered on AWS cloud platform
AWS Components
Let us look at major components which make up AWS.
Amazon API Gateway – This is used to access data, logic, and functions. The gateway provides an API endpoint to AWS Lambda function. And helps in back-end services to manage tasks and codes on Amazon EC2 or any web applications. API is scalable and lets developers manage secure APIs. Some of the key features of Amazon API gateway are:
- API activity monitoring with ease
- Robust control on security
- Hassle free server’s deployment
AWS Lambda – function procures all required information from API gateway and runs back-end codes. It offers a quick update if there is a new upload in the Amazon S3 bucket. Capacity scaling and administration of infrastructure to run loaded codes is taken care of by AWS Lambda. Real time matrix and logs can be seen visually on Amazon cloud watch. It is cost effective as users only pay for duration codes running.
Amazon SES – is a simple mail service from Amazon. Using this users can send mails with minimum infrastructure with maximized delivery. It collaborates with AWS management console to enable easy monitoring of the process of sending emails. It develops a parameter to process requests through receiver ISP provided receiver address is valid. For invalid addresses, responses are sent back to the sender.
Load Balancing – this improves performance and application efficiency and the server. Functioning as a network appliance it improves efficiency of architecture for traditional applications. It provides Elastic load balancing via distribution of traffic to EC2 across multiple available resources, dynamic allocation or deallocation of Amazon EC2 hosts from load balancing. It can dynamically grow and shrink to support advanced routing needs.
Amazon Cloud Front – responsible for content delivery (website). It may contain dynamic, static or streaming content using a global network of edge locations. User requests for content are automatically routed to the nearest edge location to improve performance. It is optimized to work with other Amazon web services such as Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2. It also works with non AWS origin servers and stores files in a similar way.
Security Management – Amazon elastic cloud provides security groups which are similar to inbound firewalls in which we can specify the protocols, ports and source IP range which are allowed to reach EC2 instances. EC2 instances can be assigned to one or more security groups which route appropriate traffic to each instance and these groups can be configured using specific subnets or IP addresses to limit access to EC2 instances.
Elasticache – is a web service which manages the memory cache in the cloud. Memory management cache helps to reduce load on the services, improve performance and scalability for database tier by caching frequency used information.
Amazon RDS – it is a relational database service to provide similar access as MYSQL, Oracle or Microsoft SQL server database engine. It automates patching of database software and manages backups as per user instructions. It supports point in time recovery with snapshots.