AWS Important Features Developers Should Now Learn

As a developer, you're likely aware of the importance of staying up-to-date with the latest features and tools in the industry. AWS is no exception, with its constantly evolving set of services and capabilities.

One key feature to learn is AWS Lambda, a serverless compute service that allows you to run code without provisioning or managing servers.

Serverless architecture is a game-changer for many applications, and AWS Lambda is a key component of this approach.

With AWS Lambda, you can write code in a variety of languages, including Node.js, Python, and Java, and run it without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.

Another important feature to learn is Amazon S3, a highly durable and scalable object storage service that can store and serve large amounts of data.

S3 is a great choice for storing static websites, images, and videos, and it's also a good option for backup and archiving purposes.

S3 is also highly secure, with features like versioning, encryption, and access controls to protect your data.

AWS CloudFormation is another essential feature to learn, a service that allows you to manage and provision infrastructure as code.

AWS provides a range of compute and container services that make it easy to build, deploy, and scale applications.

EC2 is a virtual server that offers cloud computing with scalability, allowing you to spin up virtual machines on demand and scale up or down based on application needs. Auto Scaling automatically adjusts compute resources based on traffic or system conditions.

ECS is a container orchestration service that makes it easy to run and manage Docker containers across a cluster of EC2 machines. With ECS, you can choose an EC2 container or AWS Fargate container, which is a serverless compute engine that works with both ECS and EKS.

AWS Fargate automatically allocates the right amount of isolated compute resources for each container, so you don't have to worry about over-provisioning or managing servers. It's a great option for containers that need to scale quickly and efficiently.

Here are some key features of AWS compute and container services:

The Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It's a virtual server that lets you rent virtual servers in the cloud, ranging from tiny two vCPU and 0.5Gb of RAM to beefy 96-core machines with 384 Gb of RAM.

You can also rent physical dedicated servers with EC2, which is designed for any workload, although you'll still need to choose the best instances for your specific tasks. Besides generic ones, EC2 also offers cost-saving ARM instances and bare metal Mac minis.

EC2 has several key features, including Auto Scaling, which automatically adjusts compute resources based on traffic or system conditions. This helps ensure your application is always running smoothly.

Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) is another important feature, distributing incoming traffic across multiple EC2 instances for better fault tolerance. This ensures your application remains available even if one instance goes down.

EC2 Pricing Models offer flexibility, with Spot, Reserved, and On-Demand instances allowing businesses to optimize costs. For example, Spot instances can be used for non-critical tasks that can be interrupted.

Here are some key EC2 features at a glance:

EC2 instances can be created using a pre-built machine image from AWS (AMI) or a custom machine image. These machine images are similar to pre-built templates containing the operating system with some pre-configured applications installed over it.

To run containers on AWS, you'll want to start with Amazon ECR, a highly available and high-performance container registry that allows for easy storage, management, and deployment of your container images. You can store your images privately or share them worldwide.

Amazon ECS is a container orchestration service that automates the deployment and management of your containers. It integrates well with other AWS services like Amazon Route53, Secrets Manager, and Cloudwatch. ECS chooses the right EC2 instance for your service and sets up load balancing for you.

You can deploy your service using an EC2 container or an AWS Fargate container. Fargate is a serverless compute engine that works with ECS and EKS, and it automatically allocates the right amount of isolated compute resources for each container.

To get started with ECS, you'll need to create a Docker image and push it to ECR. Then, you can build your ECS service using the Docker image from ECR. ECS will take care of choosing the right EC2 instance for your service and setting up load balancing.

Here's a quick rundown of the steps to run containers on AWS:

By following these steps, you'll be up and running with containerized applications on AWS in no time.

AWS CloudFormation is a powerful tool that allows developers to define and provision infrastructure using code. This is a game-changer for repeatability, as you can deploy consistent infrastructure across different environments, such as dev, staging, and production.

With CloudFormation, you can create templates that describe all your resources and automate deployments. This means you can keep track of infrastructure changes in code repositories, which is a huge time-saver.

Here are some key benefits of using AWS CloudFormation:

By using CloudFormation, you can ensure that your infrastructure is consistent and up-to-date, which is especially important when working with multiple environments.

Cost Optimization is a crucial aspect of running a cost-effective cloud infrastructure. To achieve this, you should consider using AWS's Cost Explorer to visualize and analyze your spending patterns and identify cost-saving opportunities.

AWS Budgets can be set up to track and monitor your costs with customizable alerts. This helps you stay on top of your expenses and avoid unexpected bills.

By committing to longer-term use of AWS resources, you can save up to 75% with Savings Plans and Reserved Instances. This is a significant reduction in costs that can add up over time.

Here are some key tools to help you optimize costs on AWS:

Storage and Databases are two of the most critical components of AWS, and understanding their features can make a huge difference for developers.

Amazon S3 is a highly scalable, secure, and durable object storage service that provides flexible and cost-effective storage solutions for media files, backups, and static website content. It has various storage classes like Standard, Intelligent-Tiering, Glacier, and Deep Archive, allowing you to choose the right balance between cost and access frequency.

Amazon RDS makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud, supporting multiple database engines like MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, and Aurora. RDS automates backups, patching, and recovery, ensuring high availability with automated failover in case of infrastructure failure.

DynamoDB is a high-performance managed NoSQL database that supports both key-value and document store, handling more than 10 trillion requests per day. It's durable and secure, with built-in in-memory caching, backups, and restore, making it the number one choice for many fastest-growing startups.

Here are some key storage and database services offered by AWS:

Amazon EBS is generic long-term high-performance block storage for EC2 instances, designed for both throughput and transactional workloads and can scale to petabytes of data. EBS replicates volumes within the Availability Zone, and you can use EBS Snapshots to backup your volumes to S3.

Amazon EFS is a fully managed scalable elastic NFS, growing and shrinking automatically, eliminating the need to provision and manually manage capacity. EFS is designed to provide massively parallel shared access to thousands of EC2 instances with a high level of aggregate throughput and IOPS, maintaining consistent latency.

Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible high-performance distributed relational database, offering high security, availability, and reliability of traditional commercial databases. It provides replication across three Availability Zones, point-in-time recovery, and continuous backup to Amazon S3.

Serverless computing is a game-changer for modern applications, and AWS Lambda is at the forefront of this revolution.

AWS Lambda allows you to run code without provisioning or managing servers, making it ideal for microservices or event-driven applications. This is achieved through an event-driven architecture, where Lambda responds to events such as S3 uploads, database changes, or API Gateway requests.

With Lambda, you only pay for the compute time you use, making it a cost-efficient option. This is made possible by auto scaling, which automatically scales up and down based on the number of incoming events.

Lambda integrates with various AWS services like S3, DynamoDB, and SNS, streamlining your architecture. This makes it easier to develop and deploy applications, as you can focus on writing code rather than worrying about infrastructure.

If you have a code that will not change, but will also perform repetitive tasks without much monitoring efforts, then Lambda is a great choice. This is because Lambda takes care of the backend infrastructure, allowing you to focus on writing efficient code.

Here are some benefits of using Lambda:

In summary, Lambda is a powerful tool for developers, allowing you to focus on writing code rather than worrying about infrastructure. With its event-driven architecture, auto scaling, and integration with various AWS services, Lambda is a great choice for modern applications.

Networking and Load Balancing is a crucial aspect of building scalable and reliable applications on AWS. Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) allows you to create isolated cloud resources, giving you full control over your networking environment.

You can design subnets for public or private access and configure routing tables for directing traffic. This is made possible by features such as Subnets and Routing, Security Groups and NACLs, and VPC Peering and PrivateLink.

A well-designed VPC is essential for protecting your EC2 instances and ensuring they can communicate with each other. To achieve this, you can create a secure private network called VPC, which contains multiple subnets, each associated with a subset of the IP addresses available to the parent VPC.

To distribute incoming application traffic across multiple servers, containers, or Lambda functions, you can use Elastic Load Balancing. This service enables your application to handle more concurrent requests without affecting response time.

Here are the key features of AWS Load Balancing:

Both ALBs and NLBs support TLS/HTTPS and run in a VPC, providing protection from spoofing and man-in-the-middle attacks.

Cloud Networking is a critical aspect of building scalable and reliable applications in the cloud. Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) allows you to create isolated cloud resources, giving you full control over your networking environment.

You can design subnets for public or private access and configure routing tables for directing traffic. This is particularly useful when you need to keep most of your backend infrastructure private while making your web servers accessible to the public.

Amazon VPC also enables you to control inbound and outbound traffic at the instance and subnet level using Security Groups and NACLs.

Route 53, a scalable and highly available Domain Name System (DNS) service, translates domain names to IP addresses, making it easier for users to access your application.

Route 53 integrates well with ELB (Elastic Load Balancing), which distributes incoming traffic across multiple servers, containers, or Lambda functions, ensuring that your application can handle more concurrent requests without affecting response time.

ELB load balancers can distribute traffic at the application layer (layer 7) or the transport layer (layer 4), making your application highly available and fault-tolerant.

Here's a summary of the main components of Amazon VPC:

By using Amazon VPC and Route 53, you can create a robust and scalable networking infrastructure for your cloud-based applications.

Choosing the right region and availability zone is crucial for your application's performance and accessibility. AWS regions are located all across the globe.

You may want to host your application closer to your customers' locations. AWS data centers are spread out across the globe, allowing you to do just that.

An AWS region is composed of multiple availability zones, which are essentially logical data centers within a region. Each availability zone is mapped to physical data centers with redundant power, networking, and connectivity.

You can bind your AWS resources to a region, an availability zone, or make them global. This flexibility allows you to tailor your setup to your specific needs.

Security and Identity are crucial components of AWS, and they play a vital role in ensuring the integrity and confidentiality of your data. IAM (Identity and Access Management) is the cornerstone of AWS's security model, enabling you to control access to AWS services and resources securely.

IAM enables you to assign specific permissions to users, groups, and roles using roles and policies, ensuring the principle of least privilege. This means that each user has only the permissions they need to perform their tasks, reducing the risk of unauthorized access.

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) adds an extra layer of security for sensitive operations, making it even harder for attackers to gain unauthorized access. Fine-Grained Access Control allows you to define precise permissions for each user or resource, giving you complete control over who has access to what.

A Directory Service provides a controlled directory in the cloud, distributing directory data across multiple servers in a network. This is different from databases, which are defined by APIs, whereas directories are defined by protocols.

Inspector helps you examine how your AWS-based apps behave and spot any security problems, giving you a clear picture of your security posture. AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) offers web traffic filters to shield your web application from threats, protecting your data from malicious attacks.

Cloud HSM (Hardware Security Module) assists you in meeting corporate, contractual, and regulatory data security compliance requirements, giving you peace of mind. KMS (Key Management Service) provides centralized management of the cryptographic keys used to protect your data, making it easy to manage your keys.

Here's a summary of the key features of Security and Identity in AWS: