Educative | Fundamental Building Blocks of AWS

October 29th, 2023

##Overview

This post will serve to capture my learnings of the first module in the Learn the A to Z of Amazon Web Services course in Educative. This should serve as a quick reference guide for the future on the concepts seen in this module.

Section 1: IaaS vs. PaaS

• IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) allows organizations to rent VMs or physical servers from AWS, removing the need to own and operate their own data centers.
• AWS manages the infrastructure, owning and operating the data center.
• PaaS (Platform as a Service) removes the need to manage underlying platforms like databases and streaming services.
• This allows organizations to focus on deploying and managing core applications without worrying about IaaS and PaaS layers.

Section 2: Amazon Web Services Infrastructure

• AWS infrastructure consists of four primary areas that combine IaaS and PaaS: Compute, Storage, Database, and Network.

Section 3: Compute

• Compute services include EC2 (create/deploy virtual machines), ECS (manage Docker containers), LightSail (launch virtual private servers), Lambda (serverless function execution), and Batch (used for batch processing).

Section 4: Storage

• Storage services include S3 (scalable object storage), EFS (Network Attached Storage), Glacier (data archival), Snow Ball (data transport), and Storage Gateway (replicates data back to S3).

Section 5: Database

• Database services include RDS (resizable and managed databases), Aurora (proprietary relational database), DynamoDB (NoSQL DB), Neptune (graph database), and ElasticCache (managed Redis and Memcached).