Cloud computing is an internet-based computing service in which large groups of remote servers are networked to allow centralized data storage, and online access to computer services or resources.

Using cloud computing, organizations can use shared computing and storage resources rather than building, operating, and improving infrastructure on their own.

Cloud computing is a model that enables the following features.

Users can provision and release resources on-demand.
Resources can be scaled up or down automatically, depending on the load.
Resources are accessible over a network with proper security.
Cloud service providers can enable a pay-as-you-go model, where customers are charged based on the type of resources and per usage.

Types of Clouds

There are three types of clouds − Public, Private, and Hybrid cloud.

Public Cloud
In public cloud, the third-party service providers make resources and services available to their customers via Internet. Customer’s data and related security is with the service providers’ owned infrastructure.

Private Cloud
A private cloud also provides almost similar features as public cloud, but the data and services are managed by the organization or by the third party only for the customer’s organization. In this type of cloud, major control is over the infrastructure so security related issues are minimized.

Hybrid Cloud
A hybrid cloud is the combination of both private and public cloud. The decision to run on private or public cloud usually depends on various parameters like sensitivity of data and applications, industry certifications and required standards, regulations, etc.

Cloud Service Models

There are three types of service models in cloud − IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.
IaaS: IaaS stands for Infrastructure as a Service. It provides users with the capability to provision processing, storage, and network connectivity on demand. Using this service model, the customers can develop their own applications on these resources.

PaaS: PaaS stands for Platform as a Service. Here, the service provider provides various services like databases, queues, workflow engines, e-mails, etc. to their customers. The customer can then use these components for building their own applications. The services, availability of resources and data backup are handled by the service provider that helps the customers to focus more on their application’s functionality.

SaaS: SaaS stands for Software as a Service. As the name suggests, here the third-party providers provide end-user applications to their customers with some administrative capability at the application level, such as the ability to create and manage their users. Also some level of customizability is possible such as the customers can use their own corporate logos, colors, etc.

Advantages of Cloud Computing

Here is a list of some of the most important advantages that Cloud Computing has to offer −

Cost-Efficient − Building our own servers and tools is time-consuming as well as expensive as we need to order, pay for, install, and configure expensive hardware, long before we need it. However, using cloud computing, we only pay for the amount we use and when we use the computing resources. In this manner, cloud computing is cost efficient.
Reliability − A cloud computing platform provides much more managed, reliable and consistent service than an in-house IT infrastructure. It guarantees 24×7 and 365 days of service. If any of the server fails, then hosted applications and services can easily be transited to any of the available servers.
Unlimited Storage − Cloud computing provides almost unlimited storage capacity, i.e., we need not worry about running out of storage space or increasing our current storage space availability. We can access as much or as little as we need.
Backup & Recovery − Storing data in the cloud, backing it up and restoring the same is relatively easier than storing it on a physical device. The cloud service providers also have enough technology to recover our data, so there is the convenience of recovering our data anytime.
Easy Access to Information − Once you register yourself in cloud, you can access your account from anywhere in the world provided there is internet connection at that point. There are various storage and security facilities that vary with the account type chosen.

Disadvantages of Cloud Computing

Although Cloud Computing provides a wonderful set of advantages, it has some drawbacks as well that often raise questions about its efficiency.

Security issues
Security is the major issue in cloud computing. The cloud service providers implement the best security standards and industry certifications, however, storing data and important files on external service providers always bears a risk.

AWS cloud infrastructure is designed to be the most flexible and secured cloud network. It provides scalable and highly reliable platform that enables customers to deploy applications and data quickly and securely.

Technical issues
As cloud service providers offer services to number of clients each day, sometimes the system can have some serious issues leading to business processes temporarily being suspended. Additionally, if the internet connection is offline then we will not be able to access any of the applications, server, or data from the cloud.

Not easy to switch service providers
Cloud service providers promises vendors that the cloud will be flexible to use and integrate, however switching cloud services is not easy. Most organizations may find it difficult to host and integrate current cloud applications on another platform. Interoperability and support issues may arise such as applications developed on Linux platform may not work properly on Microsoft Development Framework (.Net).

This is the basic structure of AWS EC2, where EC2 stands for Elastic Compute Cloud. EC2 allow users to use virtual machines of different configurations as per their requirement. It allows various configuration options, mapping of individual server, various pricing options, etc. We will discuss these in detail in AWS Products section. Following is the diagrammatic representation of the architecture.

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Note − In the above diagram S3 stands for Simple Storage Service. It allows the users to store and retrieve various types of data using API calls. It doesn’t contain any computing element. We will discuss this topic in detail in AWS products section.

Load Balancing
Load balancing simply means to hardware or software load over web servers, that improver’s the efficiency of the server as well as the application. Following is the diagrammatic representation of AWS architecture with load balancing.

Hardware load balancer is a very common network appliance used in traditional web application architectures.

AWS provides the Elastic Load Balancing service, it distributes the traffic to EC2 instances across multiple available sources, and dynamic addition and removal of Amazon EC2 hosts from the load-balancing rotation.
Elastic Load Balancing can dynamically grow and shrink the load-balancing capacity to adjust to traffic demands and also support sticky sessions to address more advanced routing needs.

Amazon Cloud-front
It is responsible for content delivery, i.e. used to deliver website. It may contain dynamic, static, and streaming content using a global network of edge locations. Requests for content at the user’s end are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, which improves the performance.

Amazon Cloud-front is optimized to work with other Amazon Web Services, like Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2. It also works fine with any non-AWS origin server and stores the original files in a similar manner.

In Amazon Web Services, there are no contracts or monthly commitments. We pay only for as much or as little content as we deliver through the service.

Elastic Load Balancer
It is used to spread the traffic to web servers, which improves performance. AWS provides the Elastic Load Balancing service, in which traffic is distributed to EC2 instances over multiple available zones, and dynamic addition and removal of Amazon EC2 hosts from the load-balancing rotation.

Elastic Load Balancing can dynamically grow and shrink the load-balancing capacity as per the traffic conditions.

Security Management
Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides a feature called security groups, which is similar to an inbound network firewall, in which we have to specify the protocols, ports, and source IP ranges that are allowed to reach your EC2 instances.

Each EC2 instance can be assigned one or more security groups, each of which routes the appropriate traffic to each instance. Security groups can be configured using specific subnets or IP addresses which limits access to EC2 instances.

Elastic Caches
Amazon Elastic Cache is a web service that manages the memory cache in the cloud. In memory management, cache has a very important role and helps to reduce the load on the services, improves the performance and scalability on the database tier by caching frequently used information.

Amazon RDS
Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) provides a similar access as that of MySQL, Oracle, or Microsoft SQL Server database engine. The same queries, applications, and tools can be used with Amazon RDS.

It automatically patches the database software and manages backups as per the user’s instruction. It also supports point-in-time recovery. There are no up-front investments required, and we pay only for the resources we use.

Hosting RDMS on EC2 Instances
Amazon RDS allows users to install RDBMS (Relational Database Management System) of your choice like MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, etc. on an EC2 instance and can manage as required.

Amazon EC2 uses Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Storage) similar to network-attached storage. All data and logs running on EC2 instances should be placed on Amazon EBS volumes, which will be available even if the database host fails.

Amazon EBS volumes automatically provide redundancy within the availability zone, which increases the availability of simple disks. Further if the volume is not sufficient for our databases needs, volume can be added to increase the performance for our database.

Using Amazon RDS, the service provider manages the storage and we only focus on managing the data.

Storage & Backups
AWS cloud provides various options for storing, accessing, and backing up web application data and assets. The Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) provides a simple web-services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web.

Amazon S3 stores data as objects within resources called buckets. The user can store as many objects as per requirement within the bucket, and can read, write and delete objects from the bucket.

Amazon EBS is effective for data that needs to be accessed as block storage and requires persistence beyond the life of the running instance, such as database partitions and application logs.

Amazon EBS volumes can be maximized up to 1 TB, and these volumes can be striped for larger volumes and increased performance. Provisioned IOPS volumes are designed to meet the needs of database workloads that are sensitive to storage performance and consistency.

Amazon EBS currently supports up to 1,000 IOPS per volume. We can stripe multiple volumes together to deliver thousands of IOPS per instance to an application.

Auto Scaling
The difference between AWS cloud architecture and the traditional hosting model is that AWS can dynamically scale the web application fleet on demand to handle changes in traffic.

In the traditional hosting model, traffic forecasting models are generally used to provision hosts ahead of projected traffic. In AWS, instances can be provisioned on the fly according to a set of triggers for scaling the fleet out and back in. Amazon Auto Scaling can create capacity groups of servers that can grow or shrink on demand.

Key Considerations for Web Hosting in AWS

Following are some of the key considerations for web hosting −

No physical network devices needed
In AWS, network devices like firewalls, routers, and load-balancers for AWS applications no longer reside on physical devices and are replaced with software solutions.

Multiple options are available to ensure quality software solutions. For load balancing choose Zeus, HAProxy, Nginx, Pound, etc. For establishing a VPN connection choose OpenVPN, OpenSwan, Vyatta, etc.

No security concerns
AWS provides a more secured model, in which every host is locked down. In Amazon EC2, security groups are designed for each type of host in the architecture, and a large variety of simple and tiered security models can be created to enable minimum access among hosts within your architecture as per requirement.

Availability of data centers
EC2 instances are easily available at most of the availability zones in AWS region and provides model for deploying your application across data centers for both high availability and reliability.

AWS Management Console is a web application for managing Amazon Web Services. AWS Management Console consists of list of various services to choose from. It also provides all information related to our account like billing.

This console provides an inbuilt user interface to perform AWS tasks like working with Amazon S3 buckets, launching and connecting to Amazon EC2 instances, setting Amazon CloudWatch alarms, etc.

Following is the screenshot of AWS management console for Amazon EC2 service.

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So, this brings us to the end of blog. This Tecklearn ‘Overview of Cloud Computing’ helps you with commonly asked questions if you are looking out for a job in AWS and Cloud Computing. If you wish to learn AWS and build a career in Cloud Computing domain, then check out our interactive, AWS Solutions Architect Training, that comes with 24*7 support to guide you throughout your learning period. Please find the link for course details:

https://www.tecklearn.com/course/aws-solutions-architect-certification-training/

AWS Solutions Architect Certification Training

About the Course

Tecklearn’s AWS Architect Certification Training is curated by industry professionals as per the industry requirements and demands. The entire AWS training course is in line with the AWS Certified Solutions Architect exam. You will learn various aspects of AWS like Elastic Cloud Compute, Simple Storage Service, Virtual Private Cloud, Aurora database service, Load Balancing, Auto Scaling and more by working on hands-on projects and case studies. You will master AWS architectural principles and services such as IAM, VPC, EC2, EBS and elevate your career to the cloud, and beyond with this AWS solutions architect course.

Why Should you take AWS Architect Certification Training?

The Average salary of an AWS Certified Solutions Architect is $129k per annum – Indeed.com
AWS market is expected to reach $236 Billion by 2020 at a CAGR of 22% – Forrester
Netflix, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, BBC, Baidu, ESPN & other MNCs worldwide use Amazon AWS Cloud

What you will Learn in this Course?

Overview of Cloud Computing and AWS

What is Cloud Computing
Definition of Cloud Computing
On Premises Vs Service Models
Advantages and Disadvantages of Cloud Computing
Cloud Computing Providers
Why AWS
What is AWS
AWS Benefits
AWS Services
Traditional Vs AWS Components
AWS Global Infrastructure
AWS Availability Zone
AWS Edge Locations
How to Access the AWS Services
AWS architecture
AWS Management Console
AWS offerings Listing (EC2, VPC, AMI, EBS, ELB, Backup)

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Overview of EC2
Elastic IP Vs Public IP
Launching of AWS EC2 instance demo
How to access EC2
EC2 Purchasing Options
Amazon Machine Images (AMI)
EC2 Storage for the Root Device
EC2 Creating AMI
EC2 Instance Types
Auto Scaling
Cost of EC2
Best Practices of EC2
EC2 Resizing
Placement Groups
Amazon Backup and various Concepts
EC2 Demo
Hands On

Networking and Monitoring Services: Amazon Virtual Public Cloud

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and its benefits
Default and Non-Default VPC
IP Address
CIDR – Classless Inter-domain Routing
Subnet: Subnet Mask and Subnet Mask Classes
Private and Public Subnet
IPv4 v/s IPv6 – As in AWS Infrastructure
Internet Gateway and Route Tables
Security Group with VPC
Access Control List, NACL and Security Group
NAT Devices: NAT Gateway and NAT Instance
Flow Logs
VPC Peering and its working
VPN and Direct Connect
VPC Limitations
Need for Monitoring Services
AWS CloudWatch and it’s working
AWS Command Line Interface
Use Cases
Hands On

Amazon Storage Services: Elastic Block Storage

What is Storage Services
What is Elastic Block Storage (EBS)
Persistent Storage
EBC Features
EBS Benefits
EBS Types
EBS Pricing
EBS Life Cycle
EBS Snapshot
EBS General Purposed SSD
EBS Provisioned IOPS SSD
EBS Throughput Optimized HDD
EBS Cold HDD
EBS Comparison
EBS Previous Generation Volumes
EBS How Incremental Snapshots Work
EBS Deleting an Amazon EBS Snapshot
EBS Summary
Hands On

Amazon Storage Services: Simple Storage Services (S3)

What is Amazon AWS S3
Simple Storage Services (S3) Advantages
S3 Buckets, Objects, Keys and Endpoints
S3 Data Consistency Model
S3 Transfer Acceleration
S3 Storage Types
S3 Versioning
S3 Life Cycle Management
S3 Data Protection
S3 Cross-Region Replication
S3 Hosting a Static Website
Hands On

Amazon Storage Services

Amazon Glacier Storage
Amazon Storage Gateway
Amazon Snowball (Data Import /Export)
Billing with Amazon CloudWatch
Hands On

AWS Database Services: Relational Database Service (RDS)

Overview of Databases and Relational Database Service (RDS)
What is Amazon RDS
AWS RDS Components
AWS RDS: Interface
AWS RDS: Charges
AWS RDS Multi-AZ: Benefits
AWS RDS Multi-AZ: Failover Process
NoSQL Database: Amazon DynamoDB
Overview of DynamoDB
DynamoDB Benefits
Hands On

AWS Database Services Continued

Data Warehouse: Amazon Redshift
Overview of Amazon Redshift
Redshift Architecture
Amazon Redshift features
In Memory Cache: Amazon ElasticCache
Redis Vs MemCache
Amazon ElasticCache Cluster
Database Migration: AWS Database Migration Service

Load Balancing in AWS

What is Fault Tolerant System
Features of Elastic Load Balancing
What is AWS ELB (Elastic Load Balancer)
Types of Load Balancer: Classic, Application and Network
Classic Load Balancer: Features, Health Check Configuration, Cross-Zone, Connection Draining, Sticky Sessions, Access Logs, Limitation
Application Load Balancer: Features, Application Flow, Limitation
Network Load Balancer
Access Elastic Load Balancing: AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, AWS SDKs, HTTPS Query API

Amazon Route 53

What is Amazon Route 53
Domain Name Registration
Routing Internet Traffic to Resources
Automated check of the health of Resources + Data Pipeline

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) – Control user access

Authentication (Who can use) and Authorization (Level of Access)
IAM Policies – JSON Structure
Users, Groups and their Roles
AWS IAM Features
User Sign-in to Account
Switch Role
Role to EC2 Instance
Password Policy
How to Access AWS
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
Permissions and Permission Types
Policies Structure
User Based Policies
Resource Based Policies
Resource Based Permission
Policies Types
Request Flow
Limitations
IAM HTTPS API
Logging IAM Events with AWS CloudTail
Hands On

Amazon CloudWatch

What is Amazon CloudWatch
Features and Benefits
CloudWatch Architecture
Hands On

AWS Auto Scaling

What is AWS Auto Scaling
Auto Scaling Components
Auto Scaling Group
Auto Scaling Launch Configuration
Auto Scaling Benefits
Auto Scaling Lifecycle
Auto Scaling Plans
Manual Scaling
Schedule Scaling
Dynamic Scaling
Auto Scaling Step Adjustment
Auto Scaling Termination Policy
Default Termination Policy
Health Check
Hands On

Amazon Application Services

Elastic BeanStalk
Simple Email Services (SES)
Simple Queue Service (SQS)
Simple Notification Services (SNS)
AWS Lambda
Introduction to Elastic OpWorks
Hands On

About AWS Solution Architect Associate Exam

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