Getting a Grip on Amazon Web Storage Part Zwei
This is the second part of my intro to the basics of AWS. Please read the first part here .
https://jcfernan.medium.com/getting-a-grip-on-amazon-web-storage-c7d47618f16a
Where were we????
Oh Yea!
Amazon RDS
What Amazon Says
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It frees you to focus on your applications so you can give them the fast performance, high availability, security and compatibility they need.
Let’s make this easier to understand
Similar to Amazon Aurora, RDS is a managed relational database. There are three main benefits to this service. First, RDS is highly available thanks to a feature called Multi A-Z. What that means is that there is an exact duplicate of your data stored in multiple Availability Zones. This makes it easier to pull up your data fast. Second, Amazon RDS offers two different types of automatic scaling: horizontal (adding more machines) and vertical (adding more resources). The service comes equipped with a load balancer that can distribute requests evenly when the database is under increased demand. Last, RDS includes a performance dashboard making it easier for users to analyze and troubleshoot the performance of their relational databases.
Amazon Lambda
What Amazon Says
*AWS Lambda lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. *
Let’s make this easier to understand
AWS Lambda lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers…
Ok, so if you are developing for the web, you will run into running things client and server side. Client will deal with most things UI/UX etc and the server would manage any big or private operation needing to be run. In the age of “microservices”, what happens if you wanted to add on a simple private function without having to deploy an entire server for it? Say:
A donation widget that requires Stripe authentication
An email to be sent
A large calculation or API call that would require a modest amount of computing power.
Lambda allows you to do this easily without having to deploy anything. Just create an instance and insert your Node, Python code etc and you will have the functionality of a server to return the results of your code for you. What makes this great is that it charges you on a usage basis. Only pay what you have to.
This means you can create your applications using your frontend frameworks and not have to worry about setting up your server. Maybe this is the perfect time to give the JAMstack a try ;).
Amazon VPC
What Amazon Says
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) is a service that lets you launch AWS resources in a logically isolated virtual network that you define.
Let’s make this easier to understand
The easiest way to describe a VPC is as your own private data center within the AWS infrastructure. You get to decide the network addresses that you will use throughout your infrastructure. Since this is your network, you can decide to slice it up any way you prefer.
For example, you might decide that your VPC network will be 192.168.0.0/16, which can accommodate 65,534 different IP addresses and 256 different subnets. This should suit your needs. The most important thing to take into account is that you only have one opportunity to do this — and that’s when you create the VPC. There is no way to change your VPC’s network block after it has been created.
Amazon Lightsail
What Amazon Says
Lightsail is an easy-to-use cloud platform that offers you everything needed to build an application or website, plus a cost-effective, monthly plan. Whether you’re new to the cloud or looking to get on the cloud quickly with AWS infrastructure you trust, we’ve got you covered.
Let’s make this easier to understand
This one is more straightforward than the other ones. Essentially, it takes all different types of application you would need (Database, server, etc) and puts it in an easy to use a container for you to use.
Amazon SageMaker
What Amazon Says
Amazon SageMaker provides every developer and data scientist with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly. Amazon SageMaker is a fully-managed service that covers the entire machine learning workflow to label and prepare your data, choose an algorithm, train the model, tune and optimize it for deployment, make predictions, and take action. Your models get to production faster with much less effort and lower cost.
Let’s make this easier to understand
This one requires a lot more context. In today’s age of “Machine Learning”, Amazon’s SageMaker does the whole process of it. Meaning that for people who have a large dataset and wants to find actionable insights based on the data they have. They would use SageMaker to make that process much easier.
First, we need to understand how Machine Learning works:
- You have a dataset (Database, csv file, JSON, etc) and you want to get some insights on it. Let’s say I have a dataset that 1,000,000 images of dogs and cats. I want to be able to build a system that can identify if the image is a cat or dog.
- We first get initial data that we need to label so that we can give the machine an understanding of what we are working with. Let’s say I help label 500 images of what is a dog or cat.
- Using this info, the machine does it’s best to either classify if it’s a dog or a cat. Anything that gets confused is resent to classify which further improves the machine of understanding if it’s a dog or cat.
- The year is now 2088. The dog versus cat machine is now understanding that mankind must be exterminated to preserve its lifecycle.
Now, my example is fairly simple (and quite scary) but when you are an organization like Intuit and have billions of data points being generated at times, it’s good to be able to get results from this information to further better your products or understand your customer base.
For civilized people like myself though, I will aim to achieve this 2088 goal of world domination.
Conclusion
AWS seems tough and overwhelming at first, however, it allows you to choose what kind of software makes sense for your scenario. Trust me, whatever situation you are in is a scenario you could apply on AWS. They reported almost 26 Billion (that’s right… with a B) dollars in 2020. You can get started in the ecosystem whenever using their free-tier. Once you understand what some of the services are, you can then start to understand most of them and how they can apply to what you want to use for your world domination.
