DevOps 2021: Key AWS Services to consider in 2021

Key AWS Services to consider in 2021

AWS (Amazon Web Services) has gained popularity in the cloud computing market. After implementing it, you do not have to spend on hardware and infrastructure needs. It offers you pay-per-use services allowing you to purchase appropriate resources. AWS has to offer more than 200 services with IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS offerings.

Using AWS services, we can create scalable applications and software which are designed to work with each other. It offers you robust, secure, and easily operable tools for managing databases, storage, and so on. These services are effective building blocks for developing and deploying cloud applications. 

AWS offers immense featured resources, including infrastructure to machine learning. They ensure maximum usability and optimization of the application’s performance. AWS comes with more features than any other provider providing free tiers access to the AWS console. It is designed for those who are unaccustomed to software development utilities. AWS allows you to deploy web applications within seconds without provisioning servers. 

Benefits of using AWS services

• It enhances the flexibility and scalability of IT resources.
• It provides a cost-effective infrastructure solution.
• It ensures quick upscaling and downscaling of your infrastructure.
• It helps in the efficient provisioning of resources.
• It makes your infrastructure flawless.
• Using AWS you can deploy your application in multiple regions across the globe with just a few clicks hence providing a lower latency and  better customer experience at minimal cost.
• AWS also provides APIs, in different programming languages to ensure that you can manage your infrastructure programmatically.
• AWS provides an end-to-end approach which secures and hardens your infrastructure.

AWS services help in accelerating cloud performance and improves the quality of the operation. Below is the list of AWS’s services to make your development and deployment process more comfortable and efficient.

 

1. Amazon EC2

Amazon EC2 allows you to create virtual machines rather than spending on expensive physical servers. It helps manage other server features like storage, security, and ports, ensuring scalability within the cloud environment. There is no need to spends hours creating servers with your chosen operating system. It will provide you various functionalities to maintain the server and allow developers to focus mainly on the deployment. Below are some features-

• It is a simple web interface that allows you to access and set up the computing assets seamlessly. 
• You can have complete control over the resources.
• It enables you to increase and decrease the computing powers within no time.
• It provides you root access along with all the features on any other machine.
• It comes with adaptable cloud hosting.
• It allows you to choose your choice of operating system and software packages.

2. Amazon RDS (relational database services)

Amazon RDS allows you to make database configuration, management, and scaling easy and efficient in the cloud environment. It will enable you to run a relational database without worrying about provisioning resources for infrastructure management. It provides a dedicated instance for the database, which is handled by the AWS support team and supports various database engines. It also helps in reducing the maintenance time for the database servers. Also, you can migrate or reproduce your existing database to Amazon RDS. below are few features-

• It is cost-effective and can be managed thoroughly.
• This service is highly scalable and resizeable.
• It helps in lowering administration efforts.
• It enables you to perform automatic software patching. 

3. Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)

This service works well when we talk about data stored within the cloud as they ensure infrastructure security. It comes with PCI-DSS, HIPAA / HITECH, FedRAMP integrations, and distributing the data among different regions to keep the data safe from being compromised. It ensures data availability that you can access it with a click and managing almost zero latency. It protects your data from failures and potential threats. It can be easily implemented by any company irrespective of the data size. Below are features-

• It ensures high data availability.
• It provides you data control with secured infrastructure.
• It ensures data backup and recovery process is in place.
• It enhances system performance with third-party integration.

4. Amazon VPC (Virtual private cloud)

Using a private cloud will ensure security as the data is available to those authorized to use it. This service will create an isolated space on AWS, which acts as an extra security layer for the underlying data and resources. You can have complete control over your environment, including subsets creation, route table management, and network access points. Below are the features-

• It ensures data protection and reduces unnecessary risk.
• It allows you to access information securely.
• You can have control over VPC.
• It helps in filtering the inbound and outbound requests.
• It provides flexible dashboard management. 

5. AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda helps in supporting the demands of your development and make it compatible with the underlying infrastructure. This instance provides a competent environment for current developments. It enables the developers to focus on coding, and the necessary resources will be taken care of by AWS. Lambda service will scale your code with high availability and run the code without the EC2 server. Below are the features-

• You do not have to worry about managing the servers.
• You do not have to provide extra administration.
• It is a cost-effective service and allows you to pay for the required services.
• It reduces the complexity and overhead of management.
• It ensures the automatic scaling of the application.

6. AWS Autoscaling

AWS auto-scaling allows you to expand your applications and make them available for thousands of users. With auto-scaling service, you can manage the multiple servers that handle the incoming traffic demanded by the application. This service does not cost you anything but charges you for the number of running instances. This service will manage your application and tunes its capacity to maintain a stable performance efficiently. It offers you a feature-rich user interface for creating scalable plans. Below are the features-

• It ensures predictive scaling along with the provisioning of EC2 instances.
• It can easily integrate machine learning to detect daily patterns.
• It handles seasonal spikes of traffic.

7. AWS IAM

AWS IAM helps in securing the access and management of involved resources securely. It allows you to create and manage users while maintaining their access to different resources within your infrastructure. It does not require extra costing and will be charged for the used services only. These services will protect your sensitive data and resources. It can be implemented as an extra layer to your security criteria.

8. Amazon ElastiCache

Amazon elastic cache is the memory caching system of AWS that supports the Memcache and Redis. This service helps set up, run, and scale the popular open-source and in-memory storage in the cloud. It helps in operating data-intensive applications. It enhances the database’s performance by evaluating data from high throughput and low latency data stores. It works well for real-time use cases that include caching, session, and queuing. 

9. Amazon Kuberbetes Services (EKS)

AWS Kubernetes services allow you to run the Kubernetes on AWS efficiently. With EKS, you do not have to worry about installing and operating a Kubernetes control plane and worker nodes to run Kubernetes. EKS serves as a Container as a Service that simplifies the Kubernetes deployment on AWS. It allows the administrators to focus on the cluster and their workloads. It ensures that you will get a complete Kubernetes advantage without having an in-house expert to maintain the infrastructure. It helps in automating the load distribution and makes parallel processing faster. Below are the features-

• You do not have to install and maintain your Kubernetes control plane.
• It allows you to run Kubernetes tooling and plugins.
• It simplifies the building process of cloud-native architecture in AWS.

10. Amazon ELB (Elastic Load balancing)

This service helps in distributing the load among different instances to ensure availability. It means if one instance is busy or failed to work, the other instance can handle the incoming traffic. This service helps in avoiding the server hotspots. This service provides three load balancers- application load balancer, network load balancer, and classic load balancer. Below are the benefits-

• It helps in monitoring application performance.
• It comes with robust security features and making applications fault-tolerant.
• It ensures automatic upscaling and downscaling.
• It provides user authentication to protect data.

11. Amazon Redshift

Redshift is a data warehouse service that offers you industry-leading performance that provides you with cost-effective data analysis. It helps store a massive amount of data, which can be easily scaled up and scaled down as per the changing business requirement. It allows to power mission-critical analytical workloads. AWS manages the clusters entirely, and this database shows third-party compatibility. Below are the features-

• This service is cost-efficient and ensures fast performance.
• It takes continuous backups and comes with data lake integration.

12. Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) 

This service allows you to send a notification to the users irrespective of their platform. The notification may be an email, text messages, or HTML endpoint messages. It helps to decouple the microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. It is an event-driven computing hub that alerts the subscribers by automating the tasks. Below are the features-

• It ensures the high durability of messages.
• It ensures services that are fully managed and keep the data secure.
• It can be easily integrated with any application.
• It provides low-cost infrastructure.

13. Amazon Athena

This service is for an online query that helps in simplifying the process of data analysis. It is a serverless service without configuring the infrastructure and can focus on analyzing the data only. You also do not have to worry about the data uploading for the service as it works directly with the data stored in S3. below are the features-

• It comes with a user-friendly console.
• It allows you to create queries using the SQL language.
• It is cost-efficient as you have to pay for the used services only.
• You can integrate this service with AWS Glue to enhance query performance.

14. Amazon KMS (Key Management Service)

This service will allow you to create and manage the cryptographic keys and control how to access them within your application. It uses hardware security modules to protect the keys. You can integrate this service with AWS CloudTail that provides you access to key usage logs to meet the compliance needs.

15. Amazon DynamoDB

This service offers you the complete NoSQL cloud database platform that allows you to store, process, and access the data to ensure the application’s high performance. You can use DynamoDB to scale up for large datasets. Below are the features-

• It is fast and serverless.
• It manages the in-memory cache.
• It ensures low latency.
• It helps you to manage mission-critical applications and workload.

You can also refer to our three part series on AWS Services Terminology to know more about other AWS Services

1. Understanding AWS Services Terminology – Part 1
2. Understanding AWS Services Terminology – Part 2
3. Understanding AWS Services Terminology – Part 3