Tools:
S3 + CloudFront
S3 (“Simple Storage Service”)
- System for saving and recovering files using a REST API.
- Redundant storage in different zones and CPD servers for high availability.
- Scalable. You only pay for the amount of storage space used. The storage cost is very low.
- Secure transfer of files in transit and storage via SSL encryption.
- Integration with other AWS services.
- Data access through buckets, with access control administration.
AWS CloudFront
- Global content delivery network (CDN) service.
- Overlapping network of servers that keep copies of the same data.
- Optimised for use with S3, EC2, ELB, etc.
SQS (“Simple Queue Service”)
- Message queuing service that is fast, reliable, scalable and fully managed.
- Serverless service. 99.99% availability.
- Application components can be decoupled.
- Any number of messages can be sent to SQS without getting lost and without requiring constant attention.
- It is also useful for traffic balancing.
- Ideal for asynchronous systems, such as PC messaging.
- Ideal for fault tolerance. The system could be down and messages will still be received and queued for later processing.
ECS (Elastic Container Service)
- ECS is the main service we use for projects with an architecture based on distributed computing (microservices).
- Service organised in highly scalable containers that supports Docker containers.
- Containers can be easily run, scaled and configured without the need of managing the Docker server.
- It is not necessary to install Docker servers when using ECS.
- It is not necessary to manage or scale a cluster of machines (EC2).
- With simple API calls from ECS, services hosted on Docker can be launched or stopped, and the state of the services can be queried.
- With ECS, we will only configure the EC2 instance types that we want to keep to host our services.
- Regarding security, ECS launches containers in Amazon's own VPC.
- No compute resources are shared with other customers, as it is reserved.
RDS (Relational Database Service)
- Relational database management system (SQL).
- Currently compatible with six database engines (Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server).
- Dramatically reduces database administration (patching, backups and automatic replacement, etc.).
- Database backups can be recovered from one engine to a different engine. For example, we could use the RDS service with PostgreSQL, back up the database and recover it with MS, SQL Server.
- Backups are carried out as automated database snapshots. Databases can be restored to any date or time, even to any second.
- Scalability for database performance (compute and storage capacity) are configured with a graphical interface (a single click) in a matter of minutes.
- Managed directly with own tools or with the AWS Management Console.
- Encryption of data at rest and in transit.
- High availability. Different databases can be stored in different parts of the world, with an automatic "switch" configuration in the event of a disaster which is transparent to the user.
- Costs are established based on computing time, depending on the chosen database engine rates and on the compute and storage capacity.
ELB (Elastic Load Balancer)
- A load balancing service.
- It distributes (balances) incoming application traffic across different EC2 instances.
- Fault tolerance is achieved.
- It offers high availability and automatic scaling.
EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)
- Virtualised computing service where we can host our services and applications.
- Configurable through a simple interface.
- It can be directly managed through SSH for Linux servers or through command prompts for Windows servers.
- Computing resources are completely controlled.
- Setting up and starting an instance can be done in a matter of minutes.
- The computing capacity (number of processor cores and processor type), storage system, operating system and memory can be set up manually or automatically. This configuration is not only quantitative, as we can also choose different types depending on the system needs. For example, storage on SSD instead of magnetic disks.
- It is a completely elastic service, in other words, it allows the capacity to be increased or decreased manually (in minutes) or automatically, by means of a balancing system (ELB, as explained below).
- Integrated monitoring and alert services. Complete access to the system's log file.