Virtual Private Cloud - VPC

All servers are present in virtual network or virtual private cloud (VPC).

A VPC can be divided into subnets.

Subnet rules are specific to each subnet. We can make one subnet as public to internet and other as a private.

We can let the servers be present in different subnets (but same vpc) can talk / communicate with each other.

Every EC2 instance should reside under a VPC. AWS automatically creates one default VPC per region. We can create any number of new VPCs if we want.

VPC Peering

• We can create Peers which can communicate with each other, regardless the subnet or VPC or Region in which they are residing in.
• VPC Peering is not supported if both servers have same private IP in their respective subnets.

We can connect to an instance in VPC through an “Internet Gateway”. Anyone can try to connect if internet gateway is enabled in VPC.

In order to make it a little bit private, we can prefer “Virtual Private Gateway” to our VPC instead of internet gateway. Virtual Private Gate allows only selected traffic to VPC. But still the route taken by the traffic is internet.

If we want the route also to be private and dedicated (non-shared) connection from client’s data center premises, “AWS Direct Connect” is the solution.

AWS Support Plans

If we have any issues in EC2 instances or any other services, we can raise a support ticket to AWS support team.

This service is not free (except base plan). This is indeed a paid service offered in 4 types of plans.

1) Basic

This plan is free and anyone can make use of this if we have an AWS account. This plan includes free Customer Service, AWS whitepapers will be provided but no technical support is offered in this plan.

2) Developer

Covers the basic plan. Includes technical support by Certified Cloud Associates in business working hours via email only.

3) Business

Covers the basic & developer plans as well and 24x7 tech support by Certified Cloud Support Engineers via email, chat, phone.

4) Enterprise

This plan includes all the services offered by previous plans and along with that the tech support is provided by senior & industry level experienced Certified Cloud Support Engineers.

In this plan, A dedicated Technical Account Manager (TAM) is assigned to your AWS account and we can reach out to that person directly for resolving any issue.

AWS Pricing Benefits & Discounts

1) Pay as you go / On-Demand

Pay for usage. Pay only as long as you need it.

• No large upfront expenses.
• No long term contracts.

2) Pay less when you reserve

We can reserve some services (EC2, RDS etc…) and purchase them if we need for long term.

75% of on demand cost can be saved.

3 payment modes:

• All upfront – Largest discount
• Partial upfront – lesser discount
• No upfront – smallest discount

3) Pay less by using more

We can get discount if we use more quantity of certain services like Amazon S3. If we use the S3 storage above the threshold set by AWS, then we get discount and bill amount will be reduced.

4) Pay less when AWS grows.

Over the years, AWS continuously kept decreasing the prices for their services offered due to huge increase in the customers for AWS.

All the aggregated users of AWS contribute to the growth of AWS and AWS will decrease the pricings. This is the benefit from massive economies of scale. (This point is important for AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification CLF – C01 exam)

AWS Health Dashboard

1) AWS Service Health Dashboard

• Checks status of AWS resources, whether they are functioning normally or not.
• This is a global service.

2) AWS Personal Health Dashboard

• Check the status of resources that are being utilized by us.
• Displays any issues that are impacting our resources.

If any services are scheduled to maintenance or updates or for testing events, then they will be notified here and we can check them here.

AWS Well Architected Framework

The 5 pillars in well architected framework of Amazon web services are:

1) Operational Excellence

• Perform operations as code
• Make frequent, small, reversible changes (agile).
• Refine operations procedure frequently
• Anticipate & learn from failure.

2) Security

• Implement identity foundation
• Enable traceability
• Apply security at all layers
• Keep people away from data as much as possible

3) Reliability

• Testing the recovery procedure
• Automatic recovery from failure

4) Performance Efficiency

• Use serverless computing

5) Cost Optimization

• Use managed services to reduce cost of ownership
• Reduce spending on conventional data centers. Instead, use cloud services.

AWS Code Commit

• Code Commit is a managed service provided by AWS for hosting GIT repositories.
• AWS code commit is used for source control or version control repositories.
• AWS Code Commit is Software as a Service model (SaaS).
• Alternatives: Git Hub, Bit Bucket etc…

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Elastic Beanstalk is AWS’ platform as a service (PaaS) model.

We can directly deploy our application in AWS cloud by just selecting the environment of our application (like PHP, Python, Java etc…)

Beanstalk will setup a platform for us by installing all the dependencies, configuring security group and launches an EC2 instance. Finally a public end point is provided with the application running and ready to serve.

• Google App Engine is another Popular PaaS.

AWS Rekognition

• Deep learning model based Computer Vision offered as Software as a service.
• AWS Rekognition provides great visual analysis.
• Performs Object detection, face detection & recognition, Face comparision etc…
• Provides attributes/explanations of detected objects or faces in the image with a percentage of accuracy.
• It has been sold and used by a number of United States government agencies.