Learning Software Development

Notes on Basic Essentials of AWS

Quick understanding of what’s EC2, ECS, Lambda, VPC, S3, etc is.

Photo by Alex Machado on Unsplash

As a mobile developer, I often wonder when the web and backend people talk about AWS, with all the terminology mixed up and confusing.

Now I learn the basics of it, just have a little recap of my learning, as a note for myself for future references. Hope this will be of benefit to anyone having heard of AWS and wonder what it is when the web and backend guys talk about it.

AWS in my simple understanding is basically a computing resources service that is provided on demand, where one only paid for what’s used. Since it is available without the users needing direct interaction with the hardware, it is called Cloud Computing.

Actually, there is hardware, and it’s not in the cloud

Amazon in the early days has its own IT infrastructure to provide online book-selling. It later turns that IT infrastructure as external services for other organizations to make use of.

Since then it has replicated its IT infrastructure all over the world, in different Regions, to enable it to serve users globally.

• Regions — parts of the world Amazon has its IT infrastructure that provides its services
• Edges — additional infrastructure in different parts of the world that provide caching mechanisms, for better latency, without introducing too many regions. This enables it to serve as Content Delivery Network.
• Availability Zones — In each region, there are multiple availability zones, which help to ensure the availability of the services in one zone better.
• Data Centers — in each availability zones, there are multiple data centers.

Image of AWS Region and Edge from https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/features/.

How does one access it?