What Core Services Do I Need to Give a Good Foundation to My AWS Architecture?

Overview of AWS Architecture

Amazon Web Services is a highly comprehensive and adopted cloud solution offering more than 200 services covering a wide catalog of computing, storage, networking, databases, etc., that has been helping organizations build great architectures for their IT solutions.

In the era of digital transformation and cloud adoption, organizations want to accelerate their focus on quickly developing IT solutions, using the latest technologies, reducing cost by leveraging the pay-as-you-go model, and wanting to be quicker while meeting security, scaling, high availability, resiliency, and a lot more.

 Amazon Web Services, because of how they have been innovating, help organizations be cloud-ready.

Organizations, including Startups, SMBs, Public Sector, Non-Profit, and Enterprises operating in a wide catalog of industry types, including Aerospace, Agriculture, Education, Financial Services, and a lot more, have been able to build great architectures for a wide catalog of use cases, including Analytics, AI/ML, Databases, Modern Applications, and lot more and hence have been delivering robust IT solutions to customers seamlessly.

 Irrespective of the use case, there are a couple of core pieces that, in general, will help us in some way or another to build and have a deeper understanding of the AWS Architecture we are building for any use case.

Let us have a look at some of the Core AWS Services

Identity and Account Management Service:

1. IAM (Identity and Access Management) (Identity and Access Management):

What is IAM? – AWS Identity and Access Management (amazon.com)

 Quickly set up IAM users, groups, policies, and roles to control authentication and authorization for AWS resources while ensuring the principle of least privilege.

Access Management: User Groups, Users, Roles, Policies, Identity providers, Account settings

Access Reports: Access Analyzer, Credential Report, Organization Activity, SCPs

 Customer Success Story:

https://aws.amazon.com/identity/customers/#Dow_Jones

2. AWS Organizations:

What are AWS Organizations? – AWS Organizations (amazon.com)

Provides central governance and management of multiple accounts.

AWS Accounts: Create or invite existing AWS Accounts

OUs: Grouping multiple accounts to manage them as a single unit

Enforcing Service Control Policies

Customer Success Story:

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/factset-automation-at-scale/

Networking Infrastructure and Content Delivery Services:

3. Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud):

What is Amazon VPC? – Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

Quickly create your own virtual networks inside of AWS, thereby providing network isolation to resources such as EC2, Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service), Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce), Amazon Redshift, etc.

VPN: Set up a hybrid connectivity with on-premises. Comes in various flavors, such as Client VPN and Site-to-Site VPN

4. Transit Gateway:

Simply a complex network architecture including VPCs (Virtual private clouds), VPNs, and Direct Connect using the Hub & Spoke model.

Customer Success Story:

https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/tableau-online-migration-case-study/?pg=ln&sec=c

5. Amazon CloudFront:

What is Amazon CloudFront? – Amazon CloudFront 

A global content delivery network service offered by AWS to deliver websites, content, and web assets with network layer optimizations for latency and throughput.

Customer Success Story:

https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/nbc-universal-case-study/?did=cr_card&trk=cr_card

6. Amazon Route53:

What is Amazon Route 53? – Amazon Route 53

A DNS (Domain Name System) service inside of AWS that gives the ability for domain name resolution, domain name registration, and to route requests based on several types of routing policies such as simple, failover, geo-location, geo-proximity, latency-based, multi-value answer, and weighted policies, respectively.

Customer Success Story:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FcUtjfkgB8&t=5s

Compute Services:

7. EC2:

What is Amazon EC2? – Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

Service that gives us an opportunity to deploy and run virtual machines hosting applications, databases, etc, inside of AWS while giving a variety of instance types and pricing options.

Customer Success Story:

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/toyota-research-institute-accelerates-safe-automated-driving-with-deep-learning-at-a-global-scale-on-aws?p=pm&c=ec2&z=6

8. Lambda:

What is AWS Lambda? – AWS Lambda (amazon.com)

A serverless computing option that allows us to have a highly available and scalable compute layer without managing the same and simply allows us to focus on the code we want to run.

Customer Success Story:

https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/capital-one-lambda-ecs-case-study/

  

9. ECR:

What is the Amazon Elastic Container Registry? – Amazon ECR (Elastic Container Registry)

Highly secure, scalable, reliable, and managed container image registry service inside of AWS.

Customer Success Story:

https://aws.amazon.com/ecr/customers/?pg=ln&sec=c#Blackboard

10. ECS:

What is Amazon Elastic Container Service? – Amazon Elastic Container Service

A fully managed container orchestration service allows running container workloads at scale, with increased speed and agility, while giving the benefits of a pay-as-you-go model and ensuring security and compliance.

Customer Success Story:

https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/amazon-prime-video-ecs-case-study/

11. EKS:

What is Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service)? – Amazon EKS

A fully managed service to run Kubernetes inside of AWS while eliminating the need to install and maintain our own Kubernetes clusters while ensuring easy security, scaling, high availability, and seamless integration with other AWS services.

Customer Success Story:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULlqukKVKBo

Storage Servies:

12. Amazon S3:

What is Amazon S3? – Amazon Simple Storage Service

All serverless is an object storage service offered by AWS to store a variety of big volumes of data while ensuring scalability, data durability, security, compliance, and performance. All are suitable for a variety of use cases, such as storage layers for data lakes, backup storage, hosting static websites, data archival, and a lot more.

Has a lot of rich features, including bucket policies, access points, encryption capabilities, storage classes for cost optimization, intelligent tiering, versioning, lifecycle policies, replication, multi-part upload, transfer acceleration, event notifications, and a lot more.

Customer Success Story:

https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/runtastic-case-study-2022/

13. Amazon EFS:

What is Amazon Elastic File System? – Amazon Elastic File System

NFS version 4 supported a serverless elastic file system that allows the sharing of file data and all accessible across services such as Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, Amazon ECS (Elastic Container Service), Amazon EKS, and AWS Fargate.

 

Customer Success Story:

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/storage/johnson-johnson-reduces-analysis-time-by-35-with-data-science-platform/

14. Amazon EBS:

Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store)) – Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

High-performant SSD-based and HDD-based block storage volume service that can be attached to EC2 instances, thereby supporting use cases such as storage volume for databases such as Amazon RDS, Managed Hadoop clusters such as Amazon EMR, Amazon Redshift, etc.

Customer Success Story:

https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/videology/?pg=ln&sec=c

15. Amazon FSx:

Amazon FSx Documentation

Comes with a variety of flavors, including Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, Amazon FSx for OpenZFS, Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, and Amazon FSx for Lustre, thereby providing an easy, scalable, cost-effective, and high-performance file system specifically designed for use cases such as ML (Machine Learning), Analytics, HPC (High-Performance Computing), Media & Entertainment, etc.

Customer Success Story:

Large-Scale Distributed Training of Media Machine Learning with Amazon FSx | Netflix Video at AWS Reinvent 2021 

Databases Services:

16. Amazon RDS:

Fully Managed Database service supporting relational access patterns coming with a variety of DB engines, including MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Oracle, and Aurora. It comes with a variety of instance sizes, instance storage, and features such as Multi-AZ, Read Replicas, RDS Proxy, RDS Custom, Performance Insights, Enhanced Monitoring, CloudWatch Metrics, Backup, and Restore, etc.

17. Amazon Aurora:

Amazon’s own proprietary DB engine is compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL, having a differently engineered cluster storage volume with features such as Aurora Replicas, Aurora Auto Scaling, Global Replication, write forwarding with global read replicas, Backtrack, Encryption, Performance Insights, etc. giving organizations to have a relational database for satisfying relational access pattern with more performance and availability inside of AWS.

18. Amazon DynamoDB:

A serverless, No SQL database to satisfy key-value access patterns while ensuring scalability and performance for use cases such as gaming platforms, retail experience, etc.

There are other purpose-built databases that are available inside of AWS, including.

Amazon DocumentDB, Amazon Keyspaces, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon MemoryDB for Redis, Amazon QLDB, Amazon Neptune, Amazon Timestream

Purpose-Built Databases on AWS | Amazon Web Services

Monitoring Services:

19. Amazon CloudWatch:

What is Amazon CloudWatch? – Amazon CloudWatch

The service was made for monitoring inside of AWS, collecting metrics, aggregating performance counters, and allowing us to have a dashboard of the same. Gives visibility into our resources and applications running.

Customer Success Story:

https://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/customers#Mapbox

20. Amazon CloudTrail:

What Is AWS CloudTrail? – AWS CloudTrail (amazon.com)

 

An auditing service that allows us to investigate user activities and API (Application Programming Interfaces) calls is being made. It provides compliance with logs and automated workflows using Amazon EventBridge.

 

Customer Success Story:

https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/monzo/?pg=ln&sec=c

Scaling Oriented Services:

21. AWS Auto Scaling:

Application Scaling – AWS Auto Scaling – AWS (amazon.com)

Monitors and provides automatic scaling for resources such as Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Aurora, etc. It can be used via AWS Management Console, CLI (Command Line Interface), or SDK (software development kits) (software development kits), and it is all free. Just pay for the resources we have for our architecture and a monitoring fee for Amazon CloudWatch.

22. EC2 Auto Scaling Groups:

Instance Auto Scaling – Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling – AWS

Provides a way to ensure that our architecture should have the desired number of EC2 instances that can handle varying loads by having an EC2 Auto Scaling Group where we can define Min Size, Max Size, and Desired Capacity and can use Scaling policies to define how to scale-in and out the number of EC2 instances.

 

Automation Services:

 

23. CloudFormation:

What is AWS CloudFormation? – AWS CloudFormation (amazon.com)

 

An IaC (Infrastructure as Code) or Infrastructure as a Code service can be used to define code for our architecture using templates that can be written in JSON or YAML and then provision the resources as defined in the stack.

Customer Success Story:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGBVPIpQMYk/?pg=ln&sec=c

 

Migration Services:

24, AWS Database Migration Service:

What is AWS Database Migration Service? – AWS Database Migration Service (amazon.com)

Quickly perform homogeneous and heterogeneous migrations of relational databases, non-relational databases, and data warehouses.

Customer Success Story:

ReasonLabs Case Study | Database Migration | AWS (amazon.com)

25. AWS Transfer Family:

What is AWS Transfer Family? – AWS Transfer Family (amazon.com)

Secure file transfer service that allows the migration of files to Amazon S3 and Amazon EFS over SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol), FTPS (File Transfer Protocol Secure), and FTP (File Transfer Protocol) protocols.

Customer Success Story:

https://aws.amazon.com/aws-transfer-family/customers/?pg=ln&cp=bn#Whole_Foods_Market

Some of the Reference AWS Architecture Examples, including Core Services, in general, in some other way

All courtesy to Amazon Web Services for the below architectures.

Connected Airports Using IoT (Internet of Things) and AI/ML:

https://d1.awsstatic.com/architecture-diagrams/ArchitectureDiagrams/connected-airports-using-iot-ai-ml-ra.pdf?did=wp_card&trk=wp_card

Alfresco Digital Business Platform on AWS:

https://d1.awsstatic.com/architecture-diagrams/ArchitectureDiagrams/alfresco-digital-business-platform-on-aws-ra.pdf?did=wp_card&trk=wp_card

Payment System Interface Modernization on AWS:

Payment System Interface Modernization on AWS: Modern Cloud-Native Payment Systems – Payment System Interface Modernization on AWS (amazon.com)

Paginated Search with Purpose-Built Databases:

https://d1.awsstatic.com/architecture-diagrams/ArchitectureDiagrams/paginated-search-with-purpose-built-databases-ra.pdf?did=wp_card&trk=wp_card

Conclusion

By leveraging a couple of core services across account security, computing, networking and content delivery, storage, databases, etc., organizations have been able to give a solid foundation to their scalable, robust, secure, resilient Architectures on AWS to cater to the needs of a variety of business use cases.

A good awareness and understanding of core pieces can help us a lot with a deeper understanding of our advanced architectures as they give a solid foundation to the same.

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