Getting Started with AWS

Getting Started with AWS

Getting Started with AWS

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 Getting Started with AWS

Table of Contents
Getting Started with AWS ................................................................................................................... 1
What Can I Do with AWS? ........................................................................................................... 1
How Do I Get Started? ................................................................................................................ 1
How Do I Access AWS? ............................................................................................................... 2
Pricing ...................................................................................................................................... 2
AWS Overview ................................................................................................................................... 3
Regions and Availability Zones ..................................................................................................... 3
Security .................................................................................................................................... 4
AWS Product Categories ............................................................................................................. 4
Compute and Networking Services ............................................................................................... 5
Key Services ...................................................................................................................... 5
Key Concepts ..................................................................................................................... 6
Architecture ....................................................................................................................... 8
Documentation .................................................................................................................. 9
Storage and Content Delivery Services .......................................................................................... 9
Key Services ...................................................................................................................... 9
Key Concepts ................................................................................................................... 10
Usage Scenarios ............................................................................................................... 11
Documentation ................................................................................................................ 12
Security and Identity Services .................................................................................................... 12
Key Services .................................................................................................................... 13
Key Concepts ................................................................................................................... 13
Documentation ................................................................................................................ 13
Database Services ..................................................................................................................... 13
Key Services .................................................................................................................... 13
Key Concepts ................................................................................................................... 14
Usage Scenarios ............................................................................................................... 15
Documentation ................................................................................................................ 16
Analytics Services ..................................................................................................................... 16
Key Services .................................................................................................................... 16
Documentation ................................................................................................................ 16
Application Services .................................................................................................................. 16
Key Services .................................................................................................................... 17
Key Concepts ................................................................................................................... 17
Documentation ................................................................................................................ 18
Management Tools ................................................................................................................... 19
Key Tools ........................................................................................................................ 19
Key Concepts ................................................................................................................... 19
Documentation ................................................................................................................ 20
AWS Tutorials .................................................................................................................................. 21
Run a Virtual Server ................................................................................................................. 21
Store Files ............................................................................................................................... 21
Share Digital Media .................................................................................................................. 22
Deploy a Website ..................................................................................................................... 22
Host a Website (Linux) .............................................................................................................. 22
Host a Website (Windows) ......................................................................................................... 22
Run a Database ........................................................................................................................ 23
Analyze Your Data .................................................................................................................... 23

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 Getting Started with AWS
What Can I Do with AWS?

Getting Started with AWS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides on-demand computing resources and services in the cloud, with
pay-as-you-go pricing. For example, you can run a server on AWS that you can log on to, congure,
secure, and run just as you would a server that's sitting in front of you. For more information, see What is
Cloud Computing?

Using AWS resources instead of your own is like purchasing electricity from a power company instead of
running your own generator, and it provides many of the same benets: capacity exactly matches your
need, you pay only for what you use, economies of scale result in lower costs, and the service is provided
by a vendor experienced in running large-scale networks.

What Can I Do with AWS?

You can use AWS to make it easier to build and manage your websites and applications. The following
are some common uses for AWS:

Store public or private data.

Host a static website. These websites use client-side technologies (such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript)
to display content that doesn't change frequently. A static website doesn't require server-side
technologies (such as PHP and ASP.NET).
Host a dynamic website, or web app. These websites include classic three-tier applications, with web,
application, and database tiers.
Support students or online training programs.
Process business and scientic data.
Handle peak loads.

For more information, see AWS Solutions.

How Do I Get Started?

The following documentation provides an overview of AWS and list of tutorials that demonstrate the
common uses for AWS:

AWS Overview (p. 3)

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 Getting Started with AWS
How Do I Access AWS?

AWS Tutorials (p. 21)

How Do I Access AWS?

AWS provides several ways to create and manage resources.

AWS Management Console

A web interface. To get started, see the Getting Started with the AWS Management Console.
AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI)

Commands for a broad set of AWS products. To get started, see AWS Command Line Interface User
Guide.
Command Line Tools

Commands for individual AWS products. For more information, see Command Line Tools.
AWS Software Development Kits (SDK)

APIs that are specic to your programming language or platform. For more information, see SDKs.
Query APIs

Low-level APIs that you access using HTTP requests. For more information, see the API
documentation for each service.

Pricing
AWS can oer signicant cost savings compared to the equivalent on-premises infrastructure. You can
use the AWS Simple Monthly Calculator to estimate what it would cost to use AWS.

Note that if you created your AWS account within the last 12 months, you are eligible for the AWS Free
Tier.

For more information about managing your costs, see Pricing and the Economics Center.

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 Getting Started with AWS
Regions and Availability Zones

AWS Overview

AWS oers a broad set of services that help you move faster, lower your costs, and scale your
applications. The following documentation provides a high-level overview of the concepts that you
should understand before you get started with AWS.

Contents

Regions and Availability Zones (p. 3)

Security (p. 4)
AWS Product Categories (p. 4)

Regions and Availability Zones

Amazon has data centers in dierent areas of the world (for example, North America, Europe, and Asia).
Correspondingly, AWS products are available to use in dierent regions. By placing resources in separate
regions, you can design your website or app to be closer to specic customers or to meet legal or other
requirements. Note that prices for AWS usage vary by region.

Each region contains multiple distinct locations called Availability Zones. Each Availability Zone is
engineered to be isolated from failures in other Availability Zones, and to provide inexpensive, low-
latency network connectivity to other zones in the same region. By placing resources in separate
Availability Zones, you can protect your website or app from the failure of a single location.

AWS resources can be tied to a region or tied to an Availability Zone. Not every region or Availability
Zone supports every AWS resource. When you view your resources, you'll only see the resources tied to
the region you've specied. This is because regions are isolated from each other, and we don't replicate
resources across regions automatically.

The following table lists the AWS regions.

Name Region Code

Asia Pacic (Seoul) ap-northeast-2

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 Getting Started with AWS
Security

Name Region Code

Asia Pacic (Singapore) ap-southeast-1

Asia Pacic (Sydney) ap-southeast-2

Asia Pacic (Tokyo) ap-northeast-1

EU (Frankfurt) eu-central-1

EU (Ireland) eu-west-1

South America (So Paulo) sa-east-1

US East (N. Virginia) us-east-1

US West (N. California) us-west-1

US West (Oregon) us-west-2

Security
AWS provides a secure global infrastructure, plus a range of features that you can use to secure your data
in the cloud. The following are highlights:

Physical access to AWS data centers is strictly controlled, monitored, and audited.
Access to the AWS network is strictly controlled, monitored, and audited.
You can manage the security credentials that enable users to access your AWS account using AWS
Identity and Access Management (IAM). You can create ne-grained permissions to AWS resources and
apply them to users or groups of users.
You can apply ACL-type permissions on your data and can also use encryption of data at rest.
You can set up a virtual private cloud (VPC), which is a virtual network that is logically isolated from
other virtual networks in the AWS cloud. You can control whether the network is directly routable to
the Internet.
You control and congure the operating system on your virtual server.
You can set up a security group, which acts as a virtual rewall to control the inbound and outbound
trac for your virtual servers.
You can specify a key pair when you launch your virtual server, which is used to encrypt your login
information. When you log in to your virtual server, you must present the private key of the key pair to
decrypt the login information.

For more information, see the following resources:

AWS Security Center

AWS Overview of Security Processes
AWS Security Best Practices

AWS Product Categories

AWS oers a broad set of services. To learn more about each AWS product category, see the following:

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 Getting Started with AWS
Compute and Networking Services

Compute and Networking Services (p. 5)

Storage and Content Delivery Services (p. 9)
Security and Identity Services (p. 12)
Database Services (p. 13)
Analytics Services (p. 16)
Application Services (p. 16)
Management Tools (p. 19)

Compute and Networking Services for AWS

AWS provides a variety of computing and networking services to meet the needs of your applications.
You can provision virtual servers, set up a rewall, congure Internet access, allocate and route IP
addresses, and scale your infrastructure to meet increasing demand.

You can use the compute and networking services with the storage, database, and application services
to provide a complete solution for computing, query processing, and storage across a wide range of
applications.

Contents
Key Services (p. 5)
Key Concepts (p. 6)
Architecture (p. 8)
Documentation (p. 9)

Key Services
The following are the key compute and networking services:

Amazon EC2

Provides virtual servers in the AWS cloud.

Amazon VPC

Provides an isolated virtual network for your virtual servers.

Elastic Load Balancing

Distributes network trac across your set of virtual servers.

Auto Scaling

Automatically scales your set of virtual servers based on changes in demand.

Amazon Route53

Routes trac to your domain name to a resource, such as a virtual server or a load balancer.
AWS Lambda

Runs your code on virtual servers from Amazon EC2 in response to events.
Amazon ECS

Provides Docker containers on virtual servers from Amazon EC2.

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 Getting Started with AWS
Key Concepts

Key Concepts
The following are concepts that you should understand before using the compute and networking
services.

Instances and AMIs

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides resizeable computing capacityliterally, servers
in Amazon's data centersthat you use to build and host your software systems. An Amazon Machine
Image (AMI) is a template that contains a software conguration (for example, an operating system,
an application server, and applications). From an AMI, you launch an instance, which is a copy of the
AMI running as a virtual server on a host computer in Amazon's data center. You can launch multiple
instances from an AMI, as shown in the following gure.

When you launch an instance, you select an instance type, which determines the hardware capabilities
(such as memory, CPU, and storage) of the host computer for the instance. You can access your instance
using its assigned public DNS name or public IP address. The public DNS names for instances are as
follows:

The US East (N. Virginia) region

ec2-public_ip.compute-1.amazonaws.com

Other regions

ec2-public_ip.region_code.compute.amazonaws.com

Your instances keep running until you stop or terminate them, or until they fail. If an instance fails, you
can launch a new one from the AMI.

You start from an existing AMI that most closely meets your needs, log on to the instance, and then
customize the instance with additional software and settings. You can save this customized conguration
as a new AMI, which you can then use to launch new instances whenever you need them.

VPCs and Subnets

A virtual private cloud (VPC) is a virtual network dedicated to your AWS account. It is logically isolated
from other virtual networks in the AWS cloud, providing security and robust networking functionality for
your compute resources. A VPC closely resembles a traditional network that you'd operate in your own
data center, with the benets of using the scalable infrastructure of AWS.

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 Getting Started with AWS
Key Concepts

A subnet is a segment of a VPC's IP address range that you can launch instances into. Subnets enable
you to group instances based on your security and operational needs. To enable instances in a subnet
to reach the Internet and AWS services, you must add an Internet gateway to the VPC and a route table
with a route to the Internet to the subnet.

We recommend that you launch your EC2 instances into a VPC. Note that if you created your AWS
account after 2013-12-04, you have a default VPC and you must launch EC2 instances into a default or a
nondefault VPC.

Security Groups
A security group acts as a virtual rewall for your instance to control inbound and outbound trac. You
can specify one or more security groups when you launch your instance. When you create a security
group, you add rules that control the inbound trac that's allowed, and a separate set of rules that
control the outbound trac. All other trac is discarded. You can modify the rules for a security group
at any time and the new rules are automatically enforced.

Amazon Route53 Hosted Zones

Amazon Route53 is a highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name System (DNS) web service. It
is designed as an extremely reliable and cost-eective way to route visitors to websites by translating
domain names (such as www.example.com) into the numeric IP addresses (such as 192.0.2.1) that
computers use to connect to each other. AWS assigns URLs to your AWS resources, such as your EC2
instances. However, you might want a URL that is easy for your users to remember. For example, you
can map your domain name to your AWS resource. If you don't have a domain name, you can search for
available domains and register them using Amazon Route53. If you have an existing domain name, you
can transfer it to Amazon Route53.

Amazon Route53 enables you to organize your DNS records using hosted zones. When you create a
hosted zone, you receive four name servers to help ensure a high level of availability.

Auto Scaling Groups

Auto Scaling supports groups of virtual servers, an Auto Scaling group that can grow or shrink on
demand.

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 Getting Started with AWS
Architecture

Load Balancer
A load balancer distributes trac to multiple instances. You can achieve even higher levels of fault
tolerance by using your load balancer with instances in multiple Availability Zones. As instances are
launched and terminated, the load balancer automatically directs trac to the running instances. Elastic
Load Balancing also performs health checks on each instance. If an instance is not responding, the load
balancer can automatically redirect trac to the healthy instances.

Architecture
The following diagram shows an example architecture for your compute and networking services.
There are EC2 instances in public and private subnets. Access to the instances in the public subnets over
protocols like SSH or RDP is controlled by one or more security groups. Security groups also control
whether the instances can talk to each other. The Auto Scaling group maintains a eet of EC2 instances
that can scale to handle the current load. This Auto Scaling group spans multiple Availability Zones to
protect against the potential failure of a single Availability Zone. The load balancer distributes trac
evenly among the EC2 instances in the Auto Scaling group. When the Auto Scaling group launches
or terminates instances based on load, the load balancer automatically adjusts accordingly. Amazon
Route53 provides secure and reliable routing of your domain name to your infrastructure hosted on
AWS.

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 Getting Started with AWS
Documentation

Documentation
For more information, see the following documentation:

Amazon EC2
Amazon ECS
Amazon Route53
Amazon VPC
Auto Scaling
AWS Lambda
Elastic Load Balancing

Storage and Content Delivery Services for AWS

AWS provides a variety of services to meet your storage needs.

Contents
Key Services (p. 9)
Key Concepts (p. 10)
Usage Scenarios (p. 11)
Documentation (p. 12)

Key Services
The following are the key storage and content delivery services:

Amazon S3

Scalable storage in the AWS cloud.

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 Getting Started with AWS
Key Concepts

CloudFront

A global content delivery network (CDN).

Amazon EBS

Network attached storage volumes for your virtual servers.

Amazon Glacier

Low-cost archival storage.

Key Concepts
The following are concepts that you should understand before using the storage and content delivery
services.

Buckets and Objects

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an Internet-scale data storage service that handles vast
amounts of data and large numbers of concurrent accesses. You store your data in containers called
buckets. You can control who has permissions for each bucket. A bucket can contain any number of
objects of any type, such as HTML pages, source code les, image les, and encrypted data. The name of
each bucket must be globally unique.

You can group objects using folders. These folders are included in the key name for an object. For
example, mysite/html/default.html. Each object can be accessed through its unique URL:

protocol://domain/bucket_name/object_key

protocol

The protocol is either http or https.

domain

The domain is s3.amazonaws.com for buckets created in US Standard or

s3-region_code.amazonaws.com for buckets created in a region.
bucket_name

The name of the bucket.

object_key

The full key name for the object.

For example, https://s3.amazonaws.com/mysite/html/default.html (US Standard) or https://s3-us-

west-2.amazonaws.com/my-bucket/image.png (US West (Oregon)).

CloudFront Distributions
Use Amazon CloudFront to create a content delivery network (CDN) that makes your website content
available from data centers around the world, called edge locations. You store your content on an
origin server, such as an Amazon S3 bucket or an HTTP server running on an EC2 instance. You create a
CloudFront distribution, associate the distribution with the origin server, and then use a CloudFront URL
to access your content:

http://distribution_id.cloudfront.net/file.ext

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 Getting Started with AWS
Usage Scenarios

Alternatively, you can associate your own domain name with your CloudFront distribution.

When a user accesses an object that's part of a CloudFront distribution, CloudFront checks whether the
object is already in a cache that's near the user. If it is, CloudFront serves the content from the cache;
otherwise, CloudFront copies the requested content from the origin server to the cache.

Instance Store Volumes

Amazon EC2 provides instance store volumes for many types of EC2 instances. The disks for these
volumes are physically attached to the same host computer as the instance, so access to these volumes is
very fast. There is no additional charge to use the instance store volumes provided by the instance type,
but you can incur data transfer changes for data transferred to and from the instance.

An instance store volume is usable only from a single instance and only during its lifetime. For instance
types that support multiple instance store volumes, you can stripe your data across multiple volumes.
The data on an instance store volume is erased when the instance terminates. If an application uses
instance store volumes for persistent data, it must periodically replicate the data or copy it to durable
storage.

Amazon EBS Volumes

Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) provides network-attached storage (NAS) for use with your
EC2 instances. After you create, attach, and mount an Amazon EBS volume to your instance, you can use
it just as you would use a physical hard drive on your computer. Each volume can be attached to only
one EC2 instance, but you can detach an Amazon EBS volume from one EC2 instance and attach it to
another. You can attach multiple Amazon EBS volumes to an EC2 instance, and you can also stripe your
data across multiple volumes.

You can back up the data on your Amazon EBS volumes by creating snapshots, which are stored in
Amazon S3. You can create a new Amazon EBS volume from a snapshot and then attach it to an EC2
instance.

Vaults and Archives

Amazon Glacier provides low-cost, durable storage that is suitable for data archiving and backup. You
create a vault, which is a container for archives. An archive is any object that you store in the vault, such
as a photo, video, or document. Each archive has a unique ID and an optional description. While you can
create and delete a vault using the AWS Management Console, you must upload, download, and delete
archives programmatically. Note that these operations typically take 3 to 5 hours to complete.

Usage Scenarios
The following table summarizes the common usage scenarios for the AWS storage options. For more
information, see AWS Storage Options.

Storage Option Usage

Amazon S3 Use for a wide range of scenarios, from backing

up your data, to storing your images and videos
(to be accessed directly or through a CDN), to
hosting static websites.

Amazon EBS Use for data that changes frequently and must
persist. For example, use EBS volumes as the
primary storage for a database or le system, or

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 Getting Started with AWS
Documentation

Storage Option Usage

for applications that require access to raw block-
level storage.

Instance store volumes Use instance store volumes for temporary storage
of data that changes frequently, such as buers,
caches, or scratch data, or data that is replicated
across a eet of instances.

If your data must persist beyond the lifetime

of the EC2 instance, use Amazon EBS volumes
instead.

Amazon CloudFront Use CloudFront edge locations to improve the

speed of your website. This is especially important
if your website displays large media les, such as
high-resolution images, audio, or video.

AWS Import/Export Use AWS Import/Export to transfer data to or

from AWS (Amazon S3 buckets, Amazon EBS
snapshots, or Amazon Glacier vaults), using
portable storage devices. This is a good option if it
would be too costly or slow (more than a week) to
transfer your data to AWS over the Internet.

AWS Storage Gateway Use AWS Storage Gateway to provide a seamless

and secure connection between an on-premises
software appliance and Amazon S3. This is useful
for corporate le sharing, enabling existing on-
premises backup applications to store primary
backups in Amazon S3, and data mirroring.

Amazon Glacier Use Amazon Glacier when cost is paramount,

you need the data infrequently, and you can wait
several hours for the data to be retrieved.

If you need fast or frequent access to your data,

use Amazon S3 instead.

Documentation
For more information, see the following documentation:

Amazon CloudFront
Amazon EBS
Amazon Glacier
Amazon S3
AWS Import/Export
AWS Storage Gateway

Security and Identity Services for AWS

AWS provides security and identity services that help you secure your data and systems in the cloud.

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 Getting Started with AWS
Key Services

Key Services
The following are the key security and identity services:

AWS Identity and Access Management

Manage user access to AWS resources through policies.

AWS Directory Service

Manage user access to AWS through your existing Microsoft Active Directory, or a directory you
create in the AWS cloud.

Key Concepts
The following are concepts that you should understand before using the security and identity services.

User Permissions
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) enables you to manage users and user permissions in AWS.
You can control which users can access which AWS resources.

Directory Services
AWS Directory Service enables you to grant access to AWS to directory users and groups. You can create
a new directory in the cloud, or connect to an existing on-premises directory, such as Microsoft Active
Directory.

Documentation
For more information, see the following documentation:

AWS Directory Service

AWS Identity and Access Management

Database Services for AWS

AWS provides fully-managed relational and NoSQL database services, as well as in-memory caching as a
service and a petabyte-scale data-warehouse solution.

Contents
Key Services (p. 13)
Key Concepts (p. 14)
Usage Scenarios (p. 15)
Documentation (p. 16)

Key Services
The following are the key database services:

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 Getting Started with AWS
Key Concepts

Amazon RDS

Provides managed relational databases.

Amazon Redshift

A fast, fully-managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse.

Amazon DynamoDB

Provides managed NoSQL databases.

Amazon ElastiCache

An in-memory caching service.

Key Concepts
The following are concepts that you should understand before using the database services.

Relational Database
A relational database is organized into tables that are related to each other by key values. It is the
traditional type of database.

If your application primarily indexes and queries data and doesn't require joins or complex transactions,
consider a NoSQL database instead. If you have large binary les (audio, video, and image), consider
storing the les in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and storing the metadata for the les in
your database.

NoSQL Database
A NoSQL database oers schema exibility (for example, to provide JSON document model support),
fast read and write performance, virtually limitless scaling, and high availability. NoSQL database tables
are schemaless and can be used to store JSON-style documents or key-value pairs. This functionality
makes NoSQL databases ideal for managing structured or unstructured data.

If your application requires joins or complex transactions, consider a relational database instead. If you
have large binary les (audio, video, and image), consider storing the les in Amazon S3 and storing the
metadata for the les in your database.

DB Instance
A DB instance is the basic building block of Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS); it is an
isolated database environment in the cloud. A DB instance can contain multiple databases.

When you launch a DB instance, you select a database engine (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, or Microsoft
SQL Server) and a DB instance class, which determines the compute and memory capabilities for the DB
instance. You also specify a security group for the DB instance. The rewall for the DB instance prevents
any access to its databases other than what you've granted through the rules for the security group. You
can launch your DB instance in a virtual private cloud (VPC) for additional network access control. You
can also use the security features of your DB engine the same way that you'd use them on your local
network.

In a Multi-AZ deployment, Amazon RDS automatically provisions and maintains a synchronous standby
replica in a dierent Availability Zone. The primary DB instance is synchronously replicated across
Availability Zones to a standby replica to provide data redundancy, eliminate I/O freezes, and minimize

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 Getting Started with AWS
Usage Scenarios

latency spikes during system backups. In the event of a planned or unplanned outage of your DB
instance, Amazon RDS automatically switches to a standby replica.

Amazon RDS can use replication functionality built into the PostgreSQL or MySQL DB engine to create a
special type of DB instance called a read replica from a source DB instance.

Amazon RDS provides two dierent methods for backing up and restoring your DB instances: automated
backups and user-initiated backups known as DB snapshots.

Usage Scenarios
The following table summarizes the common usage scenarios for the AWS database options. For more
information, see Running Databases on AWS.

Database Option Usage

Amazon RDS Provides a fully-managed relational database that scales to large

datasets. It is easy to scale the database storage and compute
resources and provide read replicas. You have a choice of database
engines: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, or Microsoft SQL Server.
Most software designed for use with these databases should work
unmodied with Amazon RDS.

If you need a specic relational database that isn't supported by

Amazon RDS, host the database on Amazon EC2 instead.

Amazon Redshift Provides a fast, fully-managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse that

makes it easy and cost-eective to analyze a vast amount of data.

If you need to perform online transaction processing, use Amazon

RDS instead.

Amazon DynamoDB Provides a fully-managed NoSQL database with fast performance

at a low cost. Common use cases include mobile apps, gaming,
digital ad serving, live events, metadata storage for Amazon S3
objects, e-commerce shopping carts, and web session management.

If you have large objects (for example, 10 GB or larger in size), store

those objects in Amazon S3 and maintain the metadata in Amazon
DynamoDB.

Amazon ElastiCache Provides a fast, fully managed, in-memory cache in the cloud. You
have a choice of caching engines: Memcached and Redis. Common
use cases include improving performance by caching the results
of I/O-intensive queries, managing web session data, and caching
dynamically-generated web pages.

If you need data persistence, use DynamoDB instead.

Hosted on Amazon EC2 Enables you to manage the software, compute resources, and
storage resources for your database with complete control. For best
performance, select the right EC2 instance type and EBS volume
type for your scenario. You can also increase the number of EBS
volumes and use striping to increase performance.

If you are running a database engine that's supported by Amazon

RDS, consider the benets oered by using a fully-managed RDS
database instead.

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 Getting Started with AWS
Documentation

Documentation
For more information, see the following documentation:

Amazon DynamoDB
Amazon ElastiCache
Amazon RDS
Amazon Redshift

Analytics Services for AWS

Today, the amount of data that companies need to analyze is vast. AWS provides analytics tools that can
scale to very large data stores eciently and cost-eectively.

Key Services
Amazon EMR (Amazon EMR) uses Hadoop, an open source framework, to manage and process data.
Hadoop uses the MapReduce engine to distribute processing using a cluster.

Amazon EMR makes it easier to install, congure, and manage Hadoop. You identify the data source,
specify the number and type of EC2 instances for the cluster and what software should be on them,
and provide a MapReduce program or run interactive queries. Amazon EMR manages the computing
resources and runs your MapReduce program or provides tools like Hive or Pig for queries.

AWS Data Pipeline makes it easy for you to regularly move and process data. You create a pipeline, which
denes the input data source, the compute resources (EMR clusters or EC2 instances) to perform the
processing, any conditions that must be met before performing any processing, and the output data
location (such as Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, Amazon RDS, and Amazon DynamoDB).

Amazon Kinesis enables real-time processing of streaming data at a massive scale. You can send data
from Amazon Kinesis to a data warehouse, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) or
Amazon Redshift, or to an Amazon EMR cluster.

Amazon ML makes is easy for developers to use machine learning technology to obtain predictions for
their applications using simple APIs. Amazon ML nds patterns in your existing data, creates machine
learning models, and then uses those models to process new data and generate predictions.

Documentation
For more information, see the following documentation:

Amazon EMR
Amazon Kinesis
Amazon Machine Learning
AWS Data Pipeline

Application Services for AWS

AWS provides a variety of managed services to use with your applications.

Contents

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 Getting Started with AWS
Key Services

Key Services (p. 17)

Key Concepts (p. 17)
Documentation (p. 18)

Key Services
The following are the key application services:

Amazon AppStream

Host your streaming application in the AWS cloud and stream the input and output to your users'
devices.
Amazon CloudSearch

Add search to your website.

Amazon Elastic Transcoder

Convert digital media into the formats required by your users' devices.
Amazon SES

Send email from the cloud.

Amazon SNS

Send or receive notications from the cloud.

Amazon SQS

Enable components in your application to store data in a queue to be retrieved other components.
Amazon SWF

Coordinate tasks across the components of your application.

Key Concepts
The following are concepts that you should understand before using the app services.

Message Queues
A queue contains messages and enables processes to coordinate their work in an asynchronous manner.
Processes write, read, and delete messages from the queue, and perform work based on the information
contained in the retrieved messages. You can design your application in a modular way, so that instead of
performing tasks in serial and waiting until each task completes, tasks are performed independently and
communicate with each other when there is work to be done.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) ensures that each message is delivered at least once,
supports multiple processes reading and writing from the same queue, and enables you to control who
can write to and read from the queue. Each queue must have a unique name and receives a unique URL.
Messages are small, so you'll often use Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store data and
include a pointer to the data in your message.

Notications
A notication lets a recipient know when an event has occurred. Unlike a message queue, the information
is delivered to the recipient automatically, so the recipient doesn't need to check for messages and
retrieve them.

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Documentation

Amazon Simple Notication Service (Amazon SNS) coordinates and manages the delivery of messages
to recipients. A publisher produces messages and sends them to a topic, which denes the message
protocol (such as email, SMS, or Amazon SQS) and the recipient list. A consumer subscribes to the topic
and receives the messages sent to the topic. When you create a topic, you can control which publishers
can send messages to the topic and which subscribers can register for notications.

Workows
A workow engine coordinates work across distributed components. A workow is a set of activities
together with the logic that coordinates the activities. Amazon Simple Workow Service (Amazon SWF)
serves as a central hub for the workow and also maintains the state of each workow execution.
You create and register activity workers, which complete the work, and a decider, which provides the
coordination logic. Then you start one or more executions of your workow.

Email
Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) provides an easy and cost-eective way for you to send a
high volume of email. Amazon SES handles outbound email only. It also collects metrics for you about
the messages that were delivered, bounced, rejected, and marked as spam, and provides access to your
metrics in real time.

Search
Amazon CloudSearch makes it easy for you to add search capability for your content to your website.
First, create a search domain, which denes the data to search, controls how Amazon CloudSearch
indexes your data, and allocates instances to index the data and process requests. Next, upload the data
for search to your domain. Amazon CloudSearch analyzes your data and generates a search index, which
provides the results for search requests. Now you can submit search requests to the search endpoint for
your domain to quickly locate content that meets the specied search criteria.

Streaming Applications
Amazon AppStream deploys your application on AWS infrastructure and streams input and output
between your application and a variety of devices, such as personal computers and mobile devices. The
processing occurs in the cloud, so the client application on the device can be small in size and require
minimal computing power.

Transcoding
Transcoding is the process of converting a video from one format to another. This enables the video
to play back on a variety of mobile devices, web browsers, and televisions. Amazon Elastic Transcoder
simplies common transcoding tasks. You create a job, which denes the transcoding operation for
a specic video stored in Amazon S3. Elastic Transcoder completes the job, providing status updates
during the transcoding operation, and storing the output video in Amazon S3.

Documentation
For more information, see the following documentation:

Amazon AppStream
Amazon CloudSearch
Amazon Elastic Transcoder
Amazon SES
Amazon SNS
Amazon SQS

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 Getting Started with AWS
Management Tools

Amazon SWF

Management Tools for AWS

AWS provides a variety of tools that help you manage your AWS resources.

Contents
Key Tools (p. 19)
Key Concepts (p. 19)
Documentation (p. 20)

Key Tools
The following are the key management tools:

Amazon CloudWatch

Monitor resources and applications.

AWS CloudFormation

Provision your AWS resources using templates.

AWS CloudTrail

Track the usage history for your AWS resources by logging AWS API calls.
AWS Cong

View the current and previous conguration of your AWS resources, and monitor changes to your
AWS resources.
AWS OpsWorks

Congure and manage the environment for your application, whether in the AWS cloud or your own
data center.
AWS Service Catalog

Distribute servers, databases, websites, and applications to users using AWS resources.

Key Concepts
The following are concepts that you should understand before using the management services.

CloudWatch Metrics
CloudWatch monitors your AWS resources and provides you with data known as metrics. You can also
congure CloudWatch to send alerts. For example, you can receive an email when your AWS bill reaches
a certain amount, or congure Auto Scaling to add or remove EC2 instances from your Auto Scaling
group as demand changes.

CloudTrail Logging
CloudTrail captures AWS API calls made for your AWS account by the AWS Management Console, AWS
SDKs, command line tools, and AWS deployment and management services, and delivers log les to

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 Getting Started with AWS
Documentation

Amazon S3 so that you can get a history of the calls. The logs contain the identity of the users and
accounts that made the calls, the source IP addresses the calls were made from, and when the calls
occurred.

Elastic Beanstalk Environments

Elastic Beanstalk enables you to easily move your app from its development environment to AWS
infrastructure in minutes. You provide basic conguration information, and Elastic Beanstalk launches an
environment, which runs a single version of your app, provisions the AWS resources required to support
your app, such as EC2 instances, and then deploys your app. After your app is deployed, you can update
your environment and the changes are applied automatically.

If you know which AWS resources you want to use and how to congure them, you might prefer to use
AWS CloudFormation instead.

AWS CloudFormation Templates and Stacks

AWS CloudFormation enables you to provision the AWS resources that you need predictably and
repeatedly. First, you create a template, a JSON le that denes the required AWS resources, such as
EC2 instances and Amazon EBS volumes. You can start from an existing template, or create one from
scratch. You can save your template locally or in Amazon S3. Then you create a stack, which manages
your resources as a single unit, and AWS CloudFormation provisions the resources described in your
template and congures them to work together. If stack creation fails, AWS CloudFormation deletes any
resources that were created. If stack creation succeeds, you can begin to use your resources. If needed,
you can edit your template and update the stack based on the modied template. AWS CloudFormation
updates the resources as specied.

AWS OpsWorks Stacks and Apps

AWS OpsWorks enables you to provision the AWS resources that you need and deploy your apps to
those resources. It depends on Chef recipes to handle tasks such as installing software and conguring
resources. You create a stack to manage your AWS resources as a single unit. An app represents the code
that you want to run on an application server and contains the information required to deploy the code.
The code itself is stored in a repository such as Amazon S3.

Documentation
For more information, see the following documentation:

Amazon CloudWatch
AWS CloudFormation
AWS CloudTrail
AWS Cong
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
AWS OpsWorks
AWS Service Catalog

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 Getting Started with AWS
Run a Virtual Server

AWS Tutorials

The following tutorials are designed to get you started creating and using resources on AWS.

Tutorials
Run a Virtual Server (p. 21)
Store Files (p. 21)
Share Digital Media (p. 22)
Deploy a Website (p. 22)
Host a Website (Linux) (p. 22)
Host a Website (Windows) (p. 22)
Run a Database (p. 23)
Analyze Your Data (p. 23)

For video tutorials, see Getting Started with AWS and AWS Instructional Videos and Labs.

Run a Virtual Server

Launch a virtual server using Amazon EC2 for complete control of your AWS computing resources. For
more information, see Amazon EC2.

Task Tutorial

Launch and connect to a Linux instance Getting Started with Amazon EC2 Linux Instances

Launch and connect to a Windows instance Getting Started with Amazon EC2 Windows
Instances

Store Files
You can use AWS to store les that you'll access or share on a regular basis, or les that you need to
archive and access infrequently.

For more information, see Backup and Recovery.

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 Getting Started with AWS
Share Digital Media

Task Tutorial

Use Amazon S3 to store data and retrieve it Getting Started with Amazon Simple Storage
quickly Service

Use Amazon Glacier to store archival data at a low Getting Started with Amazon Glacier
cost

Share Digital Media

You can use AWS to store or share digital media. For more information, see Digital Media.

Deploy a Website
You can use AWS to host your static website. You can also use AWS deployment services to quickly set up
a dynamic website.

Task Tutorial

Deploy a static website using Amazon S3 Getting Started with AWS: Hosting a Static
Website

Deploy a web app using AWS Elastic Beanstalk Getting Started with AWS: Deploying a Web App

Host a Website (Linux)

You can use AWS to host your website on Linux virtual servers. For more information, see Websites &
Website Hosting and Application Hosting.

Task Tutorial

Host a WordPress Blog Hosting a WordPress Blog with Amazon EC2

Host Drupal using scaling and load balancing Getting Started with AWS: Hosting a Web App for
Linux

Host a Website (Windows)

You can use AWS to host your website on Windows virtual servers. For more information, see Websites &
Website Hosting and Application Hosting.

Task Tutorial

Host a WordPress Blog Deploying a WordPress Blog on Your Amazon EC2

Windows Instance

Host a .NET app using scaling and load balancing Getting Started with AWS: Hosting a .NET Web
App

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 Getting Started with AWS
Run a Database

Run a Database
You can use AWS to run your database. For more information, see Running Databases on AWS.

Task Tutorial

Use Amazon DynamoDB, a fully-managed NoSQL Getting Started

database service

Use Amazon RDS to set up, operate, and scale a Getting Started
relational database in the cloud

Use Amazon Redshift, a fast, fully-managed, Amazon Redshift Getting Started

petabyte-scale data warehouse solution

Analyze Your Data

You can use AWS to manage and analyze your business or scientic data. For more information, see Big
Data on Amazon Web Services.

Task Tutorial

Use Hive with Amazon EMR to process sample Getting Started: Analyzing Big Data with Amazon
data in Amazon S3 EMR

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