Module 1: Cloud Concepts Overview

AWS Academy Cloud Foundations

© 2022, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

Welcome to Module 1: Cloud Concepts Overview.

 Section 3: Introduction to Amazon Web
Services (AWS)
Module 1: Cloud Concepts Overview

© 2022, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

Section 3: Introduction to Amazon Web Services (AWS)

 What are web services?
A web service is any piece of software that makes itself available over the
internet and uses a standardized format—such as Extensible Markup
Language (XML) or JavaScript Object Notation (JSON)—for the request and the
response of an application programming interface (API) interaction.

Request message

Internet
Response message
Client Web service

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In general, a web service is any piece of software that makes itself available over the internet or
on private (intranet) networks. A web service uses a standardized format—such as Extensible
Markup Language (XML) or JavaScript Object Notation (JSON)—for the request and the response
of an application programming interface (API) interaction. It is not tied to any one operating
system or programming language. It’s self-describing via an interface definition file and it is
discoverable.
 What is AWS?
• AWS is a secure cloud platform that offers a broad set of global cloud-based
products.
• AWS provides you with on-demand access to compute, storage, network,
database, and other IT resources and management tools.
• AWS offers flexibility.
• You pay only for the individual services you need, for as long as you use
them.
• AWS services work together like building blocks.

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a secure cloud platform that offers a broad set of global cloud-
based products. Because these products are delivered over the internet, you have on-demand
access to the compute, storage, network, database, and other IT resources that you might need
for your projects—and the tools to manage them. You can immediately provision and launch AWS
resources. The resources are ready for you to use in minutes.

AWS offers flexibility. Your AWS environment can be reconfigured and updated on demand,
scaled up or down automatically to meet usage patterns and optimize spending, or shut down
temporarily or permanently. The billing for AWS services becomes an operational expense
instead of a capital expense.

AWS services are designed to work together to support virtually any type of application or
workload. Think of these services like building blocks, which you can assemble quickly to build
sophisticated, scalable solutions, and then adjust them as your needs change.
 Categories of AWS services

Analytics Application AR and VR Blockchain Business Compute

Integration Applications

Cost Customer Database Developer Tools End User Game Tech

Management Engagement Computing

Internet Machine Management and Media Services Migration and Mobile

of Things Learning Governance Transfer

Networking and Robotics Satellite Security, Identity, and Storage

Content Delivery Compliance
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AWS services fall under different categories, and each category contains one or more services.
You can select the services that you want from these different categories to build your solutions.
 Simple solution example

Networking Compute Database Storage

AWS Cloud

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

Amazon
DynamoDB
Users Amazon S3

Amazon EC2

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For example, say you’re building a database application. Your customers might be sending data to
your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, which is a service in the compute
category. These EC2 servers batch the data in one-minute increments and add an object per
customer to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), the AWS storage service you’ve chosen
to use. You can then use a nonrelational database like Amazon DynamoDB to power your
application, for example, to build an index so that you can find all the objects for a given
customer that were collected over a certain period. You might decide to run these services inside
an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), which is a service in the networking category.

The purpose of this simple example is to illustrate that you can select web services from different
categories and use them together to build a solution (in this case, a database application). Of
course, the solutions you build can be quite complex.
 Choosing a service

The service you select depends on your business goals and technology
requirements.

Amazon
VMware Cloud EC2 AWS
on AWS Lambda

Amazon ECS ? AWS Elastic

Beanstalk

Amazon EKS

Amazon
AWS Fargate
AWS Outposts Lightsail
AWS Batch

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Which service you choose to use will depend on your business goals and technology
requirements. In the example you just looked at, the solution made use of Amazon EC2 as the
compute service. However, that is only one of many compute services that AWS offers. Here are
some other AWS compute offerings that you might choose to use for the following example use
cases:
• Amazon EC2 (https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/): You want complete control over your AWS
computing resources.
• AWS Lambda (https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/): You want to run your code and not manage
or provision servers.
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk (https://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/): You want a service that
deploys, manages, and scales your web applications for you.
• Amazon Lightsail (https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/): You need a lightweight cloud platform
for a simple web application.
• AWS Batch (https://aws.amazon.com/batch/): You need to run hundreds of thousands of batch
workloads.
• AWS Outposts (https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/): You want to run AWS infrastructure in
your on-premises data center.
• Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) (https://aws.amazon.com/ecs/)
• Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) (https://aws.amazon.com/eks/)
• AWS Fargate (https://aws.amazon.com/fargate/): You want to implement a containers or
microservices architecture.
• VMware Cloud on AWS (https://aws.amazon.com/vmware/): You have an on-premises server
virtualization platform that you want to migrate to AWS.

Similarly, there are a variety of services for you to choose from in the other categories, and the
number of offerings keeps growing.
 Services covered in this course
Compute services – Storage services – Management and
• Amazon EC2 • Amazon S3 Governance services –
• AWS Lambda • Amazon S3 Glacier • AWS Trusted Advisor
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk • Amazon EFS • AWS CloudWatch
• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling • Amazon EBS • AWS CloudTrail
• Amazon ECS • AWS Well-Architected Tool
• Amazon EKS Database services – • AWS Auto Scaling
• Amazon ECR • Amazon RDS • AWS Command Line Interface
• AWS Fargate • Amazon DynamoDB • AWS Config
• Amazon Redshift • AWS Management Console
• Amazon Aurora • AWS Organizations
Security, Identity, and
Compliance services – Networking and Content AWS Cost Management
• AWS IAM Delivery services – services –
• Amazon Cognito • Amazon VPC • AWS Cost & Usage
• AWS Shield • Amazon Route 53 Report
• AWS Artifact • Amazon CloudFront • AWS Budgets
• AWS KMS • Elastic Load Balancing • AWS Cost Explorer

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The array of AWS services can be intimidating as you start your journey into the cloud. This
course focuses on some of the more common services in the following service categories:
compute, storage, database, networking and content delivery, security, identity, and compliance,
management and governance, and AWS cost management.

Legend:
• Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
• Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR)
• Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)
• Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS)
• Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)
• Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
• Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)
• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
• AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS)
 Three ways to interact with AWS

AWS Management Console

Easy-to-use graphical interface

Command Line Interface (AWS CLI)

Access to services by discrete commands or scripts

Software Development Kits (SDKs)

Access services directly from your code (such as Java, Python, and others)

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You might wonder how to access the broad array of services that are offered by AWS. There are
three ways to create and manage resources on the AWS Cloud:
• AWS Management Console: The console provides a rich graphical interface to a majority of
the features offered by AWS. (Note: From time to time, new features might not have all of
their capabilities included in the console when the feature initially launches.)
• AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI): The AWS CLI provides a suite of utilities that can be
launched from a command script in Linux, macOS, or Microsoft Windows.
• Software development kits (SDKs): AWS provides packages that enable accessing AWS in a
variety of popular programming languages. This makes it easy to use AWS in your existing
applications and it also enables you to create applications that deploy and monitor complex
systems entirely through code.

All three options are built on a common REST-like API that serves as the foundation of AWS.

To learn more about tools you can use to develop and manage applications on AWS, see
https://aws.amazon.com/tools/.
 Section 3 key • AWS is a secure cloud platform that offers a broad set
of global cloud-based products called services that are
takeaways designed to work together.
• There are many categories of AWS services, and each
category has many services to choose from.
• Choose a service based on your business goals and
technology requirements.
• There are three ways to interact with AWS services.

© 2022, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 30

The key takeaways from this section of the module include:

• AWS is a secure cloud platform that offers a broad set of global cloud-based products called
services that are designed to work together.
• There are many categories of AWS services, and each category has many services to choose
from.
• Choose a service based on your business goals and technology requirements.
• There are three ways to interact with AWS services.