AWS[milestone: day 30]

Recap, 30 on 30

So here we are...day 30. I started not knowing what AWS stood for and now have a certification and can name over 30 AWS services.

learning goal

Take the 5th practice test and review it.

learning outcome

I took the 5th practice test, reviewed it, then took it again and scored higher.

high level overview of services learned so far

1. EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) - EC2 "instances" are amazon for servers. This is where your computing power comes in. Choose an AMI (machine image, OS) for your EC2 to use (like linux or windows).

2. EBS (Elastic Block Storage) - EBS volumes are amazon for hard drives. Choose one of these babies to attach to your EC2, depending on your needs.

3. S3 (Simple Storage Service) - S3 buckets are amazon for object storage. Keep your videos and images in here.

4. ECS (Elastic Container Service) - Ok this one is kinda cool but hard to explain in short. Basically, use this for splitting up your app into micro-services that work together. So if your app is one giant crystal, break that crystal into tiny pieces and connect them together to make the app go faster and more efficient. Think "Divide and conquer".

5. Snowball - Snowball is literally a hard drive or a truck full of hard drives for when you need to transfer data. Yea. Amazon sends you a HDD, you plug that bitch in and fill it up with your data and send it back for amazon to upload it for you with their faster speeds. The truck is called snowmobile. Why? i dont know. DataTruck™ sounds cooler to me. What's so snow-bally about it?

6. STS (Secure Token Service) - STS is for generation temporary credentials to users to log into AWS environments.

7. Lightsail - Lightsail is for AWS noobs and it automatically sets up your aws environment. (It chooses an EC2, EBS, DB for you and hooks 'em up.

8. EMR (Elastic Map Reduce) - Ah good ol' EMR. It's a framework for hadoop used to analyze big data.

9. Kinesis - This one comes in a few flavors. Use them to read, process and analyze streaming data. Kinesis Firehose, Kinesis Data Stream, Kineses Video Streams.

10. Athena - This is an analytics service. Use to analyze data ad-hoc.

11. ElasticSearch - This is a data searching service.

12. Redshift - This is a relational data warehouse. Use when you want to analyze big data inside.

13. DynamoDB - This is a schema-less NoSQL db. Non relational. Used for read heavy apps.

14. RDS - This is a relational DB engine. Slap down a MySQL, Microsoft SQL, PostgreSQL (wtf is postrge?) and a couple others that i forgot.

15. Aurora - This is a relational DB engine. It's cool because its the only with a "global mode". Basically you just have 1 Aurora DB, but its global so your data is all over the world. Slap down a MySQL or PostgreSQL.

16. Database Migration Service - Use this ol' boy to migrate from one DB service to the next. (RDS to DynamoDB).

17. ElastiCache - This is a caching service. So if a lot of users are reading the same shit from your DB, slap one of these bad boys down and it will just cache the frequently accessed data to deliver it faster.

18. Glue - This is an ETL service. Extract, Transform and load. Used to ETL data going into db's.

19. Step Functions - This is an orchestration service. You use it to see your code as "steps" working towards the bigger picture of the whole app.

20. SNS (Simple Notification Service) - This is a notfication service. Use it to send texts and emails to users when an event happens. (an item you favorited is on sale)

21. SQS (Simple Queue Service) - This is a queue service that can store messages in transit. Use it so your reads and writes don't get dropped or duplicated.

22. Elastic Beanstalk - This is an automation service used to deploy and manage your app. Feed it code and it spits out an app. Why is it named beanstalk? Don't know.

23. CloudFormation - CloudFormation is an automation service used to automate the creation of your entire VPC. You make text-file templates that are blueprints for your environment and feed it to this and it spits out the cloud.

24. Lambda - This is a serverless service used to automate things. So your user uploads a image into a bucket. Lambda can be configured to run a piece of code when that action occurs to say make a thumbnail of that image.

25. API Gateway - This is a serverless service used for when you need to call an API's function. So your callers go through this service rather than an API hosted on a server somewhere.

26. CodeCommit - Use this to store your code in Git for use with AWS.

27. SageMaker - This is an ML tool. Use this to generate visually pleasing graphs from interpreted big data.

28. Comprehend. This is an ML tool. Use to analyze your data.

29. Rekognition - This is an ML tool. Use it to read and analyze text to make an informed decision.

30. CloudWatch - This is a metrics-monitoring service. You can set it up to send alerts if you go over certain capacity or spending limits.

31. CloudTrail - CloudTrail is a lower level monitoring service. It logs API calls and information associated about that call.

32. OpsWorks - OpsWorks enables Chef Puppet. (haven't really looked into this one)

33. Organizations - Organizations is a way to consolidate AWS accounts under one hood.

34. Trusted Advisor - Trusted Advisor is a dashboard monitoring tool that visually "advises" you about best practices in regard to your apps current performance, security, fault tolerance, service limits, cost optimization

35. Budgets - Budgets is a service to help stay within your spending limits.

36. Elastic Transcoder - Use this baby to transcode images and videos into different formats.

37. Device Farm - This is a service used for developers testing their mobile environment.

38. Route53 - This is a DNS service with some filtering techniques.

39. Direct Connect - Direct Connect is literally a fiber line from AWS main network to your corporation. So you get faster speeds when working in your AWS cloud.

40. ELB (Elastic Load Balancer) - ELB comes in 3 flavors CLB (Classic Load Balancer), ALB (Application Load Balancer) and NLB (Network Load Balancer). Put one of these for each public subnet you have to distribute traffic evenly amongst your EC2 instances.

41. IAM (Identity & Access Management - IAM is a service used for assigning Policys to Roles, Users and Groups.

42. Cognito - Cognito is a service that lets users sign into your AWS app with popular logins like FB or Google.

43. Artifact - Artifact is your one stop shop for compliance-related information.

44. CloudHSM - This is a hardware key storage model. Use to store encryption keys.

45. KMS (Key Management Service) - KMS generates and manages encryption keys for you.

46. WAF (Web Application Firewall) - Use this in front of your app to protect against ddos attacks and cross scripting attacks.

47. EFS (Elastic File System) - EFS is a file system - like we are all used to (like how you interact with files and folders on your personal computer.

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and probably more that i am forgetting

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thx guys

Gee guys! Thanks for supporting me through this period of transition. If you are reading this, you are the first person to see this - yes really it's a personal blog.