In this article I will go over each of the AWS service section and mention some of the important services in that section. There are a lot of services covered in the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate 2018 so lets jump right into it.

Here are the meaning of some words you will see often:

  • Region - is a physical location in the world which consists of two or more Availability Zone (AZ).
  • AZ - is one or more discrete data centers, each with redundant power, networking and connectivity housed in seperate facilities.
  • Edge Locations - end points for AWS which are used for caching content. Typically consists of cloudfront, Amazon's CDN.

AWS Services:

  • Compute:
    • EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute) - VM inside AWS platform. You can also have physical dedicated machines.
    • Elastic Beanstalk - Simple. Just upload code. It will automatically provision necessary instances.
    • Lambda - COde you upload to the cloud and you control when it executes. No OS or any machine configs you have to worry about.
    • Lightsail - VPS service, RDP or SSH (Linux). Watered down version of EC2.
    • Batch - Batch computing.
  • Storage:
    • S3 (Simple Storage Service) - Object based storage. Upload files into buckets.
    • EFS (Elastic File System) - Network attached storage (NAS).
    • Glacier - Data archive.
    • Snowball - Transfer large amounts of data to AWS infrastructure.
    • Storage Gateway - Virtual machines you can install in your data center. It will replicate info back to S3. There are 4 different types.
  • Database:
    • RDS (Relational Database Service) - MySQL, SQLServer, ...
    • DynamoDB - Non - relational DB.
    • Elastic cache - Way of caching commonly queried data from your DB server
    • RedShift - Data warehouse, BI, complex quires.
  • Migration:
    • AWS Migration Hub - Tracking service. Track your app as you migrate to AWS.
  • Networking & Content Delivery:
    • VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) - Virtual data center, configure firewalls, AZ, network ACL, root tables.
    • Cloudfront - CDN, can make media files closer to user with edge location.
    • Route 53 - DNS server.
  • Developer Tools:
    • Not talked about in the exam.
  • Management Tools:
    • CloudWatch - Monitering service.
    • CloudFormation - Scripting infrastructure.
    • CloudTrail - Log changes to AWS environment.
  • Media Services:
    • Not talked about in the exam.
  • Machine Learning:
    • Not talked about in the exam.
  • Analytics:
    • EMR (Elastic MapReduce) - Big data solutions. Breaks data up for analysis.
    • Kinesis - Way of ingesting large amount of data into AWS.
    • Data Pipeline - Moving your data to different AWS service.
  • Security & Identity & Compliance:
    • IAM - Identity Access Management.
    • Inspector -Agent you install on your EC2 instasnce. Generates report for vaulnerabileietes.
    • Certificate Manager - Free SSL cert if you use Route 53. Manage SSL cert.
    • Cloud HSM (Hardware Security Module) - Store your keys (access EC2). Other encryption keys.
    • Directory Service - Integrate AD to AWS.
    • WAF (Web Application Firewall) - Stops SQL injection, looks at app layer.
    • Shield - Ddos mitigation.
  • Application Integration:
    • SNS (Simple Notification Service) - Set notifications for your account, ex. Setting billing alarm.
    • SQS (Simple Queue Service) - Decoupling infrastructure, Hold info in queue, EC2 polling queue.
    • SWF (simple Workflow Service) - Creates workflow, can have actual humans on other end.
  • Business Productivity:
    • Work Docs - Think Dropbox in AWS.

These are most of the services that Amazon provides and are on the exam. Next I will explain in detail about what the specific is and how to use it in a real world scenario. If you have any questions or comments leave them down below.