AMAZON WEB SERVICES

                                                                                                                  SAI KISHEN KOTHAPALLI                            

                                             

                                            AMAZON WEB SERVICES

                                                                             

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a secure cloud services platform, offering compute power, database storage, content delivery and other functionality to help businesses scale and grow.

In simple words AWS allows you to do the following things-

1. Running web and application servers in the cloud to host dynamic websites.
2. Securely store all your files on the cloud so you can access them from anywhere.
3. Using managed databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle or SQL Server to store information.
4. Deliver static and dynamic files quickly around the world using a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
5. Send bulk email to your customers.

Basic Terminologies

1. Region — A region is a geographical area. Each region consists of 2 (or more) availability zones.
2. Availability Zone — It is simply a data center.
3. Edge Location — They are CDN (Content Delivery Network) endpoints for CloudFront.

Compute

1. EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) — These are just the virtual machines in the cloud on which you have the OS level control. You can run whatever you want in them.
2. ECS (Elastic Container Service) — It is a highly scalable container service to allows you to run Docker containers in the cloud.
3. Lambda — AWS’s serverless technology that allows you to run functions in the cloud. It’s a huge cost saver as you pay only when your functions execute.

Storage

1. S3 (Simple Storage Service) — Storage service of AWS in which we can store objects like files, folders, images, documents, songs, etc. It cannot be used to install software, games or Operating System.
2. EFS (Elastic File System) — Provides file storage for use with your EC2 instances. It uses NFSv4 protocol and can beused concurrently by thousands of instances.
3. Glacier — It is an extremely low-cost archival service to store files for a long time like a few years or even decades.
4. Storage Gateway — It is a virtual machine that you install on your on-premise servers. Your on-premise data can be backed up to AWS providing more durability.

Networking & Content Delivery

1. VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) — It is simply a data center in the cloud in which you deploy all your resources. It allows you to better isolate your resources and secure them.
2. CloudFront -It is AWS’s Content Delivery Network (CDN) that consists of Edge locations that cache resources.
3. Route53 — It is AWS’s highly available DNS (Domain Name System) service. You can register domain names through it.
4. Direct Connect — Using it you can connect your data center to an Availability zone using a high speed dedicated line.
5. API Gateway — Allows you to create, store and manage APIs at scale.

Mobile Services

1. Mobile Hub — Allows you to add, configure and design features for mobile apps. It is a console for mobile app development.
2. Cognito — Allows your users to signup using social identity providers.
3. Device Farm — Enables you to improve quality of apps by quickly testing on hundreds of mobile devices.
4. AWS AppSync —It is an enterprise level, fully managed GraphQL service with real-time data synchronization and offline programming features.
5. Mobile Analytics — Allows to simply and cost effectively analyze mobile data.

Desktop & App Streaming

1. WorkSpaces — It is a VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure). Allows you to use remote desktops in the cloud
2. AppStream 2.0 — A way of streaming desktop applications to your users in the web browser. Eg: Using MS Word in Google Chrome.

AR & VR (Augmented Reality & Virtual Reality)

1. Sumerian — It is a set of tools for creating high-quality virtual reality (VR) experiences on the web. You can quickly create interactive 3D scenes and publish it as a website for users to access.

Customer Engagement

1. Amazon Connect — Allows you to create a customer care center in the cloud.
2. Pinpoint — It is like Google analytics for mobile applications. It helps you to understand users and engage with them.
3. SES (Simple Email Service) — Allows you to send bulk emails to your customers at an extremely low price.

Game Development

1. GameLift — It is a service managed by AWS that can used to host dedicated game servers. It seamlessly scales without taking your game offline.

Benefits of AWS:

1.Easy to use

2.Flexible

3.Cost effective

4.Reliable

5.Scalable and High Performance

6.and Secure.

Netflix on AWS

Netflix is the world’s leading internet television network, with more than 100 million members in more than 190 countries enjoying 125 million hours of TV shows and movies each day. Netflix uses AWS for nearly all its computing and storage needs, including databases, analytics, recommendation engines, video transcoding, and more—hundreds of functions that in total use more than 100,000 server instances on AWS.

Application Monitoring on a Massive Scale

Netflix uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) for nearly all its computing and storage needs, including databases, analytics, recommendation engines, video transcoding, and more—hundreds of functions that in total use more than 100,000 server instances on AWS.

This results in an extremely complex and dynamic networking environment where applications are constantly communicating inside AWS and across the Internet. Monitoring and optimizing its network is critical for Netflix to continue improving customer experience, increasing efficiency, and reducing costs. In particular, Netflix needed a solution for ingesting, augmenting, and analyzing the multiple terabytes of data its network generates daily in the form of virtual private cloud (VPC) flow logs. This would enable Netflix to identify performance-improvement opportunities, such as identifying apps that are communicating across regions and collocating them. The company would also be able to increase uptime by quickly detecting and mitigating application downtime.

Centralizing Flow Logs Using Amazon Kinesis Data Streams

From the outset, AWS enabled Netflix to experiment with different approaches to analyzing its network data. “Early in the design process, the flexibility to try different ways of processing the data was important,” says Bennett. “We experimented with multiple designs and used many AWS products to get here.”

The solution Netflix ultimately deployed—known internally as Dredge—centralizes flow logs using Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. The application reads the data from Amazon Kinesis Data Streams in real time and enriches IP addresses with application metadata to provide a full picture of the networking environment. “Usually, we would put the data into a database, which would build an index to enable faster querying,” says Bennett. “Dredge joins the flow logs with application metadata as it streams and indexes it without using a database, which eliminates a lot of the complexity.”

AWS was the logical choice for Dredge in part because the data was already resident in the AWS Cloud. “It would have been daunting to publish, stream, and consume that much information from an external system such as Kafka,” says Bennett. “It took just a few API calls to centralize multiple terabytes of flow logs into Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. Now we can focus on getting insights from the data rather than simply getting access to it.”

The scalability of Amazon Kinesis Data Streams was a good fit for the Dredge application because of the cyclical and elastic nature of network usage at Netflix. “When it comes to our networking data, it’s more cost efficient to be able to scale up and down, which is not as easy to do with alternatives to Amazon Kinesis Data Streams,” says Bennett.

Improving Customer Experience with Real-Time Network Monitoring

Netflix’s Amazon Kinesis Data Streams-based solution has proven to be highly scalable, each day processing billions of traffic flows. Typically, about 1,000 Amazon Kinesis shards work in parallel to process the data stream. “Amazon Kinesis Data Streams processes multiple terabytes of log data each day, yet events show up in our analytics in seconds,” says Bennett. “We can discover and respond to issues in real time, ensuring high availability and a great customer experience.”

Netflix is now able to identify new ways to optimize its applications, whether that means moving an application from one region to another or changing to a more appropriate network protocol for a specific type of traffic. “Our solution built on Amazon Kinesis enables us to identify ways to increase efficiency, reduce costs, and improve resiliency for the best customer experience,” says Bennett.

Although a streaming data solution is not new to the IT industry, it is an innovation in the networking space. “Netflix is heavily invested in AWS in part because it abstracts the underlying network, so we don’t have to deal with switches and routers,” says Bennett. “We’re monitoring, analyzing, and optimizing at a higher level of the stack—in ways we would never even consider if we were running our own data centers.”

References:

1.https://blog.usejournal.com/what-is-aws-and-what-can-you-do-with-it-395b585b03c

2.https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/netflix/?did=cr_card&trk=cr_card

3.https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/netflix-kinesis-data-streams/

4.https://youtu.be/hU25CIRPIJo