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The ABC’s of Amazon Web Services
19/04/2024
Taking your skillset and business to the cloud could be the smartest move you can make for your enterprise. This strategy offers customisation, agility, security, and cost savings. One of the most reliable and time-tested cloud-service providers is Amazon Web Services (AWS). Whether you are planning to run your applications within the public cloud or just getting started, it’s crucial to know everything you can do with AWS. Here are the basic A to Zs of the features offered by AWS, as well as strategies you should keep in mind to make the most of this platform.
Strategies for Optimising Amazon Web Services:
- Choose Automation: You get to reduce your room for error with Amazon Web Services by switching from manual to automated processes. Automation can not only reduce costs but also increase reliability. The API offered by Amazon Web Services helps you automate a lot of processes and can be easily leveraged. For instance, you get to automate your testing too, which becomes one less thing to worry about.
- Enforce Best practices: Start with designating a small team that will ensure that best practices are a priority for your organisation. The team will also serve to define what these practices are, especially within the pillars that AWS identifies. These pillars of your architectural framework for AWS include cost optimisation, performance efficiency, security, reliability, and operational excellence.
- Account for Cost spikes: Spikes in your expenses as a result of experiencing unplanned situations are to be expected. Choosing an automated system that can inform you regarding these spikes in cost is vital. Keep an eye on your usage report to ensure you are getting your money’s worth when it comes to your cloud budget. Additionally, using spot and reserved instances can also help.
- Backup your data: Determine how often you’ll need to back up your data. Additionally, consider the level of availability from your team you will need for this process. Automate your backup process as per a schedule that makes sense for your business and your budget. Ensure you are testing your backups as well.
- Opt for encryption: Choosing to encrypt all of your data is vital. On Amazon Web Services, you get tons of options for encryption of database and storage services. Key management services are also offered. Consider using the native tooling offered by the platform. One of the major advantages of doing so is how often the services will be iterated and improved.
- Prepare for failure: By distributing income traffic using ELB — Elastic Load Balancing — and launching multiple E2C instances, you can improve your application’s availability. To increase the uptime of your application and further reduce potential single points of failure, place instances in multiple availability zones.
- Go global: The cloud infrastructure of AWS operates such that its availability zones are spread out across several geographic locations all over the world. AWS regions provide numerous isolated and physically separated Availability Zones that are connected with high throughput, low latency, and highly redundant networking. With geographic diversity, you can meet your data requirements while simultaneously improving continuity.
- Hyperscale your services: Hyperscale computing is the IT environment’s ability to expand and contract such that it scales the amount of server space it has on-demand. It is crucial that sites see these unpredictable spikes in traffic as well as high demand as one of the main benefits of AWS since it is the market leader in hyper-scalable cloud services.
- Balance load: You get multiple load balancing options with Amazon web services. Choose among Application, Classic and Network load balancers. Putting too much pressure on your servers can not only reduce your response time but can also cause crashes in the system. With Elastic Load Balancing, you automatically reroute traffic to those servers which can handle it. This keeps the flow of traffic distributed evenly among surges. With the Classic load balancer, you get simple load balancing across multiple E2C instances based on either application or network level information. On the other hand, the Application load balancer has more complex rules but accomplishes the same function.
- Strategise data migration: When you choose to migrate data from its legacy IT to the cloud using Amazon Web Services, this process is quite unlike flipping a switch. Migration is an incremental process and requires active strategising. Once you determine the best cloud migration strategy for your business, work with a team or partner that can manage your migration for you.
- Utilise Replication: Did you know that the AWS platform also offers options for replicating your data such as RDS and S3 to a separate AWS region? Based on your availability needs, you might require the use of third-party software that can assist in this replication such as that for Amazon Machine Images, CloudFormation Scripts, and Elastic Block Store.
- Test regularly and often: The importance of testing your software cannot be emphasised enough. Test periodically and test to keep security issues and other bugs at bay. Regular testing can also help you learn how quickly your infrastructure can recover from a disaster. In addition to regular backups, testing often will contribute to how durable your setup is. Over time, your recovery methods will only become stronger.
- Boost security using the VPC: VPC is short for the Virtual Private Cloud. Being completely isolated from other networks in the cloud, the VPC ensures an added layer of security to your data. VPCs are very similar to virtual private networks (VPNs) but with the added benefit of scalability which comes from being a cloud service.
To sum up
Amazon Web Services is the world’s most comprehensive and popular cloud platform. You can get over 200 fully-featured services from global data centres with AWS. Whether it be small startups or large scale-enterprises, everybody can benefit from learning how to make the most of Amazon Web Services. From employing regular backups to rigorously testing your services and rerouting traffic, Focaloid Technologies can help you optimise your use of these cloud services at every stage of development.
Published:19/04/2024
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