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What is Amazon S3?
Amazon S3 or Amazon Simple Storage Service is a "simple storage service" offered by Amazon Web Services that provides object storage through a web service interface. Amazon S3 uses the same scalable storage infrastructure that Amazon.com uses to run its global e-commerce network.
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.
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What can developers do with Amazon S3 that they could not do with an on-premises solution?
Amazon S3 enables any developer to leverage Amazon’s own benefits of massive scale with no up-front investment or performance compromises. Developers are now free to innovate knowing that no matter how successful their businesses become, it will be inexpensive and simple to ensure their data is quickly accessible, always available, and secure.
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What can I do with Amazon S3?
Amazon S3 provides a simple web service interface that you can use to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. Using this web service, you can easily build applications that make use of Internet storage. Since Amazon S3 is highly scalable and you only pay for what you use, you can start small and grow your application as you wish, with no compromise on performance or reliability.
Amazon S3 is also designed to be highly flexible. Store any type and amount of data that you want; read the same piece of data a million times or only for emergency disaster recovery; build a simple FTP application, or a sophisticated web application such as the Amazon.com retail web site. Amazon S3 frees developers to focus on innovation instead of figuring out how to store their data.
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What kind of data can I store in Amazon S3?
You can store virtually any kind of data in any format.
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How much data can I store in Amazon S3?
The total volume of data and number of objects you can store are unlimited. Individual Amazon S3 objects can range in size from a minimum of 0 bytes to a maximum of 5 terabytes. The largest object that can be uploaded in a single PUT is 5 gigabytes. For objects larger than 100 megabytes, customers should consider using the Multipart Upload capability.
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What are S3 Storage Classes and What storage classes does Amazon S3 offer?
Amazon S3 offers a range of storage classes designed for different use cases. These include S3 Standard for general-purpose storage of frequently accessed data; S3 Intelligent-Tiering for data with unknown or changing access patterns; S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) and S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (S3 One Zone-IA) for long-lived, but less frequently accessed data; and Amazon S3 Glacier (S3 Glacier) and Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive (S3 Glacier Deep Archive) for long-term archive and digital preservation; and S3 Outposts for on-premises object storage to meet data residency needs.
If you have data residency requirements that can’t be met by an existing AWS Region, you can use the S3 Outposts storage class to store your S3 data on-premises.
Amazon S3 also offers capabilities to manage your data throughout its lifecycle.
Once an S3 Lifecycle policy is set, your data will automatically transfer to a different storage class without any changes to your application.
Learn more at: Amazon S3 FAQs
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What does Amazon do with my data in Amazon S3?
Amazon will store your data and track its associated usage for billing purposes. Amazon will not otherwise access your data for any purpose outside of the Amazon S3 offering, except when required to do so by law.
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Does Amazon store its own data in Amazon S3?
Yes. Developers within Amazon use Amazon S3 for a wide variety of projects. Many of these projects use Amazon S3 as their authoritative data store and rely on it for business-critical operations.
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How is Amazon S3 data organized?
Amazon S3 is a simple key-based object store. When you store data, you assign a unique object key that can later be used to retrieve the data. Keys can be any string, and they can be constructed to mimic hierarchical attributes. Alternatively, you can use S3 Object Tagging to organize your data across all of your S3 buckets and/or prefixes.
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How do I interface with Amazon S3?
Amazon S3 provides a simple, standards-based REST web services interface that is designed to work with any Internet-development toolkit. The operations are intentionally made simple to make it easy to add new distribution protocols and functional layers.
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Can I have a bucket that has different objects in different storage classes?
Yes, you can have a bucket that has different objects stored in S3 Standard, S3 Intelligent-Tiering, S3 Standard-IA, and S3 One Zone-IA.
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AWS S3 FAQs
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What is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)?
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) forms a central part of Amazon.com's cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), by allowing users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications.
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Can users SSH to EC2 instances using their AWS user name and password?
No. User security credentials created with IAM are not supported for direct authentication to customer EC2 instances. Managing EC2 SSH credentials is the customer’s responsibility within the EC2 console.
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What can I do with Amazon EC2?
Just as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) enables storage in the cloud, Amazon EC2 enables “compute” in the cloud.
Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction.
It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment.
Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change.
Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use.
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What can developers now do that they could not before EC2?
Until now, small developers did not have the capital to acquire massive compute resources and ensure they had the capacity they needed to handle unexpected spikes in load. Amazon EC2 enables any developer to leverage Amazon’s own benefits of massive scale with no up-front investment or performance compromises. Developers are now free to innovate knowing that no matter how successful their businesses become, it will be inexpensive and simple to ensure they have the compute capacity they need to meet their business requirements.
The “Elastic” nature of the service allows developers to instantly scale to meet spikes in traffic or demand. When computing requirements unexpectedly change (up or down), Amazon EC2 can instantly respond, meaning that developers have the ability to control how many resources are in use at any given point in time. In contrast, traditional hosting services generally provide a fixed number of resources for a fixed amount of time, meaning that users have a limited ability to easily respond when their usage is rapidly changing, unpredictable, or is known to experience large peaks at various intervals.
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What is the difference between using the local instance store and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) for the root device?
When you launch your Amazon EC2 instances you have the ability to store your root device data on Amazon EBS or the local instance store. By using Amazon EBS, data on the root device will persist independently from the lifetime of the instance. This enables you to stop and restart the instance at a subsequent time, which is similar to shutting down your laptop and restarting it when you need it again.
Alternatively, the local instance store only persists during the life of the instance. This is an inexpensive way to launch instances where data is not stored to the root device. For example, some customers use this option to run large web sites where each instance is a clone to handle web traffic.
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Is Amazon EC2 used in conjunction with Amazon S3?
Yes, Amazon EC2 is used jointly with Amazon S3 for instances with root devices backed by local instance storage. By using Amazon S3, developers have access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. In order to execute systems in the Amazon EC2 environment, developers use the tools provided to load their AMIs into Amazon S3 and to move them between Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2.
Amazon EC2 provides cheap, scalable compute in the cloud while Amazon S3 allows users to store their data reliably.
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How many instances can I run in Amazon EC2?
You are limited to running On-Demand Instances per your vCPU-based On-Demand Instance limit, purchasing 20 Reserved Instances, and requesting Spot Instances per your dynamic Spot limit per region. New AWS accounts may start with limits that are lower than the limits described here.
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How quickly can I scale my EC2 capacity both up and down?
Amazon EC2 provides a truly elastic computing environment. Amazon EC2 enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. You can commission one, hundreds or even thousands of server instances simultaneously. When you need more instances, you simply call RunInstances, and Amazon EC2 will typically set up your new instances in a matter of minutes. Of course, because this is all controlled with web service APIs, your application can automatically scale itself up and down depending on its needs.
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What operating system environments are supported on EC2?
Amazon EC2 currently supports a variety of operating systems including: Amazon Linux, Ubuntu, Windows Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, openSUSE Leap, Fedora, Fedora CoreOS, Debian, CentOS, Gentoo Linux, Oracle Linux, and FreeBSD. AWS is always looking for ways to expand it to other platforms.
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Does Amazon EC2 use ECC memory?
ECC memory is necessary for server infrastructure, and all the hardware underlying Amazon EC2 uses ECC memory.
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How is EC2 service different than a plain hosting service?
Traditional hosting services generally provide a pre-configured resource for a fixed amount of time and at a predetermined cost. Amazon EC2 differs fundamentally in the flexibility, control and significant cost savings it offers developers, allowing them to treat Amazon EC2 as their own personal data center with the benefit of Amazon.com’s robust infrastructure.
When computing requirements unexpectedly change (up or down), Amazon EC2 can instantly respond, meaning that developers have the ability to control how many resources are in use at any given point in time. In contrast, traditional hosting services generally provide a fixed number of resources for a fixed amount of time, meaning that users have a limited ability to easily respond when their usage is rapidly changing, unpredictable, or is known to experience large peaks at various intervals.
Secondly, many hosting services don’t provide full control over the compute resources being provided. Using Amazon EC2, developers can choose not only to initiate or shut down instances at any time, they can completely customize the configuration of their instances to suit their needs – and change it at any time. Most hosting services cater more towards groups of users with similar system requirements, and so offer limited ability to change these.
Finally, with Amazon EC2 developers enjoy the benefit of paying only for their actual resource consumption – and at very low rates. Most hosting services require users to pay a fixed, up-front fee irrespective of their actual computing power used, and so users risk overbuying resources to compensate for the inability to quickly scale up resources within a short time frame.
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Can I get a history of all EC2 API calls made on my account for security analysis and operational troubleshooting purposes?
Yes. To receive a history of all EC2 API calls (including VPC and EBS) made on your account, you simply turn on CloudTrail in the AWS Management Console. For more information, visit the CloudTrail home page.
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AWS EC2 FAQs
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What is Amazon DynamoDB?
DynamoDB is a fast and flexible nonrelational database service for any scale. DynamoDB enables customers to offload the administrative burdens of operating and scaling distributed databases to AWS so that they don’t have to worry about hardware provisioning, setup and configuration, throughput capacity planning, replication, software patching, or cluster scaling.
Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed proprietary NoSQL database service that supports key-value and document data structures and is offered by Amazon.com as part of the Amazon Web Services portfolio. DynamoDB exposes a similar data model to and derives its name from Dynamo, but has a different underlying implementation. Dynamo had a multi-master design requiring the client to resolve version conflicts and DynamoDB uses synchronous replication across multiple datacenters for high durability and availability.
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Amazon DynamoDB main charateristics:
- Fully Managed
- Fast, consistent Performance
- Fine-grained access control
- Flexible
Amazon DynamoDB is a low-latency NoSQL database.
DynamoDB consists of Tables, Items, and Attributes
DynamoDb supports both document and key-value data models
DynamoDB Supported documents formats are JSON, HTML, XML
DynamoDB has 2 types of Primary Keys: Partition Key and combination of Partition Key + Sort Key (Composite Key)
DynamoDB has 2 consistency models: Strongly Consistent / Eventually Consistent
DynamoDB Access is controlled using IAM policies.
DynamoDB has fine grained access control using IAM Condition parameter dynamodb:LeadingKeys to allow users to access only the items where the partition key vakue matches their user ID.
DynamoDB Indexes enable fast queries on specific data columns
DynamoDB indexes give you a different view of your data based on alternative Partition / Sort Keys.
DynamoDB Local Secondary indexes must be created when you create your table, they have same partition Key as your table, and they have a different Sort Key.
DynamoDB Global Secondary Index an be created at any time: at table creation or after. They have a different partition Key as your table and a different sort key as your table.
A DynamoDB query operation finds items in a table using only the primary Key attribute: You provide the Primary Key name and a distinct value to search for.
A DynamoDB Scan operation examines every item in the table. By default, it return data attributes.
DynamoDB Query operation is generally more efficient than a Scan.
With DynamoDB, you can reduce the impact of a query or scan by setting a smaller page size which uses fewer read operations.
To optimize DynamoDB performance, isolate scan operations to specific tables and segregate them from your mission-critical traffic.
To optimize DynamoDB performance, try Parallel scans rather than the default sequential scan.
To optimize DynamoDB performance: Avoid using scan operations if you can: design tables in a way that you can use Query, Get, or BatchGetItems APIs.
When you scan your table in Amazon DynamoDB, you should follow the DynamoDB best practices for avoiding sudden bursts of read activity.
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What does DynamoDB manage on my behalf?
DynamoDB takes away one of the main stumbling blocks of scaling databases: the management of database software and the provisioning of the hardware needed to run it. You can deploy a nonrelational database in a matter of minutes. DynamoDB automatically scales throughput capacity to meet workload demands, and partitions and repartitions your data as your table size grows. Also, DynamoDB synchronously replicates data across three facilities in an AWS Region, giving you high availability and data durability.
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What is the consistency model of DynamoDB?
When reading data from DynamoDB, users can specify whether they want the read to be eventually consistent or strongly consistent:
- Eventually consistent reads (the default) – The eventual consistency option maximizes your read throughput. However, an eventually consistent read might not reflect the results of a recently completed write. All copies of data usually reach consistency within a second. Repeating a read after a short time should return the updated data.
- Strongly consistent reads — In addition to eventual consistency, DynamoDB also gives you the flexibility and control to request a strongly consistent read if your application, or an element of your application, requires it. A strongly consistent read returns a result that reflects all writes that received a successful response before the read.
- ACID transactions – DynamoDB transactions provide developers atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability (ACID) across one or more tables within a single AWS account and region. You can use transactions when building applications that require coordinated inserts, deletes, or updates to multiple items as part of a single logical business operation.
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What kind of query functionality does DynamoDB support?
DynamoDB supports GET/PUT operations by using a user-defined primary key. The primary key is the only required attribute for items in a table. You specify the primary key when you create a table, and it uniquely identifies each item. DynamoDB also provides flexible querying by letting you query on nonprimary key attributes using global secondary indexes and local secondary indexes.
A primary key can be either a single-attribute partition key or a composite partition-sort key. A single-attribute partition key could be, for example, UserID. Such a single attribute partition key would allow you to quickly read and write data for an item associated with a given user ID.
DynamoDB indexes a composite partition-sort key as a partition key element and a sort key element. This multipart key maintains a hierarchy between the first and second element values. For example, a composite partition-sort key could be a combination of UserID (partition) and Timestamp (sort). Holding the partition key element constant, you can search across the sort key element to retrieve items. Such searching would allow you to use the Query API to, for example, retrieve all items for a single UserID across a range of time stamps.
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How to update and query data items with DynamoDB?
After you have created a table using the DynamoDB console or CreateTable API, you can use the PutItem or BatchWriteItem APIs to insert items. Then, you can use the GetItem, BatchGetItem, or, if composite primary keys are enabled and in use in your table, the Query API to retrieve the items you added to the table.
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Can DynamoDB be used by applications running on any operating system?
Yes. DynamoDB is a fully managed cloud service that you access via API. Applications running on any operating system (such as Linux, Windows, iOS, Android, Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX) can use DynamoDB. We recommend using the AWS SDKs to get started with DynamoDB.
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What is the maximum throughput I can provision for a single DynamoDB table?
Maximum throughput per DynamoDB table is practically unlimited. For information about the limits in place, see Limits in DynamoDB.
DynamoDB is designed to scale without limits. However, if you want to exceed throughput rates of 10,000 write capacity units or 10,000 read capacity units for an individual table, you must Contact AWS to increase it.
If you want to provision more than 20,000 write capacity units or 20,000 read capacity units from a single subscriber account, you must first contact AWS to request a limit increase.
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What is the minimum throughput I can provision for a single DynamoDB table?
The smallest provisioned throughput you can request is 1 write capacity unit and 1 read capacity unit for both auto scaling and manual throughput provisioning. Such provisioning falls within the free tier which allows for 25 units of write capacity and 25 units of read capacity. The free tier applies at the account level, not the table level. In other words, if you add up the provisioned capacity of all your tables, and if the total capacity is no more than 25 units of write capacity and 25 units of read capacity, your provisioned capacity would fall into the free tier.
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How to increase DynamoDB performance using DAX?
DAX is a DynamoDB-compatible caching service that enables you to benefit from fast in-memory performance for demanding applications.
- As an in-memory cache, DAX reduces the response times of eventually-consistent read workloads by an order of magnitude, from single-digit milliseconds to microseconds
- DAX improves response times for Eventually Consistent reads only.
- With DAX, you point your API calls to the DAX cluster instead of your table.
- If the item you are querying is on the cache, DAX will return it; otherwise, it will perform and Eventually Consistent GetItem operation to your DynamoDB table.
- DAX reduces operational and application complexity by providing a managed service that is API compatible with Amazon DynamoDB, and thus requires only minimal functional changes to use with an existing application.
- DAX is not suitable for write-intensive applications or applications that require Strongly Consistent reads.
- For read-heavy or bursty workloads, DAX provides increased throughput and potential operational cost savings by reducing the need to over-provision read capacity units. This is especially beneficial for applications that require repeated reads for individual keys.
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How to increase DynamoDB performance using ElastiCache?
- ElastiCache is an In-memory cache that sits between your application and database
- 2 different caching strategies: Lazy loading and Write Through: Lazy loading only caches the data when it is requested
- Elasticache Node failures are not fatal, just lots of cache misses
- Avoid stale data by implementing a TTL.
- Write-Through strategy writes data into cache whenever there is a change to the database. Data is never stale
- Write-Through penalty: Each write involves a write to the cache. Elasticache node failure means that data is missing until added or updated in the database.
- Elasticache is wasted resources if most of the data is never used.
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AWS DYNAMODB FAQs
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What is Amazon RDS?
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a managed service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity, while managing time-consuming database administration tasks, freeing you up to focus on your applications and business.
Amazon RDS gives you access to the capabilities of a familiar MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SQL Server, or PostgreSQL database. This means that the code, applications, and tools you already use today with your existing databases should work seamlessly with Amazon RDS. Amazon RDS can automatically back up your database and keep your database software up to date with the latest version. You benefit from the flexibility of being able to easily scale the compute resources or storage capacity associated with your relational database instance. In addition, Amazon RDS makes it easy to use replication to enhance database availability, improve data durability, or scale beyond the capacity constraints of a single database instance for read-heavy database workloads. As with all Amazon Web Services, there are no up-front investments required, and you pay only for the resources you use.
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Which relational database engines does Amazon RDS support?
Amazon RDS supports Amazon Aurora, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SQL Server, and PostgreSQL database engines.
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What does Amazon RDS manage on your behalf?
Amazon RDS manages the work involved in setting up a relational database: from provisioning the infrastructure capacity you request to installing the database software. Once your database is up and running, Amazon RDS automates common administrative tasks such as performing backups and patching the software that powers your database. With optional Multi-AZ deployments, Amazon RDS also manages synchronous data replication across Availability Zones with automatic failover.
Since Amazon RDS provides native database access, you interact with the relational database software as you normally would. This means you're still responsible for managing the database settings that are specific to your application. You'll need to build the relational schema that best fits your use case and are responsible for any performance tuning to optimize your database for your application’s workflow.
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When to use Amazon RDS vs. Amazon EC2 Relational Database AMIs?
Amazon Web Services provides a number of database alternatives for developers. Amazon RDS enables you to run a fully featured relational database while offloading database administration. Using one of our many relational database AMIs on Amazon EC2 allows you to manage your own relational database in the cloud. There are important differences between these alternatives that may make one more appropriate for your use case. See Cloud Databases with AWS for guidance on which solution is best for you.
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What is a database instance (DB instance)?
You can think of a DB instance as a database environment in the cloud with the compute and storage resources you specify. You can create and delete DB instances, define/refine infrastructure attributes of your DB instance(s), and control access and security via the AWS Management Console, Amazon RDS APIs, and AWS Command Line Interface. You can run one or more DB instances, and each DB instance can support one or more databases or database schemas, depending on engine type.
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How many DB instances can I run with Amazon RDS?
By default, customers are allowed to have up to a total of 40 Amazon RDS DB instances. Of those 40, up to 10 can be Oracle or SQL Server DB instances under the "License Included" model. All 40 can be used for Amazon Aurora, MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL and Oracle under the "BYOL" model. Note that RDS for SQL Server has a limit of up to 100 databases on a single DB instance to learn more see the Amazon RDS SQL Server User Guide.
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How many databases or schemas can I run within a DB instance in Amazon RDS?
RDS for Amazon Aurora: No limit imposed by software
RDS for MySQL: No limit imposed by software
RDS for MariaDB: No limit imposed by software
RDS for Oracle: 1 database per instance; no limit on number of schemas per database imposed by software
RDS for SQL Server: Up to 100 databases per instance see here: Amazon RDS SQL Server User Guide
RDS for PostgreSQL: No limit imposed by software
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How to import data into an Amazon RDS DB instance in Amazon RDS?
There are a number of simple ways to import data into Amazon RDS, such as with the mysqldump or mysqlimport utilities for MySQL; Data Pump, import/export or SQL Loader for Oracle; Import/Export wizard, full backup files (.bak files) or Bulk Copy Program (BCP) for SQL Server; or pg_dump for PostgreSQL.
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How to access my running DB instance in Amazon RDS?
Once your DB instance is available, you can retrieve its endpoint via the DB instance description in the AWS Management Console, DescribeDBInstances API or describe-db-instances command. Using this endpoint you can construct the connection string required to connect directly with your DB instance using your favorite database tool or programming language. In order to allow network requests to your running DB instance, you will need to authorize access.
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What to do if my queries seem to be running slowly in Amazon RDS?
- For production databases enable Enhanced Monitoring, which provides access to over 50 CPU, memory, file system, and disk I/O metrics. You can enable these features on a per-instance basis and you can choose the granularity (all the way down to 1 second). High levels of CPU utilization can reduce query performance and in this case you may want to consider scaling your DB instance class.
- If you are using RDS for MySQL or MariaDB, you can access the slow query logs for your database to determine if there are slow-running SQL queries and, if so, the performance characteristics of each. You could set the "slow_query_log" DB Parameter and query the mysql.slow_log table to review the slow-running SQL queries.
- If you are using RDS for Oracle, you can use the Oracle trace file data to identify slow queries.
- If you're using RDS for SQL Server, you can use the client side SQL Server traces to identify slow queries.
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AWS RDS FAQs
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What is AWS Lambda?
AWS Lambda lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. You pay only for the compute time you consume - there is no charge when your code is not running. With Lambda, you can run code for virtually any type of application or backend service - all with zero administration. Just upload your code and Lambda takes care of everything required to run and scale your code with high availability. You can set up your code to automatically trigger from other AWS services or call it directly from any web or mobile app.
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What events can trigger an AWS Lambda function?
AWS Lambda integrates with other AWS services to invoke functions. You can configure triggers to invoke a function in response to resource lifecycle events, respond to incoming HTTP requests, consume events from a queue, or run on a schedule.
Each service that integrates with Lambda sends data to your function in JSON as an event. The structure of the event document is different for each event type, and contains data about the resource or request that triggered the function. Lambda runtimes convert the event into an object and pass it to your function.
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Lambda main characteristics in images
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AWS LAMBDA FAQs
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What is Amazon Elastic Container Service?
Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) is a highly scalable, high performance container management service that supports Docker containers and allows you to easily run applications on a managed cluster of Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon ECS eliminates the need for you to install, operate, and scale your own cluster management infrastructure. With simple API calls, you can launch and stop container-enabled applications, query the complete state of your cluster, and access many familiar features like security groups, Elastic Load Balancing, EBS volumes and IAM roles. You can use Amazon ECS to schedule the placement of containers across your cluster based on your resource needs and availability requirements. You can also integrate your own scheduler or third-party schedulers to meet business or application specific requirements.
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Why should I use Amazon ECS?
Amazon ECS makes it easy to use containers as a building block for your applications by eliminating the need for you to install, operate, and scale your own cluster management infrastructure. Amazon ECS lets you schedule long-running applications, services, and batch processes using Docker containers. Amazon ECS maintains application availability and allows you to scale your containers up or down to meet your application's capacity requirements. Amazon ECS is integrated with familiar features like Elastic Load Balancing, EBS volumes, VPC, and IAM. Simple APIs let you integrate and use your own schedulers or connect Amazon ECS into your existing software delivery process.
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What is the pricing for Amazon ECS?
There is no additional charge for Amazon ECS. You pay for AWS resources (e.g. EC2 instances or EBS volumes) you create to store and run your application. You only pay for what you use, as you use it; there are no minimum fees and no upfront commitments.
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How is Amazon ECS different from AWS Elastic Beanstalk?
AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an application management platform that helps customers easily deploy and scale web applications and services. It keeps the provisioning of building blocks (e.g., EC2, RDS, Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, CloudWatch), deployment of applications, and health monitoring abstracted from the user so they can just focus on writing code. You simply specify which container images are to be deployed, the CPU and memory requirements, the port mappings, and the container links.
Elastic Beanstalk will automatically handle all the details such as provisioning an Amazon ECS cluster, balancing load, auto-scaling, monitoring, and placing your containers across your cluster. Elastic Beanstalk is ideal if you want to leverage the benefits of containers but just want the simplicity of deploying applications from development to production by uploading a container image. You can work with Amazon ECS directly if you want more fine-grained control for custom application architectures.
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How is Amazon ECS different from AWS Lambda?
Amazon ECS is a highly scalable Docker container management service that allows you to run and manage distributed applications that run in Docker containers. AWS Lambda is an event-driven task compute service that runs your code in response to “events” such as changes in data, website clicks, or messages from other AWS services without you having to manage any compute infrastructure.
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Does Amazon ECS support any other container types?
No. Docker is the only container platform supported by Amazon ECS at this time.
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AWS ECS FAQs
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What is AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)?
You can use AWS IAM to securely control individual and group access to your AWS resources. You can create and manage user identities ("IAM users") and grant permissions for those IAM users to access your resources. You can also grant permissions for users outside of AWS ( federated users).
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What problems does IAM solve?
IAM makes it easy to provide multiple users secure access to your AWS resources. IAM enables you to:
- Manage IAM users and their access: You can create users in AWS's identity management system, assign users individual security credentials (such as access keys, passwords, multi-factor authentication devices), or request temporary security credentials to provide users access to AWS services and resources. You can specify permissions to control which operations a user can perform.
- Manage access for federated users: You can request security credentials with configurable expirations for users who you manage in your corporate directory, allowing you to provide your employees and applications secure access to resources in your AWS account without creating an IAM user account for them. You specify the permissions for these security credentials to control which operations a user can perform.
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Who can use IAM?
Any AWS customer can use IAM. The service is offered at no additional charge. You will be charged only for the use of other AWS services by your users.
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What is a user?
A user is a unique identity recognized by AWS services and applications. Similar to a login user in an operating system like Windows or UNIX, a user has a unique name and can identify itself using familiar security credentials such as a password or access key. A user can be an individual, system, or application requiring access to AWS services. IAM supports users (referred to as "IAM users") managed in AWS's identity management system, and it also enables you to grant access to AWS resources for users managed outside of AWS in your corporate directory (referred to as "federated users").
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What can a user do?
A user can place requests to web services such as Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2. A user's ability to access web service APIs is under the control and responsibility of the AWS account under which it is defined. You can permit a user to access any or all of the AWS services that have been integrated with IAM and to which the AWS account has subscribed. If permitted, a user has access to all of the resources under the AWS account. In addition, if the AWS account has access to resources from a different AWS account, its users may be able to access data under those AWS accounts. Any AWS resources created by a user are under control of and paid for by its AWS account. A user cannot independently subscribe to AWS services or control resources.
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How do users call AWS services?
Users can make requests to AWS services using security credentials. Explicit permissions govern a user's ability to call AWS services. By default, users have no ability to call service APIs on behalf of the account.
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AWS IAM FAQs
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What makes a service or application serverless?
The concept of serverless were founded on the following tenets: no server management, pay-for-value services, continuous scaling, and built-in fault tolerance. When adopting a serverless service or building a serverless architecture, these ideals are fundamental to serverless strategy.
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What is a serverless-first strategy?
A serverless-first strategy is the organizational dedication to prioritizing the tenets of serverless in your applications, operations, and development cycles. A serverless developer or serverless-first company works to build using these tenets first and foremost, but knows that it doesn’t work for every workload. Non-serverless technologies are incorporated as supporting architecture when needed.
2
As a developer, why should I use serverless?
A serverless approach will allow you to minimize undifferentiated work around managing servers, infrastructure, and the parts of the application that add less value to your customers. Serverless can make it easier to deliver new features in applications, launch experiments, and improve your team delivery velocity, while also providing a pay-for-value cost model.
3
What is Function as a Service (FaaS)?
FaaS is the compute layer of a serverless architecture, which is AWS Lambda. In serverless applications, Lambda is typically used to connect services, transform data, and implement business logic. Most serverless application consist of more than Lambda, so FaaS is typically only one part of a serverless workload.
4
How does serverless lower costs?
If you use on-premise servers or EC2 instances, you are likely not using 100% of the compute capacity at all times. Many customers only use 10-20% of the available capacity in their EC2 fleet at any point in time. This average is also affected by high availability and Disaster Recovery requirements, which typically result in idle servers waiting for traffic from failovers. In the on-demand AWS Lambda compute model, you pay per request and by duration of time. Additionally, serverless architectures can lower the overall Total Cost of Ownership since many of the networking, security, and DevOps management tasks are included in the cost of the service.
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How do I maintain the security posture I need?
AWS has a shared security model where AWS is responsible for security of the cloud and customers are responsible for security in the cloud. With serverless, AWS manages many additional layers of infrastructure, including operating systems and networking. If you follow the principles of least privilege and the best practices of securing a serverless application, you can secure each resource with granular permissions using familiar tools like AWS IAM, which can help give you a robust security posture for your serverless applications.
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What is an event-driven architecture?
An event-driven architecture uses messages, or events, to trigger and communicate between decoupled services and is common in modern applications built with microservices. Events contain information about a change in a system’s state, such as a new order or a completed payment. Focusing on events helps avoid tight-coupling and can promote greater flexibility and extensibility for applications, which in turn helps improve feature velocity and agility for your developer teams.
7
What is application integration?
Application integration on AWS is a suite of services that enable communication between decoupled components within microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications.
8
What is messaging in the context of serverless applications?
Event-driven architectures communicate across services using messages. Messages are lightweight JSON objects that typically contain event details. AWS provides Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, and Amazon EventBridge as serverless messaging services to help with routing messages at scale. These services provide queues, message fan-out capabilities, event buses, content filtering, and other powerful features.
9
What is AWS SAM?
The AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) is a model to define serverless applications. AWS SAM is natively supported by AWS CloudFormation and provides a simplified way of defining the Amazon API Gateway APIs, AWS Lambda functions, and Amazon DynamoDB.
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Serverless characteristics?
11
How to automate building, testing, and deploying serverless applications.
You can use AWS CodePipeline with the AWS Serverless Application Model to automate building, testing, and deploying serverless applications. AWS CodeBuild integrates with CodePipeline to provide automated builds. You can use AWS CodeDeploy to gradually roll out and test new Lambda function versions.
12
How to monitor and troubleshoot the performance of your serverless applications?
You can monitor and troubleshoot the performance of your serverless applications and AWS Lambda functions with AWS services and third-party tools. Amazon CloudWatch helps you see real-time reporting metrics and logs for your serverless applications. You can use AWS X-Ray to debug and trace your serverless applications and AWS Lambda.
13
What is AWS Serverless Application Repository
The AWS Serverless Application Repository is a managed repository for serverless applications. It enables teams, organizations, and individual developers to store and share reusable applications, and easily assemble and deploy serverless architectures in powerful new ways. Using the Serverless Application Repository, you don't need to clone, build, package, or publish source code to AWS before deploying it. Instead, you can use pre-built applications from the Serverless Application Repository in your serverless architectures, helping you and your teams reduce duplicated work, ensure organizational best practices, and get to market faster.
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Who can publish a serverless application to the Serverless Application Repository?
Anyone with an AWS account can publish a serverless application to the Serverless Application Repository. Applications can be privately shared with specific AWS accounts. Applications that are shared publicly include a link to the application's source code so others can view what the application does and how it works.
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What kinds of applications are available in the AWS Serverless Application Repository?
The AWS Serverless Application Repository includes applications for Alexa Skills, chatbots, data processing, IoT, real time stream processing, web and mobile back-ends, social media trend analysis, image resizing, and more from publishers on AWS.
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AWS Serverless Application Repository and Githhub?
The AWS Serverless Application Repository enables developers to publish serverless applications developed in a GitHub repository. Using AWS CodePipeline to link a GitHub source with the AWS Serverless Application Repository can make the publishing process even easier, and the process can be set up in minutes.
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What two arguments does a Python Lambda handler function require?
Event, Context
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AWS SERVERLESS FAQs
0
What is Amazon API Gateway?
Amazon API Gateway is a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, you can create an API that acts as a “front door” for applications to access data, business logic, or functionality from your back-end services, such as applications running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) or AWS Elastic Beanstalk, code running on AWS Lambda, or any web application. Amazon API Gateway handles all of the tasks involved in accepting and processing up to hundreds of thousands of concurrent API calls, including traffic management, authorization and access control, monitoring, and API version management. Amazon API Gateway has no minimum fees or startup costs. For HTTP APIs and REST APIs, you pay only for the API calls you receive and the amount of data transferred out. For WebSocket APIs, you pay only for messages sent and received and for the time a user/device is connected to the WebSocket API.
1
Why use Amazon API Gateway?
Amazon API Gateway provides developers with a simple, flexible, fully managed, pay-as-you-go service that handles all aspects of creating and operating robust APIs for application back ends. With API Gateway, you can launch new services faster and with reduced investment so you can focus on building your core business services. API Gateway was built to help you with several aspects of creating and managing APIs:
1- Metering: API Gateway helps you define plans that meter and restrict third-party developer access to your APIs. You can define a set of plans, configure throttling, and quota limits on a per API key basis. API Gateway automatically meters traffic to your APIs and lets you extract utilization data for each API key.
2- Security: API Gateway provides you with multiple tools to authorize access to your APIs and control service operation access. API Gateway allows you to leverage AWS administration and security tools, such as AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Amazon Cognito, to authorize access to your APIs. API Gateway can verify signed API calls on your behalf using the same methodology AWS uses for its own APIs. Using custom authorizers written as AWS Lambda functions, API Gateway can also help you verify incoming bearer tokens, removing authorization concerns from your backend code.
3- Resiliency: API Gateway helps you manage traffic with throttling so that backend operations can withstand traffic spikes. API Gateway also helps you improve the performance of your APIs and the latency your end users experience by caching the output of API calls to avoid calling your backend every time.
4- Operations Monitoring: After an API is published and in use, API Gateway provides you with a metrics dashboard to monitor calls to your services. The API Gateway dashboard, through integration with Amazon CloudWatch, provides you with backend performance metrics covering API calls, latency data and error rates. You can enable detailed metrics for each method in your APIs and also receive error, access or debug logs in CloudWatch Logs.
5- Lifecycle Management: After an API has been published, you often need to build and test new versions that enhance or add new functionality. API Gateway lets you operate multiple API versions and multiple stages for each version simultaneously so that existing applications can continue to call previous versions after new API versions are published.
6- Desigend for developers: API Gateway allows you to quickly create APIs and assign static content for their responses to reduce cross-team development effort and time-to-market for your applications. Teams who depend on your APIs can begin development while you build your backend processes.
7- Real-Time Two-Way Communication: Build real-time two-way communication applications such as chat apps, streaming dashboards, and notifications without having to run or manage any servers. API Gateway maintains a persistent connection between connected users and enables message transfer between them.
2
What API types are supported by Amazon API Gateway?
Amazon API Gateway offers two options to create RESTful APIs, HTTP APIs and REST APIs, as well as an option to create WebSocket APIs.
- HTTP API: HTTP APIs are optimized for building APIs that proxy to AWS Lambda functions or HTTP backends, making them ideal for serverless workloads. They do not currently offer API management functionality.
- REST API: REST APIs offer API proxy functionality and API management features in a single solution. REST APIs offer API management features such as usage plans, API keys, publishing, and monetizing APIs.
- WebSocket API: WebSocket APIs maintain a persistent connection between connected clients to enable real-time message communication. With WebSocket APIs in API Gateway, you can define backend integrations with AWS Lambda functions, Amazon Kinesis, or any HTTP endpoint to be invoked when messages are received from the connected clients.
2
When creating RESTful APIs, when should I use HTTP APIs and when should I use REST APIs?
You can build RESTful APIs using both HTTP APIs and REST APIs in Amazon API Gateway.
HTTP APIs are optimized for building APIs that proxy to AWS Lambda functions or HTTP backends, making them ideal for serverless workloads. HTTP APIs are a cheaper and faster alternative to REST APIs, but they do not currently support API management functionality. REST APIs are intended for APIs that require API proxy functionality and API management features in a single solution.
HTTP APIs are ideal for:
1- Building proxy APIs for AWS Lambda or any HTTP endpoint
2- Building modern APIs that are equipped with OIDC and OAuth 2 authorization
3- Workloads that are likely to grow very large
4- APIs for latency sensitive workloads
REST APIs are ideal for:
1- Customers looking to pay a single price point for an all-inclusive set of features needed to build, manage, and publish their APIs.
3
Can I create HTTPS endpoints ith API Gateway?
Yes, all of the APIs created with Amazon API Gateway expose HTTPS endpoints only. Amazon API Gateway does not support unencrypted (HTTP) endpoints. By default, Amazon API Gateway assigns an internal domain to the API that automatically uses the Amazon API Gateway certificate. When configuring your APIs to run under a custom domain name, you can provide your own certificate for the domain.
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What data types can I use with Amazon API Gateway ?
APIs built on Amazon API Gateway can accept any payloads sent over HTTPS for HTTP APIs, REST APIs, and WebSocket APIs. Typical data formats include JSON, XML, query string parameters, and request headers. You can declare any content type for your APIs responses, and then use the transform templates to change the back-end response into your desired format.
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With what backends can Amazon API Gateway communicate?
Amazon API Gateway can execute AWS Lambda functions in your account, start AWS Step Functions state machines, or call HTTP endpoints hosted on AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon EC2, and also non-AWS hosted HTTP based operations that are accessible via the public Internet.API Gateway also allows you to specify a mapping template to generate static content to be returned, helping you mock your APIs before the backend is ready. You can also integrate API Gateway with other AWS services directly – for example, you could expose an API method in API Gateway that sends data directly to Amazon Kinesis.
6
For which client platforms can Amazon API Gateway generate SDKs?
API Gateway generates custom SDKs for mobile app development with Android and iOS (Swift and Objective-C), and for web app development with JavaScript. API Gateway also supports generating SDKs for Ruby and Java. Once an API and its models are defined in API Gateway, you can use the AWS console or the API Gateway APIs to generate and download a client SDK. Client SDKs are only generated for REST APIs in Amazon API Gateway.
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What can I manage through the Amazon API Gateway console?
Through the Amazon API Gateway console, you can define the REST API and its associated resources and methods, manage the API lifecycle, generate client SDKs and view API metrics. You can also use the API Gateway console to define your APIs’ usage plans, manage developers’ API keys, and configure throttling and quota limits. All of the same actions are available through the API Gateway APIs.
8
What is the Amazon API Gateway API lifecycle?
With Amazon API Gateway, each REST API can have multiple stages. Stages are meant to help with the development lifecycle of an API -- for example, after you’ve built your APIs and you deploy them to a development stage, or when you are ready for production, you can deploy them to a production stage.
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What is a resource?
A resource is a typed object that is part of your API’s domain. Each resource may have associated a data model, relationships to other resources, and can respond to different methods.You can also define resources as variables to intercept requests to multiple child resources.
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What is a method?
Each resource within a REST API can support one or more of the standard HTTP methods. You define which verbs should be supported for each resource (GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE, HEAD, OPTIONS) and their implementation. For example, a GET to the cars resource should return a list of cars. To connect all methods within a resource to a single backend endpoint, API Gateway also supports a special “ANY” method.
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What is a usage plan?
Usage plans help you declare plans for third-party developers that restrict access only to certain APIs, define throttling and request quota limits, and associate them with API keys. You can also extract utilization data on an per-API key basis to analyze API usage and generate billing documents. For example, you can create a basic, professional, and enterprise plans – you can configure the basic usage plan to only allow 1,000 requests per day and a maximum of 5 requests per second (RPS).
12
What is a stage?
In Amazon API Gateway, stages are similar to tags. They define the path through which the deployment is accessible. For example, you can define a development stage and deploy your cars API to it. The resource will be accessible at https://www.myapi.com/dev/cars. You can also set up custom domain names to point directly to a stage, so that you don’t have to use the additional path parameter. For example, if you pointed myapi.com directly to the development stage, you could access your cars resource at https://www.myapi.com/cars. Stages can be configured using variables that can be accessed from your API configuration or mapping templates.
13
What are stage variables?
Stage variables let you define key/value pairs of configuration values associated with a stage. These values, similarly to environment variables, can be used in your API configuration. For example, you could define the HTTP endpoint for your method integration as a stage variable, and use the variable in your API configuration instead of hardcoding the endpoint – this allows you to use a different endpoint for each stage (e.g. dev, beta, prod) with the same API configuration. Stage variables are also accessible in the mapping templates and can be used to pass configuration parameters to your Lambda or HTTP backend.
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What is a Resource Policy?
A Resource Policy is a JSON policy document that you attach to an API to control whether a specified principal (typically an IAM user or role) can invoke the API. You can use a Resource Policy to enable users from a different AWS account to securely access your API or to allow the API to be invoked only from specified source IP address ranges or CIDR blocks. Resource Policies can be used with REST APIs in Amazon API Gateway.
15
Can I use my Swagger API definitions?
Yes. You can use our open source Swagger importer tool to import your Swagger API definitions into Amazon API Gateway. With the Swagger importer tool you can create and deploy new APIs as well as update existing ones.
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Can I restrict access to private APIs to a specific Amazon VPC or VPC endpoint?
Yes, you can apply a Resource Policy to an API to restrict access to a specific Amazon VPC or VPC endpoint. You can also give an Amazon VPC or VPC endpoint from a different account access to the Private API using a Resource Policy.
17
How do I authorize access to my APIs?
With Amazon API Gateway, you can optionally set your API methods to require authorization. When setting up a method to require authorization you can leverage AWS Signature Version 4 or Lambda authorizers to support your own bearer token auth strategy.
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What is a Lambda authorizer?
Lambda authorizers are AWS Lambda functions. With custom request authorizers, you will be able to authorize access to APIs using a bearer token auth strategy such as OAuth. When an API is called, API Gateway checks if a Lambda authorizer is configured, API Gateway then calls the Lambda function with the incoming authorization token. You can use Lambda to implement various authorization strategies (e.g. JWT verification, OAuth provider callout) that return IAM policies which are used to authorize the request. If the policy returned by the authorizer is valid, API Gateway will cache the policy associated with the incoming token for up to 1 hour.
19
Can Amazon API Gateway generate API keys for distribution to third-party developers?
Yes. API Gateway can generate API keys and associate them with an usage plan. Calls received from each API key are monitored and included in the Amazon CloudWatch Logs you can enable for each stage. However, we do not recommend you use API keys for authorization. You should use API keys to monitor usage by third-party developers and leverage a stronger mechanism for authorization, such as signed API calls or OAuth.
20
How can I address or prevent API threats or abuse?
API Gateway supports throttling settings for each method or route in your APIs. You can set a standard rate limit and a burst rate limit per second for each method in your REST APIs and each route in WebSocket APIs. Further, API Gateway automatically protects your backend systems from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, whether attacked with counterfeit requests (Layer 7) or SYN floods (Layer 3).
21
Can I verify that it is API Gateway calling my backend?
Yes. Amazon API Gateway can generate a client-side SSL certificate and make the public key of that certificate available to you. Calls to your backend can be made with the generated certificate, and you can verify calls originating from Amazon API Gateway using the public key of the certificate.
22
Can I use AWS CloudTrail with Amazon API Gateway?
Yes. Amazon API Gateway is integrated with AWS CloudTrail to give you a full auditable history of the changes to your REST APIs. All API calls made to the Amazon API Gateway APIs to create, modify, delete, or deploy REST APIs are logged to CloudTrail in your AWS account.
23
How does Amazon API Gateway work with an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)?
In Amazon API Gateway, you can proxy requests to backend HTTP/HTTPS resources running in your Amazon VPC by setting up Private Integrations using VPC Links. Client-side SSL certificates in Amazon API Gateway can be used to verify that requests to your backend systems were sent by API Gateway using the public key of the certificate. You can also create Private APIs in Amazon API Gateway which can only be accessible by resources within your Amazon VPC through Amazon VPC Endpoints.
24
Can I restrict access to private APIs to a specific Amazon VPC or VPC endpoint?
Yes, you can apply a Resource Policy to an API to restrict access to a specific Amazon VPC or VPC endpoint. You can also give an Amazon VPC or VPC endpoint from a different account access to the Private API using a Resource Policy
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Can I configure my REST APIs in API Gateway to use TLS 1.1 or higher ?
If you’re using REST APIs, you can set up a CloudFront distribution with custom SSL certificate in your account and use it with Regional APIs in API Gateway. You can then configure the Security Policy for the CloudFront distribution with TLS 1.1 or higher based on your security and compliance requirements.
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AWS API GATEWAY FAQs
0
What is AWS CodePipeline?
AWS CodePipeline is a continuous delivery service that enables you to model, visualize, and automate the steps required to release your software. With AWS CodePipeline, you model the full release process for building your code, deploying to pre-production environments, testing your application and releasing it to production. AWS CodePipeline then builds, tests, and deploys your application according to the defined workflow every time there is a code change. You can integrate partner tools and your own custom tools into any stage of the release process to form an end-to-end continuous delivery solution.
1
Why should I use AWS CodePipeline?
By automating your build, test, and release processes, AWS CodePipeline enables you to increase the speed and quality of your software updates by running all new changes through a consistent set of quality checks.
2
What is continuous delivery?
Continuous delivery is a software development practice where code changes are automatically built, tested, and prepared for a release to production. AWS CodePipeline is a service that helps you practice continuous delivery.
3
What is a pipeline?
A pipeline is a workflow construct that describes how software changes go through a release process. You define the workflow with a sequence of stages and actions.
4
What is a revision?
A revision is a change made to the source location defined for your pipeline. It can include source code, build output, configuration, or data. A pipeline can have multiple revisions flowing through it at the same time.
5
What is a stage?
A stage is a group of one or more actions. A pipeline can have two or more stages.
6
What is an action?
An action is a task performed on a revision. Pipeline actions occur in a specified order, in serial or in parallel, as determined in the configuration of the stage.
7
What is an artifact?
When an action runs, it acts upon a file or set of files. These files are called artifacts. These artifacts can be worked upon by later actions in the pipeline. For example, a source action will output the latest version of the code as a source artifact, which the build action will read in. Following the compilation, the build action will upload the build output as another artifact, which will be read by the later deployment actions.
8
What is a transition?
The stages in a pipeline are connected by transitions, and are represented by arrows in the AWS CodePipeline console. Revisions that successfully complete the actions in a stage will be automatically sent on to the next stage as indicated by the transition arrow. Transitions can be disabled or enabled between stages.
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How can I practice continuous delivery for my serverless applications and AWS Lambda functions?
You can release updates to your serverless application by including the AWS Serverless Application Model template and its corresponding files in your source code repository. You can use AWS CodeBuild in your pipeline to package your code for deployment. You can then use AWS CloudFormation actions to create a change set and deploy your serverless application. You have the option to extend your workflow with additional steps such as manual approvals or automated tests.
10
How do I receive notifications or alerts for any events in AWS CodePipeline?
You can create notifications for events impacting your pipelines. Notifications will come in the form of Amazon SNS notifications. Each notification will include a status message as well as a link to the resources whose event generated that notification. Notifications has no additional cost; but, you may be charged for other AWS services utilized by notifications, such as Amazon SNS.
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AWS CODE PIPELINE FAQs
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What is AWS CloudFormation?
AWS CloudFormation is a service that gives developers and businesses an easy way to create a collection of related AWS and third-party resources, and provision and manage them in an orderly and predictable fashion.
1
What can developers do with AWS CloudFormation?
Developers can deploy and update compute, database, and many other resources in a simple, declarative style that abstracts away the complexity of specific resource APIs. AWS CloudFormation is designed to allow resource lifecycles to be managed repeatably, predictablp, and safely, while allowing for automatic rollbacks, automated state management, and management of resources across accounts and regions. Recent enhancements and options allow for multiple ways to create resources, including using AWS CDK for coding in higher-level languages, importing existing resources, detecting configuration drift, and a new Registry that makes it easier to create custom types that inherit many core CloudFormation benefits.
2
How is CloudFormation different from AWS Elastic Beanstalk?
These services are designed to complement each other. AWS Elastic Beanstalk provides an environment where you can easily deploy and run applications in the cloud. It is integrated with developer tools and provides a one-stop experience for managing application lifecycle. If your application workloads can be managed as Elastic Beanstalk workloads, you can enjoy a more turn-key experience in creating and updating applications. Behind the scenes, Elastic Beanstalk uses CloudFormation to create and maintain resources. If your application requirements dictate more custom control, the additional functionality of CloudFormation gives you more options to control your workloads.
AWS CloudFormation is a convenient provisioning mechanism for a broad range of AWS and third-party resources. It supports the infrastructure needs of many different types of applications such as existing enterprise applications, legacy applications, applications built using a variety of AWS resources, and container-based solutions (including those built using AWS Elastic Beanstalk).
AWS CloudFormation supports Elastic Beanstalk application environments as one of the AWS resource types. This allows you, for example, to create and manage an AWS Elastic Beanstalk–hosted application along with an RDS database to store the application data. Any other supported AWS resource can be added to the group as well.
3
What new concepts does AWS CloudFormation introduce?
CloudFormation introduces four concepts: A template is a JSON or YAML declarative code file that describes the intended state of all the resources you need to deploy your application. A stack implements and manages the group of resources outlined in your template, and allows the state and dependencies of those resources to be managed together. A change set is a preview of changes that will be executed by stack operations to create, update, or remove resources. A stack set is a group of stacks you manage together that can replicate a group.
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What are the elements of an AWS CloudFormation template?
CloudFormation templates are JSON or YAML-formatted text files comprised of five types of elements:
1. An optional list of template parameters (input values supplied at stack creation time)
2. An optional list of output values (e.g., the complete URL to a web application)
3. An optional list of data tables used to look up static configuration values (e.g., AMI names)
4. The list of AWS resources and their configuration values
5. A template file format version number
Template parameters are used to customize aspects of your template at run time, when the stack is built. For example, the Amazon RDS database size, Amazon EC2 instance types, database and web server port numbers can be passed to AWS CloudFormation when a stack is created. Each parameter can have a default value and description, and may be marked as “NoEcho” to hide the actual value you enter on the screen and in the AWS CloudFormation event logs. When you create an AWS CloudFormation stack, the AWS Management Console will automatically synthesize and present a pop-up dialog form for you to edit parameter values.
Output values are a convenient way to present a stack’s key resources (such as the address of an Elastic Load Balancing load balancer or Amazon RDS database) to the user via the AWS Management Console, or via the command line tools. You can use simple functions to concatenate string literals and the value of attributes associated with the actual AWS resources. A template can also leverage Registry resource types, your own custom private types, your own macros, and retrieving configuration parameters from AWS Secrets Manager and AWS System Manager Parameter Store.
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Can I install software at stack creation time using AWS CloudFormation?
Yes. AWS CloudFormation provides a set of application bootstrapping scripts that enable you to install packages, files, and services on your EC2 instances simply by describing them in your CloudFormation template. For more details and a how-to, see Bootstrapping Applications via AWS CloudFormation.
CloudFormation can also be integrated with Systems Manager to drive and maintain software installations with Systems Manager Automation Documents.
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Can I use AWS CloudFormation with Terraform?
Yes. CloudFormation can bootstrap your Terraform engine on your EC2 instances, and you can use Terraform resource providers to create resources in stacks, leveraging stack state management, dependencies, stabilization and rollback.
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What happens when one of the resources in a stack cannot be created successfully?
By default, the “automatic rollback on error” feature is enabled. This will direct CloudFormation to only create or update all resources in your stack if all individual operations succeed. If they do not, CloudFormation reverts the stack to the last known stable configuration. This is useful when, for example, you accidentally exceed your default limit of Elastic IP addresses, or you don’t have access to an EC2 AMI that you’re trying to run. This feature enables you to rely on the fact that stacks are created either fully or not at all, which simplifies system administration and layered solutions built on top of CloudFormation.
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Can I manage resources created outside of CloudFormation?
Yes! With Resource Import, you can bring an existing resource into AWS CloudFormation management using resource import.
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What is the AWS CloudFormation Registry?
The AWS CloudFormation Registry is a managed service that lets you register, use, and discover AWS and third-party resource types. Third-party resource types must be registered before they can be used to provision resources with AWS CloudFormation templates. Please see Using the AWS CloudFormation registry in our in the documentation for details.
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What are resource types in AWS CloudFormation?
A resource provider is a set of resource types with specifications and handlers that control the lifecycle of underlying resources via create, read, update, delete, and list operations. You can use resource providers to model and provision resources using CloudFormation. For example, AWS::EC2::Instance is a resource type from the Amazon EC2 provider. You can use this type to model and provision an Amazon EC2 instance using CloudFormation. Using the CloudFormation Registry, you can build and use resource providers to model and provision third-party resources such as SaaS monitoring, team productivity, or source code management resources.
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AWS CLOUDFORMATION FAQs
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What is AWS Elastic Beanstalk?
AWS Elastic Beanstalk makes it even easier for developers to quickly deploy and manage applications in the AWS Cloud. Developers simply upload their application, and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring.
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Who should use AWS Elastic Beanstalk?
Those who want to deploy and manage their applications within minutes in the AWS Cloud. You don’t need experience with cloud computing to get started. AWS Elastic Beanstalk supports Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker web applications.
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Which languages and development stacks does AWS Elastic Beanstalk support?
AWS Elastic Beanstalk supports the following languages and development stacks:
Apache Tomcat for Java applications
Apache HTTP Server for PHP applications
Apache HTTP Server for Python applications
Nginx or Apache HTTP Server for Node.js applications
Passenger or Puma for Ruby applications
Microsoft IIS 7.5, 8.0, and 8.5 for .NET applications
Java SE
Docker
Go
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What can developers now do with AWS Elastic Beanstalk that they could not before?
AWS Elastic Beanstalk automates the details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto scaling, and application deployment, creating an environment that runs a version of your application. You can simply upload your deployable code (e.g., WAR file), and AWS Elastic Beanstalk does the rest. The AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio and the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse allow you to deploy your application to AWS Elastic Beanstalk and manage it without leaving your IDE. Once your application is running, Elastic Beanstalk automates management tasks–such as monitoring, application version deployment, a basic health check–and facilitates log file access. By using Elastic Beanstalk, developers can focus on developing their application and are freed from deployment-oriented tasks, such as provisioning servers, setting up load balancing, or managing scaling.
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How is AWS Elastic Beanstalk different from existing application containers or platform-as-a-service solutions?
Most existing application containers or platform-as-a-service solutions, while reducing the amount of programming required, significantly diminish developers’ flexibility and control. Developers are forced to live with all the decisions predetermined by the vendor–with little to no opportunity to take back control over various parts of their application’s infrastructure. However, with AWS Elastic Beanstalk, developers retain full control over the AWS resources powering their application. If developers decide they want to manage some (or all) of the elements of their infrastructure, they can do so seamlessly by using Elastic Beanstalk’s management capabilities.
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Most existing application containers or platform-as-a-service solutions, while reducing the amount of programming required, significantly diminish developers’ flexibility and control. Developers are forced to live with all the decisions predetermined by the vendor–with little to no opportunity to take back control over various parts of their application’s infrastructure. However, with AWS Elastic Beanstalk, developers retain full control over the AWS resources powering their application. If developers decide they want to manage some (or all) of the elements of their infrastructure, they can do so seamlessly by using Elastic Beanstalk’s management capabilities.
With AWS Elastic Beanstalk, you can:
- Select the operating system that matches your application requirements (e.g., Amazon Linux or Windows Server 2016)
- Choose from several Amazon EC2 instances including On-Demand, Reserved instances, and Spot instances
- Choose from several available database and storage options
- Enable login access to Amazon EC2 instances for immediate and direct troubleshooting
- Quickly improve application reliability by running in more than one Availability Zone
- Enhance application security by enabling HTTPS protocol on the load balancer
- Access built-in Amazon CloudWatch monitoring and getting notifications on application health and other important events
- Adjust application server settings (e.g., JVM settings) and pass environment variables
- Run other application components, such as a memory caching service, side-by-side in Amazon EC2
- Access log files without logging in to the application servers
7
What kinds of applications are supported by AWS Elastic Beanstalk?
AWS Elastic Beanstalk supports Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker, and is ideal for web applications. However, due to Elastic Beanstalk’s open architecture, non-web applications can also be deployed using Elastic Beanstalk. We expect to support additional application types and programming languages in the future.
8
Which operating systems does AWS Elastic Beanstalk use?
AWS Elastic Beanstalk runs on the Amazon Linux AMI and the Windows Server AMI. Both AMIs are supported and maintained by Amazon Web Services and are designed to provide a stable, secure, and high-performance execution environment for Amazon EC2 Cloud computing.
9
What are the Cloud resources powering my AWS Elastic Beanstalk application?
WS Elastic Beanstalk uses proven AWS features and services, such as Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, Amazon S3, and Amazon SNS, to create an environment that runs your application. The current version of AWS Elastic Beanstalk uses the Amazon Linux AMI or the Windows Server 2012 R2 AMI.
10
What database solutions can I use with AWS Elastic Beanstalk?
AWS Elastic Beanstalk does not restrict you to any specific data persistence technology. You can choose to use Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) or Amazon DynamoDB, or use Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, or other relational databases running on Amazon EC2.
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Source
AWS ELASTIC BEANSTALK FAQs
