Compute

The EC2 service is used to provision virtual machines in the cloud.

There are many instance types available based on the compute, memory or storage needs.

The full list of instance types can be referred in the AWS Documentation.

Instances are named using the below convention:
m5.2xlarge
m - instance class
5 - generation
2xlarge - size of the instance

Security Groups are firewalls attached to EC2 instances. Security Groups have rules that determine the permitted inbound and outbound traffic.

EC2 User Data is used to bootstrap an instance during startup.

EC2 instances can be attached IAMRoles to give them permissions.

Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is a supported and maintained image provided by AWS that provides the information required to launch an instance. It can be public or private or shared.

Launch configuration is an instance configuration template that an Auto Scaling group uses to launch EC2 instances.

Launch template is similar to a launch configuration, in that it specifies instance configuration information. However, defining a launch template instead of a launch configuration allows you to have multiple versions of a launch template.

EC2 Image Builder helps automate the image build process.

Elastic Network Interface is a virtual network card. It provides a primary private IPv4 address and additional secondary IPv4 addresses can be added.

Secondary ENIs persist even if the EC2 instance is stopped.

Elastic Beanstalk helps to automate the creation of services and resources for application deployment.

Some of the features provided by Elastic Beanstalk are:

Elastic Beanstalk comes with some pre-configured stacks for popular languages.

Amazon Lightsail is a virtual private server (VPS) provider and is the easiest way to get started with AWS for developers, small businesses, students, and other users who need a solution to build and host their applications on cloud.

It provides a subset of AWS services and resources that give customers the core functionality needed to get started with their cloud journey.

Lightsail can support containerized workloads as well.

ECS is the container orchestration service of AWS.

ECS Task Definition is a blueprint that describes how containers should launch.

Task Definitions create Tasks. A Task is analogous to a container.

ECS Service ensures that a certain number of Tasks are running at all times.

You cannot map different ports with ECS.

Containers within one specific task can communicate through localhost.

Anything in a docker-compose file can be translated to a task definition.

EFS can be used as a file system for ECS over NFS protocol.

S3 cannot be used as a file system for ECS.

Two types of autoscaling:

EKS is the managed Kubernetes service of AWS. Through EKS, AWS manages the control plane, whereas worker nodes have to be managed by customers.

For Data Volumes, you need to specify a StorageClass manifest on the EKS cluster.
It leverages a Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver.
Supports EBS, EFS (Fargate), FSx for Lustre and NetApp ONTAP.

ECR is a container registry provided by AWS.

Types of repositories

ECR works well with AWS CodeCommit and AWS CodeBuild.

Amazon Inspector can be used to scan the images.

Behind the scenes the images are stored in S3.

AWS App Runner is a fully managed service that makes it easy to deploy web applications and APIs at scale.

AWS Batch is used to schedule batch jobs that don’t need any human intervention.

The state moves from Submitted → Pending → Runnable → Starting → Running → (Succeeded / Failed)

Core components include Job Definition, Job Queues, Job Scheduler

Supports EC2 on-demand, EC2 SPOT, Fargate.

AWS Lambda is the Serverless offering from AWS. It helps customers run workloads without the need to provision virtual machines on the cloud.

Lambda functions are limited by time, so they should be short running.

Pay per calls, Pay per duration.

Memory allocation 128 MB - 10 GB
Max execution time 900 sec / 15 min
Env variables 4 KB

Lambda functions can be triggered by many AWS services. Some of them are listed below.

Layers can be created to manage dependencies.

Destination is the next step to pass the flow like SNS, SQS.

The main features of Lambda apart from its serverless support are event-driven programming, multi-language support, fault tolerance and automatic scaling.

Lambda SnapStart for Java 11 is known to increase performance by 10x.

Lambda does not have an out-of-the-box caching feature.

Concurrency in Lambda, is the number of in-flight requests that your function is handling at the same time.

By default, your account has a concurrency limit of 1,000 concurrent executions across all functions in a Region.

Step Functions build a serverless visual workflow to orchestrate Lambda functions.

One use-case is to create state machines.

Workflow can be parallelized with support for Error Handling and Retry Logic.

Serverless Application Model is a toolkit that improves the developer experience of building and running serverless applications on AWS.

SAM can be considered as a template or a blueprint for a serverless application.

Serverless Application Repository is a managed repository for serverless applications that allows developers to share and deploy their serverless applications and components with other teams, developers, companies or the community.

AWS Amplify is a complete solution for building web and mobile applications. With Amplify, features such as authentication, APIs, storage, continuous deployment and analytics can be easily enabled for an application.

It facilitates rapid development for full-stack applications.

AWS Amplify Studio is a visual interface that allows developers to easily build and ship complete web and mobile apps in hours.

AWS Outposts is a family of fully managed solutions delivering AWS infrastructure and services to virtually any on-premise or edge location for a truly consistent hybrid experience.

It enables you to run AWS services locally with a AWS rack on your on-premise hardware.

Enables you to run ECS or EKS on your on-premise hardware.

Users can use the EKS Dashboard or ECS Anywhere Dashboard to view the cluster.

It is useful for hybrid deployments.

It is good if a customer has a legal requirement to keep all their data on-premise.

In hybrid cloud architectures, many customers use VMWare products like vSphere, vSAN and NSX-T to create virtual environments on their on-premise hardware and the EC2 instances on cloud.

VMware Cloud on AWS allows customers a uniform way of managing virtual environments on-premise and in the cloud.

Snowball Edge and Snowcone have in-built compute capabilities.