30 | Other Services or Features - devian-al/AWS-Solutions-Architect-Prep GitHub Wiki

The following section includes services, features, and techniques that may appear on the exam. They are also extremely useful to know as an engineer using AWS. If the following items do appear on the exam, they will not be tested in detail. You'll just have to know what the meaning is behind the name. It is a great idea to learn each item in depth for your career's benefit, but it is not necessary for the exam.

Athena

• Athena is an interactive query service which allows you to interact and query data from S3 using standard SQL commands. This is beneficial for programmatic querying for the average developer. It is serverless, requires no provisioning, and you pay per query and per TB scanned. You basically turn S3 into a SQL supported database by using Athena.
• Example use cases
  • Query logs that are dumped into S3 buckets as an alternative or supplement to the ELK stack
  • Setting queries to run business reports based off of the data regularly entering S3
  • Running queries on click-stream data to have further insight of customer behavior

AWS STS

• AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS) is the service that you can use to create and provide trusted users with temporary security credentials that can control access to your AWS resources.
• Temporary security credentials work almost identically to the long-term access key credentials that your IAM users can use.
• Temporary security credentials are short-term, as the name implies. They can be configured to last for anywhere from a few minutes to several hours. After the credentials expire, AWS no longer recognizes them or allows any kind of access from API requests made with them.

OpsWorks

• AWS OpsWorks is a configuration management service that provides managed instances of Chef and Puppet. Chef and Puppet are automation platforms that allow you to use code to automate the configurations of your servers.
• OpsWorks lets you use Chef and Puppet to automate how servers are configured, deployed, and managed across your Amazon EC2 instances or on-premises compute environments.
• OpsWorks has three offerings - AWS Opsworks for Chef Automate, AWS OpsWorks for Puppet Enterprise, and AWS OpsWorks Stacks.
• AWS OpsWorks Stacks lets you manage applications and servers on AWS and on-premises. With OpsWorks Stacks, you can model your application as a stack containing different layers, such as load balancing, database, and application server.
• OpsWorks Stacks is complex enough for you to deploy and configure Amazon EC2 instances in each layer or connect to other resources such as Amazon RDS databases.

Elastic Transcoder

• A media transcoder in the cloud. Basically, it is a service that converts media files from their original format to the media format specified whether for phones, tablets, PCs, etc.
• Because of the built-in support for different media types, you can trust that the resulting quality will be good.
• With Elastic Transcoder, you pay per minute of the transcode job and the resolution of the finished work.

IoT Core

• AWS IoT Core is a managed cloud service that lets connected devices easily and securely interact with cloud applications and other devices.
• AWS IoT Core provides secure communication and data processing across different kinds of connected devices and locations so you can easily build IoT applications.

AWS WorkSpaces

• Amazon WorkSpaces is a managed, secure Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution. You can use Amazon WorkSpaces to provision either Windows or Linux desktops in just a few minutes and quickly scale to provide thousands of desktops to workers across the globe.
• Amazon WorkSpaces helps you eliminate the complexity in managing hardware inventory, OS versions and patches, and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), which helps simplify your desktop delivery strategy.
• With Amazon WorkSpaces, your users get a fast, responsive desktop of their choice that they can access anywhere, anytime, from any supported device.

What is AWS Fargate?

• AWS Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers.

• The Fargate launch type allows you to run your containerized applications without the need to provision and manage the backend infrastructure. Just register your task definition and Fargate launches the container for you.

• It works with both Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS).
• Fargate makes it easy for you to focus on building your applications. It removes the need to provision and manage servers, lets you specify and pay for resources per application, and improves security through application isolation by design.

What is Amazon Elastic Container Service

• Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a fully managed container orchestration service.
• 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.
• You can choose to run your ECS clusters using AWS Fargate, which is serverless compute for containers. Fargate removes the need to provision and manage servers, lets you specify and pay for resources per application, and improves security through application isolation by design.

What is Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service?

• Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is a fully managed Kubernetes service. EKS runs upstream Kubernetes and is certified Kubernetes conformant so you can leverage all benefits of open source tooling from the community. You can also easily migrate any standard Kubernetes application to EKS without needing to refactor your code.
• Kubernetes is open source software that allows you to deploy and manage containerized applications at scale. Kubernetes groups containers into logical groupings for management and discoverability, then launches them onto clusters of EC2 instances. Using Kubernetes you can run containerized applications including microservices, batch processing workers, and platforms as a service (PaaS) using the same tool set on premises and in the cloud.

• Amazon EKS provisions and scales the Kubernetes control plane, including the API servers and backend persistence layer, across multiple AWS availability zones for high availability and fault tolerance. Amazon EKS automatically detects and replaces unhealthy control plane nodes and provides patching for the control plane.

• Without Amazon EKS, you have to run both the Kubernetes control plane and the cluster of worker nodes yourself. With Amazon EKS, you provision your worker nodes using a single command in the EKS console, CLI, or API, and AWS handles provisioning, scaling, and managing the Kubernetes control plane in a highly available and secure configuration. This removes a significant operational burden for running Kubernetes and allows you to focus on building applications instead of managing AWS infrastructure.
• You can run EKS using AWS Fargate, which is serverless compute for containers. Fargate removes the need to provision and manage servers, lets you specify and pay for resources per application, and improves security through application isolation by design.
• Amazon EKS is integrated with many AWS services to provide scalability and security for your applications. These services include Elastic Load Balancing for load distribution, IAM for authentication, Amazon VPC for isolation, and AWS CloudTrail for logging.

Pilot Light

• The term pilot light is often used to describe a disaster recovery scenario in which a minimal version of an environment is always running in the cloud.
• The idea of the pilot light is an analogy that comes from the gas heater. In a gas heater, a small flame that’s always on and can quickly ignite the entire furnace to heat up a house. This scenario is similar to a backup-and-restore scenario.
• For example, with AWS you can maintain a pilot light by configuring and running the most critical core elements of your system in AWS. When the time comes for recovery, you can rapidly provision a full-scale production environment around the critical core that has always been running.

Blue-Green deployments?

• One of the challenges with automating deployments is the cut-over from the final stage of testing to live production. You usually need to do this quickly in order to minimize downtime.
• The Blue-Green deployment approach does this by ensuring you have two production environments, as identical as possible. At any time one of them, let's say blue for the example, is live. As you prepare a new release of your software you do your final stage of testing in the green environment. Once the software is working in the green environment, you switch the router so that all incoming requests go to the green environment - the blue one is now idle.
• Blue-green deployment also gives you a rapid way to rollback - if anything goes wrong you switch the router back to your blue environment.
• CloudFormation and CodeDeploy (AWS's version of Jenkins) both support this deployment technique.

Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager

• You can use Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (Amazon DLM) to automate the creation, retention, and deletion of snapshots taken to back up your Amazon EBS volumes.
• Automating snapshot management helps you to
  • Protect valuable data by enforcing a regular backup schedule.
  • Retain backups as required by auditors or internal compliance.
  • Reduce storage costs by deleting outdated backups.
• Using Amazon DLM means that you no longer need to remember to take your EBS snapshots, thus reducing cognitive load on engineers.

What is Route Origin Authorization?

• You can bring part or all of your public IPv4 address range from your on-premises network to your AWS account. You continue to own the address range, but AWS advertises it on the Internet. After you bring the address range to AWS, it appears in your account as an address pool.
• You can then create an Elastic IP address from your address pool and use it with your AWS resources, such as EC2 instances, NAT gateways, and Network Load Balancers. This is also called Bring Your Own IP Addresses (BYOIP).
• To ensure that only you can bring your address range to your AWS account, you must authorize Amazon to advertise the address range and provide proof that you own the address range.

  The benefit of ROA is that you can migrate pre-existing applications to AWS without requiring your partners and customers to change their IP address whitelists.

Amazon MQ

• Amazon MQ is a managed message broker service that makes it easy to set up and operate message brokers in the cloud.
• The service is used when migrating services and apps into the cloud from your on-prem which is how it differs from Amazon SQS.
• Amazon MQ supports durability-optimized brokers backed by Amazon EFS to support high availability and message durability, and throughput-optimized brokers backed by Amazon EBS to support high-volume applications that require low latency and high throughput.
• You can easily move from any message broker to Amazon MQ because you don’t have to rewrite any messaging code in your applications.
• Amazon MQ is suitable for enterprise IT pros, developers, and architects who are managing a message broker themselves–whether on-premises or in the cloud–and want to move to a fully managed cloud service without rewriting the messaging code in their applications.

AWS Config

• AWS Config is a service that enables you to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your AWS resources. Config continuously monitors and records your AWS resource configurations and allows you to automate the evaluation of recorded configurations against desired configurations.
• With Config, you can review changes in configurations and relationships between AWS resources, dive into detailed resource configuration histories, and determine your overall compliance against the configurations specified in your internal guidelines. This enables you to simplify compliance auditing, security analysis, change management, and operational troubleshooting.

  AWS Config allows you to do the following ·
  >- Evaluate your AWS resource configurations for desired settings
  >- Get a snapshot of the current configurations of the supported resources that are associated with your AWS account >- Retrieve configurations of one or more resources that exist in your account
  >- Retrieve historical configurations of one or more resources >- Receive a notification whenever a resource is created, modified, or deleted.
  >- View relationships between resources. - For example, you might want to find all resources that use a particular security group.