Getting Started with AWS Services

Get started With AWS analytic tools on EC2

AWS Analytic tools and the data they store are completely transparent to you so that you can run any analytical tool on the data anytime. The latest version of this tool has been designed to integrate with Amazon Kinesis, the streaming query service for Amazon EMR. Amazon Kinesis streamlines analytics around the persistence of streams of events. You can run analytics against streams, making it easy to collect massive amounts of data quickly. And, since you don't have to re-run your queries over and over to run analytics, you can focus on analyzing the data rather than applying the query. With Kinesis streams, you can read, update, and delete events without additional cost.

Get Started With AWS Monitoring on AWS

Amazon provides a global monitoring service that makes it easy to monitor your AWS infrastructure remotely. The service gives you web-based access to all your AWS instances and Cloudfront distribution points, so you can easily monitor your AWS infrastructure. The API lets you query a global searchable repository of AWS services and associated metrics. An anomaly detection for an EC2 instance or an auto-scaling group is a common benchmark to measure your business response time. You can use the anomaly detection feature of AWS Global Monitoring to send you alerts anytime the response time of an EC2 instance jumps more than a specified threshold. You can also use the metadata search function to identify certain parameters of an AWS service. You can use the AWS CloudWatch service logs, metrics, and alarms to measure your environment anytime without spinning up new instances, monitoring them, or configuring them from your local instance.

Get Started With Jenkins on AWS

If you're looking for a continuous integration (CI) solution for AWS, then Jenkins is a good fit. Jenkins has been used in production for many years and is supported by AWS. Jenkins is open source, well known, and offers many controls and options that can make it easy to integrate with the world of AWS. As well as integrating with Amazon Web Services, Jenkins integrates with third-party cloud providers and servers to provide a great way to create and deploy applications. Since Jenkins is designed to run on many platforms, it provides a single codebase and can be used on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Get Started With Git on AWS

Git is a distributed revision control system (DVCS) that allows you to maintain version control in a shared fashion. The primary benefit is that if there are changes to the codebase that you don't want to commit, it's simple to set the version control mirror at a specific URL. Once a commit is successfully made, Git will take care of the details of merging the changes to create a single version that meets the current intent. This tool integrates with the AWS infrastructure and gives you a fast way to push changes to a Jenkins pipeline. Git is a lightweight tool that can efficiently run on your AWS EC2 instance and integrates well with the Jenkins pipeline for easy deployment.

Get Started With StackStorm on AWS

StackStorm is an automation tool that makes building, testing, and deploying applications easy. You can connect AWS infrastructure with your application in just a few minutes and begin building your application with no intervention. Once it is set up, you can have a fully functional application in minutes. The architecture of StackStorm lets you have a set of green, yellow, and red indicators for different types of failures and configurations, so you always know when something is going wrong. StackStorm works with Git for version control and can merge patches from the Git repositories. It also supports automation with AWS for applications in EC2, Elastic Beanstalk, ECS, Fargate, ELB, Lambda, S3, and more. You can easily build and deploy applications with a simple click. StackStorm is the only automation tool available that can work with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in the entire AWS suite.

Get Started With McAfee on AWS

The intrusion detection solution (IDS) and intrusion protection system (IPS) products available with AWS are known for their ease of installation, ease of use, and flexible features provided for a low cost. Suppose you are looking for a good IDS for your AWS environment. In that case, you can get started quickly with one of the main players in the IDS and IPS market, McAfee. McAfee's Firewalls can be installed on EC2 instances, automatically detecting common server misconfigurations such as open ports, misconfigured hosts, SSH logins, and other network misconfigurations. Once the solution is installed, it will record attacks and notify you when something happens in the network.

Get Started With TZM on AWS

It's no secret that many organizations need help to keep track of the number of employees they have and their respective availability across different time zones, particularly for regions like Europe. The AWS Time Zone Manager (TZM) can help you ensure that you will always go right in assigning the right time zones for your AWS resources in the future. This solution automatically creates the time zone for the regions where your infrastructure is hosted and sets the correct time for your AWS resources.

Get Started With Docker on AWS

Docker is a new container technology that brings multiple instances of software applications together in a lightweight, self-contained package. Providing the same container image to different environments enables fast, light, and scalable computing. Docker offers a new approach to managing the underlying infrastructure to create independent software processes, allowing developers to reuse components in different software projects more easily and quickly.

Get Started With Lambda on AWS

AWS provides AWS Lambda as a service for running code in a real-time and event-driven environment. AWS Lambda is a serverless event-driven server for running code. It is executed when triggered by an event (such as when an IAM or elastic load balancer policy is triggered). AWS Lambda provides a REST API to manipulate and transform data and a set of functions that can be used to do just about anything. Once triggered, Lambda functions return values to the API. AWS Lambda functions run statelessly, so they are kept in memory only and don't require a separate storage instance.

Get Started With CloudTrail on AWS

Another new AWS service is CloudTrail, which lets you see application and system state over time and provides insight into how a service behaves. When a customer signs up for Amazon EC2 for the first time, CloudTrail generates a logging file with the username, the VM IP address, and the user id that is associated with that instance. You can then log in and view the history of events related to that user ID. When troubleshooting a problem, you can use CloudTrail to identify common issues that may be caused by application or user error and choose to start a debugging session from the CloudTrail logs. CloudTrail also supports searching and deleting logs.

CloudTrail, Loggly, and EurekaFS are just a few examples of AWS services for you to try out. For a closer look at the many other services available, take a look at the following resources.

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Summary

Hundreds of services can be used on AWS, so picking the right ones is difficult. By choosing the right set of services, you can simplify your configuration and set up your EC2 instances faster, so you can focus on your application development. You will save a lot of time and effort with a bit of research on AWS and looking for resources that can help.

Now that you have decided on a few services, it is up to you to choose which is right. Each of these services has its strengths and weaknesses, and you should work closely with your technical team to test the environments and customize them to your needs. Some services, such as Amazon S3, might have issues in certain regions, so you should consider working with your business units to find possible solutions to that problem. For example, an application for low-latency IoT devices might require a different approach from one used in a heavily-scheduled environment.

A good understanding of AWS will enable you to select the right AWS services. To help you gain this understanding, Simplilearn offers a range of training programs for cloud computing. For example, our AWS Cloud Architect Master's Program is an 11-month comprehensive online program that gives you hands-on experience with AWS services through labs and projects. Learn more at the AWS Cloud Architect Master's Program.