What Is AWS (Amazon Web Services)?
AWS is currently the most popular platform for cloud computing services. But
what is this 'cloud computing' thing? Well, think about an app that lets
people shop online. How can it remember the shipping address of each user?
It stores it in a database. And how can the user order a product? His app
contacts some server. How is the user notified his order will arrive
tomorrow? Through an email.
Database, server, email -- these are just a few examples of things the app
needs to use. And AWS gives you access to such resources and services.
So how can we sum up cloud computing? It's almost like you build your own
datacenter in the cloud. You go to the AWS website and add anything that
your app, service, or website needs. It's your custom-made datacenter, in
the cloud. You don't care about the hardware that is required. You just buy
and configure your cloud services. Amazon takes care of the hardware
stuff.
KodeKloud AWS Playground
AWS has a you can buy. If you've never used a cloud computing platform
before, this can be overwhelming. What do you start with? What is EC2? A
virtual server? How do you configure it and connect to it? How do you create
a Kubernetes cluster on AWS?
We know how hard it is to understand with theory alone. That's why we
created the AWS Playground. With a simple click, you get quick access to the
AWS platform. You can test things out and learn by doing. All of this
without even having to create an account there. There's no risk of breaking
anything. If you mess up, you can just launch a new playground.
Quick Start Guide
For a smooth experience, please read the guide below. Pay close attention to
the stuff highlighted with bold text.
The regions supported in our AWS playground are:
- us-east-1
- us-east-2
- eu-central-1
- us-west-2
- eu-west-2
- ap-southeast-1
And here are the AWS services you can currently test in our playground:
EC2 Instances (Virtual Machines / Servers)
Elastic Compute instances, also called EC2, are basically virtual servers.
They're called elastic because they are easy to scale up or down. For
example, you can scale up from 4 CPU cores to 8 cores with a few mouse
clicks. Or you can scale down from 8 CPU cores to 4, as easily. Same goes
for RAM, or storage space.
- Use a nano, micro, small, or medium size for the t1, t2 and t3 instances.
- For storage use the gp2 (General Purpose) volume.
- The maximum storage size we support is 30GB.
After you create your instance, you might not see it displayed. In that
case, just press the refresh button in your web browser.
S3 - Object Storage
An S3 bucket is a convenient place to store files. Apps or users can easily
push files there (upload). And apps, or users can also easily pull them
(download).
Configuration is straightforward, but there is one tricky part. Make sure
the bucket name is unique. It must be something that no one
else on AWS uses. If it's hard to find a unique name, just add a random
number in there, e.g., 'mybucket4884796837'.
RDS - Relational Database Service
NoSQL is no good? Well, if you need a relational database instead, AWS has
you covered. RDS supports the following database engines:
- MySQL
- MariaDB
- PostgreSQL
- Oracle
- Microsoft SQL Server
- Amazon Aurora
The quickest way to get started is to pick the Free tier in
the Templates section. This works with
MySQL, MariaDB, and
PostgreSQL.
If you want to use a different engine, with custom settings, this will
be trickier. You need to:
- Pick a Single DB Instance.
- Then choose a Burstable Class for the instance.
- Next, pick a micro or small instance.
- For storage select General Purpose SSD (gp2).
EKS - Elastic Kubernetes Service
If you want to create a Kubernetes cluster yourself, it can be a pretty
long process. You need to launch a couple of Linux servers, then
configure each one. And the configuration steps can be quite long. EKS
lets you get such a cluster much faster, in mere minutes.
- Cluster service role name = eksClusterRole
- CloudFormation stack name = eks-cluster-stack
ECR - Elastic Container Registry
Here, you can create your own container repositories. Then you can
upload/download container images just like you do on Docker Hub.
If you want to test other AWS services, just type their name in the top
search bar.
Here are the
other services that you can test in our playground:
- SNS - Simple Notification Service
- KMS - Key Management Service (e.g., encryption keys)
- VPC - Virtual Private Cloud (configure networking in your cloud)
- CloudShell (Linux-type command line in your web browser)
- AWS CodeCommit (Your own GitHub-like repository for code)
- CodeDeploy (automate deployment of software)
- CodePipeline (CI/CD pipeline - Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery)
- Certificate Manager (Manage SSL/TLS certificates)
Extra services we've enabled recently:
- CloudFormation
- CloudWatch
- CodeArtifact
- Amazon S3
- EC2 Instances
- RDS
- CloudTrail
- Elastic Container Registry
- Elastic Container Kubernetes
- Simple Email Service
- Simple Queue Service