What this book covers
Chapter 1, What Is Cloud Computing?, discusses the fundamentals of cloud computing, and outlines the six advantages of cloud computing. We also look at the various cloud computing models and cloud deployment models.
Chapter 2, Introduction to AWS and the Global Infrastructure, introduces you to the AWS ecosystem, its global infrastructure, and how it enables you to start deploying solutions on a global scale. We discuss the excellent support services offered by AWS and the importance of choosing the right support plan.
Chapter 3, Exploring AWS Accounts, Multi-Account Strategy, and AWS Organizations, details the concept of AWS accounts, which enable you to access the vast array of AWS services securely. We also look at the use case for setting multiple AWS accounts and the best practices to follow to manage multiple accounts using the AWS Organizations service.
Chapter 4, Identity and Access Management, introduces you to one of the core fundamental security features of AWS. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) enables you to manage access to AWS services and resources securely. With AWS IAM, you can design policies and permissions to ensure access and authorization to services using the principle of least privilege.
Chapter 5, Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), explains how AWS offers a wide range of different storage options, including block, object, and file storage services. Amazon S3 is AWS's object storage solution and in this chapter, you learn how to harness the power of this virtually unlimited and highly scalable storage offering from Amazon.
Chapter 6, AWS Networking Services – VPCs, Route53, and CloudFront, covers networking services in the cloud. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) enables you to launch AWS resources in a logically isolated virtual network in the cloud. We also look at AWS's Domain Name System (DNS) offering, which enables you to register new domain names and design traffic routing services for your workloads. Finally, in this chapter, we look at Amazon CloudFront, which helps you design a content network delivery service for your digital assets and applications.
Chapter 7, AWS Compute Services, details the various compute services on offer from AWS. These include the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, which enables you to launch Linux, Windows, and macOS virtual servers in the cloud, through to containers and serverless compute offerings such as Amazon Lambda. In this chapter, you will also learn about block storage and file storage services on AWS.
Chapter 8, AWS Databases Services, examines the wide range of database solutions on offer from AWS, capable of supporting almost any use case. From traditional relational database services such as Amazon RDS through to NoSQL databases solutions such as Amazon DynamoDB, we examine their use cases and learn how to configure these databases for your applications. Additional niche database solutions are also discussed in this chapter.
Chapter 9, High Availability and Elasticity on AWS, covers one of the fundamental benefits of cloud computing and, specifically, AWS. Designing solutions that are highly available and capable of withstanding outages is of paramount importance for any organization and, in this chapter, you will learn how to use the tools to build highly available solutions. In addition, we also discuss how you can automatically scale your application, expanding your resources when demand increases and terminating them when demand drops. This enables you to manage costs much more effectively and avoid the need to guess capacity.
Chapter 10, Application Integration Services, examines various AWS services that enable you to build applications that adopt a decoupled architecture design. This enables you to move away from traditional monolithic design in favor of the more modern microservice architectures.
Chapter 11, Analytics on AWS, examines the vast array of tools and services on AWS that can help you analyze the massive amounts of data that organizations collect, much of which is collected in real time.
Chapter 12, Automation and Deployment on AWS, looks at several automation tools and processes to help you deploy infrastructure and applications that not only speed up the deployment process but also reduce configuration errors.
Chapter 13, Management and Governance on AWS, examines several AWS services that can be used to monitor your resources, manage them centrally, and help you follow best practices.
Chapter 14, Implementing Security on AWS, outlines the wide range of security tools, services, and processes offered by AWS that can help you design your application solutions, with security being at the forefront, thereby enabling you to adhere to any compliance and regulatory environments and ensure that your customers' data is always protected.
Chapter 15, Billing and Pricing, discusses cloud economics and examines the vast array of AWS tools to help you manage your cloud computing costs effectively. We discuss strategies for minimizing costs without compromising performance, reliability, and security.
Chapter 16, Mock Tests, enables you to test your knowledge acquired throughout this study guide by undertaking two complete practice exams. These mock tests will help you gauge your readiness to take the official AWS certification exams and also provide answer explanations to help you prepare for the AWS exams.