#aws

AWS network firewalling has two layers: the Security Group (SG) attached to instances, and the Network ACL (NACL) attached to subnets. The names are similar, but the operating models differ quite a bit.

A VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) is the virtual network where compute, databases, and load balancers live in AWS. If the shape of the VPC is not defined first, every decision inside it stays unstable.

DNS, which resolves domain names to IPs, is one of the oldest pieces of internet infrastructure. AWS's managed DNS service is Route 53 — named after the standard DNS port (53).

Operating a relational DB directly is an area heavy with backup, recovery, HA, tuning, and version upgrades. RDS (Relational Database Service) takes a large share of those operational responsibilities off the user's han…

AWS effectively defined the cloud services market. The service catalog tops 200, but at the category level it boils down to a handful of larger groupings.

The single phrase "deploy on AWS" hides choices that span very different abstraction levels. From managing one EC2 box directly all the way to function-level hosting like Lambda. Including other clouds and PaaS, the pic…

Caching static files, video, and API responses near users speeds up responses and reduces load on the origin server. The service that does this on globally distributed edges is a CDN (Content Delivery Network).

S3 (Simple Storage Service) was the first AWS service to reach GA, in 2006, and it popularized the object storage category. Neither file system nor block storage, the model of "an infinitely large bucket accessed by key…

EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is the first compute service AWS released, and it popularized the cloud "virtual machine" abstraction. As managed services have grown, the share of direct usage has diversified, but EC2 remai…

Every cloud call eventually passes through "who · what · where" questions. In AWS, the place that answers them is IAM (Identity and Access Management). Compared with the flashier managed services, IAM has a plain text-p…

Distributing traffic across backends, removing dead servers, and managing certificates from a single place are common needs across nearly every web service. AWS's seat for this is ELB (Elastic Load Balancing) — four fla…

There is a model where code runs at the function level without provisioning a server. Compute wakes up when an event arrives, runs the function once, and disappears. AWS's seat for this is Lambda — it played a major rol…

After building a container image, the next question is where to run it. One option is to run docker directly on EC2; another is to delegate container lifecycle, health checks, rolling deploys, and service discovery to a…