Graduate Program KB

Section 25 - Other Services

CloudFormation

  • Declarative way of outlining AWS infrastructure for any resources
    • Creates resources in right order with exact specified configuration
  • Benefits:
    • Infrastructure as code: No manual resources created, can review through code
    • Cost: Resources within the stack are tagged with an identifier to see the whole stack cost
    • Productivity: Create and destroy infrastructure easily, declarative style means not needing to figure out orchestration and ordering
    • Can leverage existing templates on the web and documentation
    • Supports almost all AWS resources (use custom resources for non-supported resources)

CloudFormation Service Role

  • An IAM role allowing CloudFormation to create/update/delete stacks resources for you
  • Gives ability to users to create/update/delete the stack resources even if they lack permissions to work with the resources in the stack
  • Useful for achieving the least privilege principle but don't want to give user all required permissions to create the stack resources
  • User must have iam:PassRole permissions

Amazon Simple Email Service

  • A fully managed service to send emails securely, globally and at scale
  • Allows inbound/outbound emails
  • Supports DomainKeys Identified Mail and Sender Policy Framework
  • Flexible IP deployment (shared, dedicated and customer-owned IPs)
  • Send emails using your app using Console, APIs or SMTP
  • Useful for transactional, marketing and bulk email communications

Amazon Pinpoint

  • A scalable 2-way marketing communications service supporting email, SMS, push, voice and in-app messaging
  • Can segment and personalize messages with the right content to customers
  • Possibility to receive replies
  • Scales to billions of messages per day
  • Useful for running campaigns by sending marketing, bulk and transactional SMS messages
  • In SNS & SES, you manage each message's audience, context and delivery schedule, with Pinpoint, you create message templates, delivery schedules, highly-targeted segments and full campaigns

Systems Manager (SSM Session Manager)

  • Allows you to start a secure shell on your EC2 and on-premises servers
  • No SSH access, bastion hosts or SSH keys needed
  • No port 22 needed (improved security)
  • Supports Linux, macOS and Windows
  • Sen session log data to S3 or CloudWatch Logs
  • Run Command
    • Execute script or command which can rune across multiple instances (using resource groups)
    • Output can be shown in Console, sent to S3 bucket or CloudWatch Logs
    • Can send notifications to SNS about command status
    • Integrated with IAM and CloudTrail
    • Can be invoked using EventBridge
  • Patch Manager
    • Automates process of patching managed instances (OS updates, app updates, security updates)
    • Supports EC2 instances and on-premises servers
    • Supports Linux, macOS and Windows
    • Can patch on schedule or on-demand using Maintenance Windows
    • Can scan instances and generate patch compliance report for missing patches
  • Maintenance Windows
    • Defines a schedule for performing actions on your instances
    • Contains schedule, duration, set of registered instances and set of registered tasks
  • Automation
    • Simplifies common maintenance and deployment tasks of EC2 instances and other AWS resources
    • Automation Runbook: SSM documents to define actions performed on instances or resources
    • Can be triggered using Console, CLI, SDK, EventBridge, schedule via Maintenance Windows or AWS Config for rules remediations

Cost Explorer

  • A service to visualize, understand and manage your AWS costs and usage over time
  • Can create custom reports that analyze cost and usage data across all accounts
  • Can choose an optimal savings plan to lower bill prices and forecast usage up to 12 months based on previous usage

AWS Cost Anomaly Detection

  • Continuously monitor cost an usage using ML to detect unusual spends
  • Learns your unique, historic spend patterns to detect a one-time cost spike or continuous cost increases
  • Monitors services, member accounts, cost allocation tags or cost categories
  • Sends an anomaly detection report with root-cause analysis
  • Can get notified with individual alerts or daily/weekly summaries using SNS

AWS Outposts

  • Server racks that offer the same AWS infrastructure, services, APIs and tools to build your own apps on-premises just like in the cloud
  • AWS sets up and manages the racks within your on-premises infrastructure and you can leverage their services on-premises
  • The racks become a customer responsibility and you must ensure physical security
  • Benefits:
    • Low-latency access to on-premises systems
    • Local data processing
    • Data residency
    • Easier migration from on-premises to the cloud
    • Fully managed service

AWS Batch

  • Fully managed batch processing at any scale (a batch job is a job with a start and end as opposed to continuous)
  • Efficiently run hundreds of thousands of computing batch jobs on AWS
  • Dynamically launch EC2 instances or Spot Instances, provisioning the right amount of compute and memory
  • Can submit or schedule batch jobs
  • Batch jobs are defined as Docker images and run on ECS
  • Useful for cost optimizations and focusing less on infrastructure

Batch vs. Lambda

  • Lambda
    • Time limit
    • Limited runtimes
    • Limited temporary disk space
    • Serverless
  • Batch
    • No time limit
    • Any runtime as long as it's packaged as a Docker image
    • Relies on EBS or instance store for disk space
    • Relies on EC2 (can be managed by AWS)

Amazon AppFlow

  • A fully managed integration service enabling you to securely transfer data between SaaS apps and AWS
  • Sources include Salesforce, SAP, Zendesk, Slack and ServiceNow
  • Destinations include services like S3, Redshift or non-AWS services such as SnowFlake and Salesforce
  • Data can be transferred on a schedule, in response to events or on-demand
  • There are data transforming capabilities such as filtering and validation
  • Data is encrypted over the public internet or privately over AWS PrivateLink
  • Don't need to spend time writing integrations and leveraging APIs immediately

AWS Amplify

  • Develop and deploy scalable full stack web and mobile apps
  • Integrates authentication, storage, API, CI/CD, PubSub, analytics, AI/ML predictions, monitoring, etc.
  • Connect source code from GitHub, CodeCommit, Bitbucket, GitLab or upload directly

Instance Scheduler on AWS

  • Automatically start/stop services to reduce costs up to 70%
  • Supports EC2 instances, EC2 ASG and RDS instances
  • Schedules are managed in a DynamoDB table
  • Uses resources' tags and Lambda to start/stop instances
  • Supports cross-account and cross-region resources