AWS Solution Architect Associate Series — Part 1

Hello everyone! Welcome to the beginning of a series aimed at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Solution Architect Associate certification. If you’re looking to step into the world of cloud computing and gain a deeper understanding of AWS services, you’re in the right place. Now, let’s open the doors together to a series that will guide you through the preparation process for this comprehensive certification offered by AWS. However, before we dive into that, we need to take a look at the history of cloud computing.

History of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a technological evolution that aims to provide computing resources over the internet and scale them according to users’ needs. This concept forms the foundation for many technologies and services widely used today, allowing businesses to benefit from advantages such as flexibility, efficiency, and cost savings.

While the first instances of cloud computing date back to the 1960s, the foundations of today’s modern cloud infrastructure were laid in the 2000s. Amazon’s AWS services are one of the pioneering platforms that increased the popularity of cloud computing and accelerated the transformation in this field. In this series, we will take a closer look at the world of cloud computing through the lens of AWS’s Solution Architect Associate certification, developing a comprehensive understanding of this exciting technology.

AWS Web Services

Amazon Web Services (AWS) stands out as a leading cloud computing service provider in today’s landscape. AWS is designed to meet the computing needs of businesses, developers, and organizations across various industries by offering a wide range of services.

Elastic Infrastructure: AWS provides users with a flexible infrastructure that can be instantly scaled to meet their needs, offering the freedom to increase or decrease storage and processing capacity. This allows businesses to quickly adapt to changing demands.

Extensive Service Portfolio: AWS covers various areas, including databases, artificial intelligence, network management, security, and more, by offering hundreds of different services. Core services such as Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3), Lambda, and Amazon RDS are used to support various workloads.

Global Infrastructure: AWS provides services with data centers in many geographical regions worldwide, optimizing the user experience by ensuring low latency and high availability.

Security and Compliance: AWS prioritizes the security of customer data, offering a secure cloud environment with various security measures such as identity and access management, data encryption, and firewalls. Additionally, it holds various certifications to ensure compliance with different industries.

Cost Management: Through a pay-per-use model, AWS offers a cost-effective solution, allowing customers to pay for resources only during the time they are used, simplifying budget control for businesses.

The AWS Cloud platform has become the preferred choice for many organizations due to its advantages such as scalability, flexibility, and reliability. The AWS Solution Architect Associate certification enables professionals to certify their in-depth knowledge and skills in this dynamic cloud ecosystem effectively. In this series, we will explore this platform more closely through AWS’s core services and architectural concepts.

AWS Global Infrastructure

Source: https://aws.amazon.com/tr/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/growing-aws-internet-peering-with-400-gbe/

When getting to know AWS (Amazon Web Services), certain concepts form the foundation of its global infrastructure, and it’s important to understand these concepts. Therefore, explanations for each of them are provided below.

Regions:

AWS Regions are geographically separate areas worldwide, each containing one or more Availability Zones. Availability Zones are independent and physically separated data centers within an AWS Region. This arrangement is designed to ensure high availability and durability.

AWS’s geographically distributed Regions allow users to distribute their services and respond quickly to user demands in different geographical regions. Each AWS Region has its independent infrastructure and resources.

For example, AWS’s US East (N. Virginia) Region is a geographical area located in the northeastern part of the United States. This Region includes multiple Availability Zones, with each Availability Zone representing an independent data center.

AWS Regions offer flexibility by allowing users to distribute their services to locations closest to them or different geographical regions as needed, enhancing performance, ensuring high availability, and complying with local regulations. AWS provides numerous Regions worldwide and continues to add new ones.

Availability Zone:

AWS uses the concept of “Availability Zone” (AZ) to ensure high availability and durability. Each Availability Zone is designed as a physically separate and independent data center. This means that a potential issue in one Availability Zone will not affect other Availability Zones.

In the event of an issue in one data center, resources and services in other Availability Zones can come into play, ensuring redundancy in the system. This effectively summarizes how AWS uses the features of “redundancy” and “Availability Zone” to achieve high availability.

Single Data Center:

AWS generally provides infrastructure that includes independent Availability Zones, often distributed across different geographical regions, offering users high performance, durability, and availability. However, the term “single data center” may refer to a configuration that does not fully include separate Availability Zones or consists of only one data center.

This configuration is typically suitable for specific use cases such as test and development environments but is not recommended for production environments. Using one or more Availability Zones provides the advantage of higher resilience and reduced chances of service interruptions.

The general practice of AWS is for users to configure their systems with multiple Availability Zones or different geographical regions to achieve high availability and durability. This reduces the likelihood of an event affecting others in one Availability Zone or region, resulting in overall higher reliability in the system.

In terms of size in the Global Infrastructure, the hierarchy is as follows:

Regions > Availability Zone > Single Data Center

Now that we’ve learned about the concepts of Regions, Availability Zone, and Single Data Center, questions may arise about how to choose them when setting up a system. At this stage, there are some important questions to consider.

Factors to consider when choosing an AWS Region:

• Compliance: Know the regulations in the region where you are located.
• Latency: Communication/access in your region should be fast.
• Pricing: It should fit your budget (Note that pricing may vary between regions due to geographical taxation policies).
• Service Availability: There should be no service interruptions; it should be continuously accessible.

Below are some example AWS Region names provided by AWS:

Example Regions:

• us-east-1a is an Availability Zone in us-east-1 (N. Virginia Region).
• sa-east-1b is an Availability Zone in sa-east-1 (São Paulo Region).

AWS Global Edge Network

Source: https://aws.amazon.com/tr/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/well-architecting-online-applications-with-cloudfront-and-aws-global-accelerator/

The term “Global Edge Network” is often used to pronounce a global infrastructure, but AWS has a service called AWS Global Accelerator, which is a high-performance network infrastructure service that ensures the secure and fastest transmission of user data with low latency.

The Global Edge Network consists of two components:

1. Edge Location
2. Regional Edge Caches

Edge Location:

AWS Edge Locations are part of AWS’s global network infrastructure. Edge Locations are designed to perform operations related to content distribution, acceleration, and various services closer to the users.

• Content Distribution: Edge Locations are used to deliver content more quickly and reliably to customers through a content delivery network (CDN). This enables more effective delivery of web pages, images, videos, and other content.
• Amazon CloudFront Integration: AWS Edge Locations integrate with Amazon CloudFront. Amazon CloudFront is a global content delivery service used to deliver content to customers more quickly through Edge Locations.
• AWS Lambda Edge: AWS Lambda Edge utilizes Edge Locations to add functionality. This allows dynamically responding to incoming requests using Lambda functions running in the content delivery network.
• API Gateway and Other AWS Services: Edge Locations integrate with Amazon API Gateway and other AWS services, providing users with closer access to API and other services.

Regional Edge Caches:

Also known as “regional edge caches,” these are CloudFront locations distributed worldwide and located near your viewers. Regional edge caches are positioned between your origin server and Points of Presence (POPs), which are global edge locations directly delivering content to viewers.

We have reached the end of the planned content for Part 1. While I have tried to explain simply and concisely, exploring AWS documentation can provide more in-depth information on each topic. Each topic is like an ocean when you delve into it.

Thank you for reading and stay healthy!