May 2023 – Page 3 – A Tech Ref

Intro to Subnet and VPC

A subnet in AWS VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) is a range of IP addresses in your VPC that you can use to launch your resources, such as EC2 instances or RDS databases. A subnet is a subdivision of an IP network, which enables you to segment and isolate different parts of your network. When you create a VPC, you can create one or more subnets within it. Each subnet must be associated with a specific availability zone within a region. Availability zones are physically separate locations within a region, each with its own power source, network, and connectivity to other availability zones. Continue reading

Intro to EC2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a web service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that enables users to provision and manage virtual machines (VMs) in the cloud. It provides scalable computing capacity in the cloud, allowing users to quickly and easily launch virtual machines with a variety of operating systems and software configurations.

With EC2, users can choose from a wide range of instance types optimized for different types of workloads, including general-purpose, compute-optimized, memory-optimized, and storage-optimized instances. EC2 also provides several features and capabilities, including the ability to configure security groups and network settings, attach storage volumes, and scale up or down as needed.

Intro to AWS VPC

AWS VPC or Amazon Virtual Private Cloud is a service that enables customers to launch their AWS resources in a virtual network that is logically isolated from other networks in the AWS cloud, and in some cases, even from the internet. When creating a VPC, customers can define their own IP address range, subnets, and route tables, and have full control over their virtual network topology. They can also configure security groups and network ACLs to control access to their resources, and use a variety of network connectivity options, such as virtual private network (VPN) or AWS Direct Connect, to securely connect their VPC to their on-premises data centers or other networks. Continue reading

DynamoDB and DAX

DAX (DynamoDB Accelerator) is a fully managed, in-memory caching service for DynamoDB that can significantly improve read performance by reducing the number of requests to DynamoDB. DAX is designed to work with DynamoDB, and it provides a fast, scalable, and highly available caching layer that sits between your application and DynamoDB.

DAX can significantly improve read performance by reducing the number of requests to DynamoDB and caching frequently accessed data in memory. By using DAX, you can improve the performance and cost-effectiveness of your application while minimizing infrastructure management.

DynamoDB Performance and Optimizations

DynamoDB is designed to provide high performance and scalability, even at scale. It is a highly available and durable NoSQL database service that can handle large volumes of data and requests with low latency.

DynamoDB is a distributed database service that uses sharding to partition data across multiple servers called nodes. Each node is responsible for storing a subset of the data, and the partition key is used to determine which node stores the data. This allows DynamoDB to scale horizontally by adding more nodes to the cluster as the data and request volume grows.

Intro to AWS Region

AWS Region is a physical location where AWS maintains multiple data centers that are interconnected by a low-latency network. Each region is a separate geographic area, identified by a unique name and code, such as us-east-1 or eu-west-2. AWS Regions are strategically located in different parts of the world to provide customers with a wide selection of geographic locations for hosting their resources, applications, and services. Each AWS Region consists of two or more Availability Zones (AZs), which are physically separate data centers located within a single region. Each AZ is designed to be highly available and fault-tolerant, with independent power, cooling, and networking infrastructure. Continue reading

Read contents of S3 bucket using AWS lambda

Here is an example AWS Lambda function written in Python that reads a file from an S3 bucket. In this example, the lambda_handler function is the entry point for the Lambda function. It takes two parameters, event and context.

The event parameter contains information about the S3 bucket and object that triggered the Lambda function, and the context parameter contains information about the runtime environment of the function.

Intro to AWS DynamoDB

AWS DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is a high-performance, scalable, and highly available database that can handle millions of requests per second and can automatically partition and re-partition data across a cluster of machines.

DynamoDB allows you to store and retrieve any amount of data and serve any level of request traffic, and provides a flexible and efficient data model that supports both document and key-value store paradigms. It also offers advanced features such as automated backups, global replication, and fine-grained access control.

Intro to AWS Serverless

AWS Serverless is a cloud computing model in which the cloud provider (AWS) manages the infrastructure and automatically provisions, scales, and manages the computing resources required to run an application. In a Serverless architecture, the customer only pays for the actual usage of the application, rather than paying for fixed computing capacity. AWS Serverless computing is based on the concept of functions as a service (FaaS). A function is a self-contained piece of code that performs a specific task, such as processing data or responding to an event. The AWS Lambda service is a FaaS service that allows developers to write and deploy functions in a variety of programming languages, including Java, Python, Node.js, C#, and more. Continue reading