[AWS - Design Resilient Architectures] 1.1 Design a multi-tier architecture solution

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

• Vitural machine in the cloud
• Pay as you go
• Integrates with storage, netowrking, and security
• FAST! (you don't need to setup hardwares)

 

EC2 Benefits

• Time out market
• Scalability
• Reliability
• Security
• Control
• Services integration
• Cost efficiency

EC2 Deployment

 

EC2 Instance types

General Purpose

• T2, M5, M4 and M3
• Provides a balance of memory and network resources
• T2 provides burst performance
  • Credits accure during the idle times
  • Credits used to burst performance
  • You might have application which not used 6 hours... but at certain period, there are lots of customers.

Compute Optimized

• C5, C4 and C3
• Useful for CPU-intensive applications
  • Media coding
  • Intensive batch jobs
  • Many concurrent users
  • Gaming servers
  • Anything compute-intensive

Memory Optimized

• X1e, X1, R4, and R3
• Useful for high memory requirements 
  • Processing large datasets
  • In-memory databases
  • Big data processing

Storage Optimized

• H1, I3, and D2
• Useful for high sequential read/writes to local storage
  • Relational databases
  • Data warehousing
  • Image storage and processing

Pro Tips:

Memory optimized / Storage Optimized looks like there are some overlapped. The rule is if you need both Memory & Storage optimized, you always choose a Memory optimized instance and add implement the type of EBS volume that's give you storage optimization with that.

 

Advanced Computing

• Pe, P2, G3, and F1
• Only useful for specialty hardware compute requirement
  • Graphics processing Unit (GPU)
  • FPGA

Pro Tips:

Bare Metal instances such as I3en and C5n, instances runing directly on your hardwares.

 

Amazon Machine Image (AMI)

• A blueprint including a machine image and details for configuration
• Each instance (AWS term) is an instance (general term)
• Free AMIs are available from Amazon and the community
• Paid AMIs are available from the AWS marketplace

 

Reference Architectures

• Well-architected frameworks
• AWS created architecture plans for specific scenarios
  • HIPAA
  • PCI-DSS
  • UK-OFFICIAL

AWS Quick Start

Using Quick Start, looking for the template which you are interested in, download the template, load into CloudFormation Desiger, you can quickly see the structure.

 

Simple Workflow (SWF)

• Will be replaced by Step Function
• Defines the sequence of events required to achieve a workflow
• Used in decoupled applications

Workflow

• Activitiess that result in a desired objective
• Logic that controls the activites
  • Decider function determines best workflow
• Operates in a logical boundary in SWF to constrain the scope of the activites

SWF Activity Tasks

• One invocation of an activity: exp: processing an order
• Maybe invoked multiple times

SWF Activity Worker

• The applications that receives and processes activity tasks

SWF was the first full-features workflow management solution introduced in AWS.

SWF allows for the definition of sequenced events and is used in decoupled applications.

A workflow includes the activities and logic required to complete a process.

 

Step Functions

• AWS recommended practice
  • Eventually replacing SWF
• Similar to SWF in functionality
  • Uses state machines: Decider, Activity tasks, Worker tasks

 A task is a single unit of work and choices provide branching logic.

Step functions support parallel processing.