AWS Basics

What is Scalability?

Scalability refers to the idea of system where each and every application or piece of infrastructure can be expanded to handle increased load. With respect to cloud computing, it provides solutions for improved scalability, efficiency, and productivity that supports business in many ways. This helps to secure data, enable teamwork from anywhere in the world, and find new ways and services to provide it to the customers. Thus, it unlocks the new business possibilities in cloud scalability with the help of Amazon Web Services. It is said that businesses adopting cloud computing can easily be able to increase their capacity on demand in order to scale quickly.

There are two types when it comes to scalability, namely, vertical scaling and horizontal scaling, and one of the prime reasons for scaling the system is to increase the performance. Horizontal scaling is considered a long-term advantage whereas we can consider vertical scaling as a short-term advantage, as we can add many servers to the infrastructure but at some point, in time the hardware upgrades are not possible.

What is Data Store?

Data Store is connection to a store of data, irrespective of whether the data is stored in a database or in any of the file systems. The data store thus may be used as one of the sources of data for an application or maybe exported via the written staged data results of a process. It is used to persist the data needed by the microservices, and relational databases are still popular to store the structured kind of data and objects. AWS offers six database engines such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, and the Amazon Aurora, which is managed by the Amazon Relational Database Service, i.e., Amazon RDS.

When we talk about relational databases as the data store, it does not provide scaling, which can be difficult and time consuming to apply the methods to a high number of queries. Thus, NoSQL databases are assigned to meet the scalability, performance, and availability requirements.

What is Lambda?

Lambda is the compute service of AWS which allows you to run the code without any requirements of provisioning or managing the servers. Lambda runs the code on a high-availability compute infrastructure and also helps in performing the administrative of the resources which include server and operating system maintenance, automatic scaling, and much more. With the help of lambda, one can run the code on a virtual machine or environment with respect to any type of application or backend services.

The code is being organized into the lambda functions which runs the function only when it is needed and automatically scales from a few requests. The lambda functions can be invoked by using the Lambda API, where lambda can be used to process streaming data, creating your own backend which operates at the AWS scale, performance, and security, etc.

What is IaaS on AWS?

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is the business model which is delivered by the IT infrastructure involving compute, storage, and network resources over the internet. The IaaS can be used to request and configure the resources that is required to run the applications and the various IT systems. The responsibility with the user lies in deploying, maintaining, and supporting the applications, whereas the IaaS provider is responsible for maintaining the physical infrastructure. Thus, Infrastructure as a Service gives one the flexibility as well as the control over the various IT resources in a cost-effective manner.

What is CloudFormation?

AWS CloudFormation is a service which helps one to model and set the AWS resources such that one can spend less time managing the resources and focus more on the applications and that can run in the Amazon Web Services. The user can create a template which describes the AWS resources and CloudFormation would thus take care of the provisioning and configuration of those resources for the particular user. AWS CloudFormation is thus a service that gives the developers and businesses an easy way to create a collection of related AWS and resources to manage them in an orderly manner and make it predictable. It creates a bucket for each of the region in which the template file can be uploaded, where the buckets are accessible to anyone within the Amazon S3.

References:

What is scalability in cloud computing? (2021, October 27). A Cloud Guru, from https://acloudguru.com/blog/engineering/scalability-cloud-computing

Data store - Implementing Microservices on AWS. (n.d.), from https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/microservices-on-aws/data-store.html

What is AWS Lambda? - AWS Lambda. (n.d.), from https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/welcome.html

What is Infrastructure as a Service? IaaS Explained - AWS. (n.d.). Amazon Web Services, Inc, from https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/iaas/

What is AWS CloudFormation? - AWS CloudFormation. (n.d.), from https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/Welcome.html