A Computer Scientist learns Amazon Web Services (AWS) - Introduction

"A Computer Scientist learns Amazon Web Services (AWS)"

Sounds harmless? What could go wrong?

Journey with me into the fog of AWS for a few weeks as I teach myself AWS from the solution architecture book I recently acquired.

I am only to likely comment on things that I find interesting, odd, unusual, etc.

My background is computer science (R&D including machine learning, UNIX, software engineering, enterprise java benchmarking, middleware, Grid computing, web services, and software architecture analysis and performance engineering for large scale distributed systems including cloud). The performance engineering approach is to automatically build predictive performance models from APM data (e.g. Dynatrace) allowing questions about scale (time, size, number) and architectural and infrastructure changes to be explored and predicted. We've modelled a few migrations to/from Cloud so I have a pretty good idea about some of the real performance, scalability, and cost issues people face in practice. I'm currently CTO of a small NICTA spin-out company based in Canberra Australia.  


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Which Amazon Web Services are Interoperable?

Image
Which Amazon Web Services are Interoperable? This is a question I asked when I started studying for AWS certification, asked a few AWS certified architects at Sydney Summit 201 (the answer typically was "all of them as they all use REST APIs", really?), and have attempted to answer from the documentation. They only way I could think to answer this so far is go through the documentation for the 3500 services (according to April AWS service update) and create a dependencies graph (which services interoperate with which other services).  I've also noticed that some of the certification questions ask which for AWS X, which other AWS services interoperate with it? So obviously it's important. Obviously AWS could answer this by monitoring (E.g. with X-Ray) which services call or are called with services and create a interoperability graph and frequency of calls. I've since come up with another approach to answer this.  I've used the 16 aws reference architecture
Read more

AWS Certification glossary quiz: IAM

Image
I also keep getting stuck on IAM and key related questions so here's a quiz on IAM. Qn1  One of two possible outcomes (the other is  deny ) when an  IAM  access  policy  is evaluated. When a user makes a request to AWS, AWS evaluates the request based on all permissions that apply to the user and then returns either deny or this one. alarm permit true allo w Qn2  A web service that enables  Amazon Web Services  (AWS)  customers to manage users and user permissions within AWS. AWS user service (AUS) AWS customer service (ACS) AWS access management (AAM) AWS Identity and Access Management  (IAM) Qn3:  An  IAM   managed policy  that is created and managed by AWS. AWS management AWS policy AWS IAM policy AWS managed policy Qn4:  A web service for requesting temporary, limited-privilege credentials for  AWS Identity and Access Management  (IAM)  users or for users that you authenticate ( federated users ). AWS credential service (AWS ACS) AWS token service
Read more

AWS SWF vs Lambda + step functions? Simple answer is use Lambda for all new applications.

Image
I do like my Lamb (daaaa)! What's the difference between SWF and Lambda + step functions? Well, for a start they can be used together. Benefits and Limitations of using Lambda Tasks There are a number of benefits of using Lambda tasks in place of a traditional Amazon SWF activity: Lambda tasks don’t need to be registered or versioned like Amazon SWF activity types. You can use any existing Lambda functions that you've already defined in your workflows. Lambda functions are called directly by Amazon SWF; there is no need for you to implement a worker program to execute them as you must do with traditional activities. Lambda provides you with metrics and logs for tracking and analyzing your function executions. There are also a number of limitations regarding Lambda tasks that you should be aware of: Lambda tasks can only be run in AWS regions that provide support for Lambda. See  Lambda Regions and Endpoints  in the  Amazon Web Services General
Read more