Knowt
Module 1 - AWS
Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of compute power, database, storage, applications, and other IT resources via the internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. These resources run on server computers that are located in large data centers in different locations around the world. When you use a cloud service provider like AWS, that service provider owns the computers that you are using. These resources can be used together like building blocks to build solutions that help meet business goals and satisfy technology requirements.
Infrastructure as a Software
Cloud computing enables you to stop thinking of your infrastructure as hardware, and instead think of (and use) it as software. But what does this mean?
Traditional Computing Model
In the traditional computing model, infrastructure is thought of as hardware. Hardware solutions are physical, which means they require space, staff, physical security, planning, and capital expenditure.
In addition to significant upfront investment, another prohibitive aspect of traditional computing is the long hardware procurement cycle that involves acquiring, provisioning, and maintaining on-premises infrastructure.
With a hardware solution, you must ask if there is enough resource capacity or sufficient storage to meet your needs, and you provision capacity by guessing theoretical maximum peaks. If you don’t meet your projected maximum peak, then you pay for expensive resources that stay idle. If you exceed your projected maximum peak, then you don’t have sufficient capacity to meet your needs. And if your needs change, then you must spend the time, effort, and money required to implement a new solution. For example, if you wanted to provision a new website, you would need to buy the hardware, rack and stack it, put it in a data center, and then manage it or have someone else manage it. This approach is expensive and time-consuming.
Cloud Computing Model
By contrast, cloud computing enables you to think of your infrastructure as software. Software solutions are flexible. You can select the cloud services that best match your needs, provision and terminate those resources on-demand, and pay for what you use. You can elastically scale resources up and down in an automated fashion. With the cloud computing model, you can treat resources as temporary and disposable. The flexibility that cloud computing offers enables businesses to implement new solutions quickly and with low upfront costs.
Compared to hardware solutions, software solutions can change much more quickly, easily, and cost-effectively.
Cloud computing helps developers and IT departments avoid undifferentiated work like procurement, maintenance, and capacity planning, thus enabling them to focus on what matters most.
As cloud computing has grown in popularity, several different service models and deployment strategies have emerged to help meet the specific needs of different users. Each type of cloud service model and deployment strategy provides you with a different level of control, flexibility, and management. Understanding the differences between these cloud service models and deployment strategies can help you decide what set of services is right for your needs.
Cloud Service Models
There are three main cloud service models. Each model represents a different part of the cloud computing stack and gives you a different level of control over your IT resources:
Infrastructure as a service (IaaS): Services in this category are the basic building blocks for cloud IT and typically provide you with access to networking features, computers (virtual or on dedicated hardware), and data storage space. IaaS provides you with the highest level of flexibility and management control over your IT resources. It is the most similar to existing IT resources that many IT departments and developers are familiar with today.
Platform as a service (PaaS): Services in this category reduce the need for you to manage the underlying infrastructure (usually hardware and operating systems) and enable you to focus on the deployment and management of your applications.
Software as a service (SaaS): Services in this category provide you with a completed product that the service provider runs and manages. In most cases, software as a service refers to end-user applications. With a SaaS offering, you do not have to think about how the service is maintained or how the underlying infrastructure is managed. You need to think only about how you plan to use that particular piece of software. A common example of a SaaS application is web-based email, where you can send and receive email without managing feature additions to the email product or maintaining the servers and operating systems that the email program runs on.
Cloud Computing Deployment Models
There are three main cloud computing deployment models, which represent the cloud environments that your applications can be deployed in:
Cloud: A cloud-based application is fully deployed in the cloud, and all parts of the application run in the cloud. Applications in the cloud have either been created in the cloud or have been migrated from an existing infrastructure to take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing (see https://aws.amazon.com/what-is-cloud-computing/). Cloud-based applications can be built on low-level infrastructure pieces or they can use higher-level services that provide abstraction from the management, architecting, and scaling requirements of core infrastructure.
Hybrid: A hybrid deployment is a way to connect infrastructure and applications between cloud-based resources and existing resources that are not located in the cloud. The most common method of hybrid deployment is between the cloud and existing on-premises infrastructure. This model enables an organization to extend and grow their infrastructure into the cloud while connecting cloud resources to internal systems.
On-premises: Deploying resources on-premises, using virtualization and resource management tools, is sometimes called private cloud. While on-premises deployment does not provide many of the benefits of cloud computing, it is sometimes sought for its ability to provide dedicated resources. In most cases, this deployment model is the same as legacy IT infrastructure, but it might also use application management and virtualization technologies to increase resource utilization.
Similarities between AWS and traditional IT
There are many similarities between AWS and the traditional, on-premises IT space:
AWS security groups, network access control lists (network ACLs), and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) are similar to firewalls, access control lists (ACLs), and administrators.
Elastic Load Balancing and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) are similar to routers, network pipelines, and switches.
Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances are similar to on-premises servers.
Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) are similar to direct attached storage (DAS), storage area networks (SAN), network attached storage (NAS), and a relational database management service (RDBMS).
With AWS services and features, you can do almost everything that you would want to do with a traditional data center.
Section 2: Advantages of Cloud Computing
Trade capital expense for variable expense
Advantage #1—Trade capital expense for variable expense: Capital expenses (capex) are funds that a company uses to acquire, upgrade, and maintain physical assets such as property, industrial buildings, or equipment. Do you remember the data center example in the traditional computing model where you needed to rack and stack the hardware, and then manage it all? You must pay for everything in the data center whether you use it or not.
By contrast, a variable expense is an expense that the person who bears the cost can easily alter or avoid. Instead of investing heavily in data centers and servers before you know how you will use them, you can pay only when you consume resources and pay only for the amount you consume. Thus, you save money on technology. It also enables you to adapt to new applications with as much space as you need in minutes, instead of weeks or days. Maintenance is reduced, so you can spend focus more on the core goals of your business.
Massive Economies of Scale
Advantage #2—Benefit from massive economies of scale: By using cloud computing, you can achieve a lower variable cost than you can get on your own. Because usage from hundreds of thousands of customers is aggregated in the cloud, providers such as AWS can achieve higher economies of scale, which translates into lower pay-as-you-go prices.
Stop Guessing Capacity
Advantage #3—Stop guessing capacity: Eliminate guessing about your infrastructure capacity needs. When you make a capacity decision before you deploy an application, you often either have expensive idle resources or deal with limited capacity. With cloud computing, these problems go away. You can access as much or as little as you need, and scale up and down as required with only a few minutes’ notice.
Increase speed and agility
Advantage #4—Increase speed and agility: In a cloud computing environment, new IT resources are only a click away, which means that you reduce the time it takes to make those resources available to your developers from weeks to just minutes. The result is a dramatic increase in agility for the organization because the cost and time that it takes to experiment and develop are significantly lower.
Stop spending money on running and maintaining data centers
Advantage #5—Stop spending money on running and maintaining data centers: Focus on projects that differentiate your business instead of focusing on the infrastructure. Cloud computing enables you to focus on your own customers instead of the heavy lifting of racking, stacking, and powering servers.
Go Global in Minutes
Advantage #6—Go global in minutes: You can deploy your application in multiple AWS Regions around the world with just a few clicks. As a result, you can provide a lower latency and better experience for your customers simply and at minimal cost.
Section 3 Introduction to Amazon Web Services (AWS)
What are web services?
In general, a web service is any piece of software that makes itself available over the internet or on private (intranet) networks. A web service uses a standardized format—such as Extensible Markup Language (XML) or JavaScript Object Notation (JSON)—for the request and the response of an application programming interface (API) interaction. It is not tied to any one operating system or programming language. It’s self-describing via an interface definition file and it is discoverable.
What is AWS?
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a secure cloud platform that offers a broad set of global cloud-based products. Because these products are delivered over the internet, you have on-demand access to the compute, storage, network, database, and other IT resources that you might need for your projects—and the tools to manage them. You can immediately provision and launch AWS resources. The resources are ready for you to use in minutes.
AWS offers flexibility. Your AWS environment can be reconfigured and updated on demand, scaled up or down automatically to meet usage patterns and optimize spending, or shut down temporarily or permanently. The billing for AWS services becomes an operational expense instead of a capital expense.
AWS services are designed to work together to support virtually any type of application or workload. Think of these services like building blocks, which you can assemble quickly to build sophisticated, scalable solutions, and then adjust them as your needs change.
Categories of AWS services
AWS services fall under different categories, and each category contains one or more services. You can select the services that you want from these different categories to build your solutions.
Compute Category
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
Storage Service Category
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
Nonrelational Database
Amazon DynamoDB
Networking Category
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)
Choosing a Service
Which service you choose to use will depend on your business goals and technology requirements. In the example you just looked at, the solution made use of Amazon EC2 as the compute service. However, that is only one of many compute services that AWS offers. Here are some other AWS compute offerings that you might choose to use for the following example use cases:
Amazon EC2(https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/): You want complete control over your AWS computing resources.
AWS Lambda (https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/): You want to run your code and not manage or provision servers.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk (https://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/): You want a service that deploys, manages, and scales your web applications for you.
Amazon Lightsail(https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/): You need a lightweight cloud platform for a simple web application.
AWS Batch (https://aws.amazon.com/batch/): You need to run hundreds of thousands of batch workloads.
AWS Outposts (https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/): You want to run AWS infrastructure in your on-premises data center.
Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) (https://aws.amazon.com/ecs/)
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) (https://aws.amazon.com/eks/)
AWS Fargate(https://aws.amazon.com/fargate/): You want to implement a containers or microservices architecture.
VMware Cloud on AWS (https://aws.amazon.com/vmware/): You have an on-premises server virtualization platform that you want to migrate to AWS.
Similarly, there are a variety of services for you to choose from in the other categories, and the number of offerings keeps growing.
Three ways to interact with AWS
You might wonder how to access the broad array of services that are offered by AWS. There are three ways to create and manage resources on the AWS Cloud:
AWS Management Console: The console provides a rich graphical interface to a majority of the features offered by AWS. (Note: From time to time, new features might not have all of their capabilities included in the console when the feature initially launches.)
AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI): The AWS CLI provides a suite of utilities that can be launched from a command script in Linux, macOS, or Microsoft Windows.
Software development kits (SDKs): AWS provides packages that enable accessing AWS in a variety of popular programming languages. This makes it easy to use AWS in your existing applications and it also enables you to create applications that deploy and monitor complex systems entirely through code. All three options are built on a common REST-like API that serves as the foundation of AWS.
Section 4: Moving to the AWS Cloud – The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF)
AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF)
Each organization’s cloud adoption journey is unique. However, in order for any organization to successfully migrate its IT portfolio to the cloud, three elements (that is, people, process, and technology) must be in alignment. Business and technology leaders in an organization must understand the organization’s current state, target state, and the transition that is needed to achieve the target state so they can set goals and create processes for staff.
The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) provides guidance and best practices to help organizations identify gaps in skills and processes. It also helps organizations build a comprehensive approach to cloud computing—both across the organization and throughout the IT lifecycle—to accelerate successful cloud adoption.
At the highest level, the AWS CAF organizes guidance into six areas of focus, called perspectives. Perspectives span people, processes, and technology. Each perspective consists of a set of capabilities, which covers distinct responsibilities that are owned or managed by functionally related stakeholders.
Capabilities within each perspective are used to identify which areas of an organization require attention. By identifying gaps, prescriptive work streams can be created that support a successful cloud journey.
Six Core Perspectives
Business Capabilities
Business perspective
Stakeholders from the Business perspective (for example, business managers, finance managers, budget owners, and strategy stakeholders) can use the AWS CAF to create a strong business case for cloud adoption and prioritize cloud adoption initiatives. Stakeholders should ensure that an organization’s business strategies and goals align with its IT strategies and goals.
People perspective
Stakeholders from the People perspective (for example, human resources, staffing, and people managers) can use the AWS CAF to evaluate organizational structures and roles, new skill and process requirements, and identify gaps. Performing an analysis of needs and gaps can help prioritize training, staffing, and organizational changes to build an agile organization.
Governance perspective
Stakeholders from the Governance perspective (for example, the Chief Information Officer or CIO, program managers, enterprise architects, business analysts, and portfolio managers) can use the AWS CAF to focus on the skills and processes that are needed to align IT strategy and goals with business strategy and goals. This focus helps the organization maximize the business value of its IT investment and minimize the business risks.
Technical Capabilities
Platform perspective
Stakeholders from the Platform perspective (for example, Chief Technology Officer or CTO, IT managers, and solutions architects) use a variety of architectural dimensions and models to understand and communicate the nature of IT systems and their relationships. They must be able to describe the architecture of the target state environment in detail. The AWS CAF includes principles and patterns for implementing new solutions on the cloud, and for migrating on-premises workloads to the cloud.
Security Perspective
Stakeholders from the Security perspective (for example, Chief Information Security Officer or CISO, IT security managers, and IT security analysts) must ensure that the organization meets security objectives for visibility, auditability, control, and agility. Security perspective stakeholders can use the AWS CAF to structure the selection and implementation of security controls that meet the organization’s needs.
Operations perspective
Stakeholders from the Operations perspective (for example, IT operations managers and IT support managers) define how day-to-day, quarter-to-quarter, and year-to-year business is conducted. Stakeholders from the Operations perspective align with and support the operations of the business. The AWS CAF helps these stakeholders define current operating procedures. It also helps them identify the process changes and training that are needed to implement successful cloud adoption.
Module 1 - AWS
Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of compute power, database, storage, applications, and other IT resources via the internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. These resources run on server computers that are located in large data centers in different locations around the world. When you use a cloud service provider like AWS, that service provider owns the computers that you are using. These resources can be used together like building blocks to build solutions that help meet business goals and satisfy technology requirements.
Infrastructure as a Software
Cloud computing enables you to stop thinking of your infrastructure as hardware, and instead think of (and use) it as software. But what does this mean?
Traditional Computing Model
In the traditional computing model, infrastructure is thought of as hardware. Hardware solutions are physical, which means they require space, staff, physical security, planning, and capital expenditure.
In addition to significant upfront investment, another prohibitive aspect of traditional computing is the long hardware procurement cycle that involves acquiring, provisioning, and maintaining on-premises infrastructure.
With a hardware solution, you must ask if there is enough resource capacity or sufficient storage to meet your needs, and you provision capacity by guessing theoretical maximum peaks. If you don’t meet your projected maximum peak, then you pay for expensive resources that stay idle. If you exceed your projected maximum peak, then you don’t have sufficient capacity to meet your needs. And if your needs change, then you must spend the time, effort, and money required to implement a new solution. For example, if you wanted to provision a new website, you would need to buy the hardware, rack and stack it, put it in a data center, and then manage it or have someone else manage it. This approach is expensive and time-consuming.
Cloud Computing Model
By contrast, cloud computing enables you to think of your infrastructure as software. Software solutions are flexible. You can select the cloud services that best match your needs, provision and terminate those resources on-demand, and pay for what you use. You can elastically scale resources up and down in an automated fashion. With the cloud computing model, you can treat resources as temporary and disposable. The flexibility that cloud computing offers enables businesses to implement new solutions quickly and with low upfront costs.
Compared to hardware solutions, software solutions can change much more quickly, easily, and cost-effectively.
Cloud computing helps developers and IT departments avoid undifferentiated work like procurement, maintenance, and capacity planning, thus enabling them to focus on what matters most.
As cloud computing has grown in popularity, several different service models and deployment strategies have emerged to help meet the specific needs of different users. Each type of cloud service model and deployment strategy provides you with a different level of control, flexibility, and management. Understanding the differences between these cloud service models and deployment strategies can help you decide what set of services is right for your needs.
Cloud Service Models
There are three main cloud service models. Each model represents a different part of the cloud computing stack and gives you a different level of control over your IT resources:
Infrastructure as a service (IaaS): Services in this category are the basic building blocks for cloud IT and typically provide you with access to networking features, computers (virtual or on dedicated hardware), and data storage space. IaaS provides you with the highest level of flexibility and management control over your IT resources. It is the most similar to existing IT resources that many IT departments and developers are familiar with today.
Platform as a service (PaaS): Services in this category reduce the need for you to manage the underlying infrastructure (usually hardware and operating systems) and enable you to focus on the deployment and management of your applications.
Software as a service (SaaS): Services in this category provide you with a completed product that the service provider runs and manages. In most cases, software as a service refers to end-user applications. With a SaaS offering, you do not have to think about how the service is maintained or how the underlying infrastructure is managed. You need to think only about how you plan to use that particular piece of software. A common example of a SaaS application is web-based email, where you can send and receive email without managing feature additions to the email product or maintaining the servers and operating systems that the email program runs on.
Cloud Computing Deployment Models
There are three main cloud computing deployment models, which represent the cloud environments that your applications can be deployed in:
Cloud: A cloud-based application is fully deployed in the cloud, and all parts of the application run in the cloud. Applications in the cloud have either been created in the cloud or have been migrated from an existing infrastructure to take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing (see https://aws.amazon.com/what-is-cloud-computing/). Cloud-based applications can be built on low-level infrastructure pieces or they can use higher-level services that provide abstraction from the management, architecting, and scaling requirements of core infrastructure.
Hybrid: A hybrid deployment is a way to connect infrastructure and applications between cloud-based resources and existing resources that are not located in the cloud. The most common method of hybrid deployment is between the cloud and existing on-premises infrastructure. This model enables an organization to extend and grow their infrastructure into the cloud while connecting cloud resources to internal systems.
On-premises: Deploying resources on-premises, using virtualization and resource management tools, is sometimes called private cloud. While on-premises deployment does not provide many of the benefits of cloud computing, it is sometimes sought for its ability to provide dedicated resources. In most cases, this deployment model is the same as legacy IT infrastructure, but it might also use application management and virtualization technologies to increase resource utilization.
Similarities between AWS and traditional IT
There are many similarities between AWS and the traditional, on-premises IT space:
AWS security groups, network access control lists (network ACLs), and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) are similar to firewalls, access control lists (ACLs), and administrators.
Elastic Load Balancing and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) are similar to routers, network pipelines, and switches.
Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances are similar to on-premises servers.
Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) are similar to direct attached storage (DAS), storage area networks (SAN), network attached storage (NAS), and a relational database management service (RDBMS).
With AWS services and features, you can do almost everything that you would want to do with a traditional data center.
Section 2: Advantages of Cloud Computing
Trade capital expense for variable expense
Advantage #1—Trade capital expense for variable expense: Capital expenses (capex) are funds that a company uses to acquire, upgrade, and maintain physical assets such as property, industrial buildings, or equipment. Do you remember the data center example in the traditional computing model where you needed to rack and stack the hardware, and then manage it all? You must pay for everything in the data center whether you use it or not.
By contrast, a variable expense is an expense that the person who bears the cost can easily alter or avoid. Instead of investing heavily in data centers and servers before you know how you will use them, you can pay only when you consume resources and pay only for the amount you consume. Thus, you save money on technology. It also enables you to adapt to new applications with as much space as you need in minutes, instead of weeks or days. Maintenance is reduced, so you can spend focus more on the core goals of your business.
Massive Economies of Scale
Advantage #2—Benefit from massive economies of scale: By using cloud computing, you can achieve a lower variable cost than you can get on your own. Because usage from hundreds of thousands of customers is aggregated in the cloud, providers such as AWS can achieve higher economies of scale, which translates into lower pay-as-you-go prices.
Stop Guessing Capacity
Advantage #3—Stop guessing capacity: Eliminate guessing about your infrastructure capacity needs. When you make a capacity decision before you deploy an application, you often either have expensive idle resources or deal with limited capacity. With cloud computing, these problems go away. You can access as much or as little as you need, and scale up and down as required with only a few minutes’ notice.
Increase speed and agility
Advantage #4—Increase speed and agility: In a cloud computing environment, new IT resources are only a click away, which means that you reduce the time it takes to make those resources available to your developers from weeks to just minutes. The result is a dramatic increase in agility for the organization because the cost and time that it takes to experiment and develop are significantly lower.
Stop spending money on running and maintaining data centers
Advantage #5—Stop spending money on running and maintaining data centers: Focus on projects that differentiate your business instead of focusing on the infrastructure. Cloud computing enables you to focus on your own customers instead of the heavy lifting of racking, stacking, and powering servers.
Go Global in Minutes
Advantage #6—Go global in minutes: You can deploy your application in multiple AWS Regions around the world with just a few clicks. As a result, you can provide a lower latency and better experience for your customers simply and at minimal cost.
Section 3 Introduction to Amazon Web Services (AWS)
What are web services?
In general, a web service is any piece of software that makes itself available over the internet or on private (intranet) networks. A web service uses a standardized format—such as Extensible Markup Language (XML) or JavaScript Object Notation (JSON)—for the request and the response of an application programming interface (API) interaction. It is not tied to any one operating system or programming language. It’s self-describing via an interface definition file and it is discoverable.
What is AWS?
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a secure cloud platform that offers a broad set of global cloud-based products. Because these products are delivered over the internet, you have on-demand access to the compute, storage, network, database, and other IT resources that you might need for your projects—and the tools to manage them. You can immediately provision and launch AWS resources. The resources are ready for you to use in minutes.
AWS offers flexibility. Your AWS environment can be reconfigured and updated on demand, scaled up or down automatically to meet usage patterns and optimize spending, or shut down temporarily or permanently. The billing for AWS services becomes an operational expense instead of a capital expense.
AWS services are designed to work together to support virtually any type of application or workload. Think of these services like building blocks, which you can assemble quickly to build sophisticated, scalable solutions, and then adjust them as your needs change.
Categories of AWS services
AWS services fall under different categories, and each category contains one or more services. You can select the services that you want from these different categories to build your solutions.
Compute Category
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
Storage Service Category
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
Nonrelational Database
Amazon DynamoDB
Networking Category
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)
Choosing a Service
Which service you choose to use will depend on your business goals and technology requirements. In the example you just looked at, the solution made use of Amazon EC2 as the compute service. However, that is only one of many compute services that AWS offers. Here are some other AWS compute offerings that you might choose to use for the following example use cases:
Amazon EC2(https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/): You want complete control over your AWS computing resources.
AWS Lambda (https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/): You want to run your code and not manage or provision servers.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk (https://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/): You want a service that deploys, manages, and scales your web applications for you.
Amazon Lightsail(https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/): You need a lightweight cloud platform for a simple web application.
AWS Batch (https://aws.amazon.com/batch/): You need to run hundreds of thousands of batch workloads.
AWS Outposts (https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/): You want to run AWS infrastructure in your on-premises data center.
Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) (https://aws.amazon.com/ecs/)
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) (https://aws.amazon.com/eks/)
AWS Fargate(https://aws.amazon.com/fargate/): You want to implement a containers or microservices architecture.
VMware Cloud on AWS (https://aws.amazon.com/vmware/): You have an on-premises server virtualization platform that you want to migrate to AWS.
Similarly, there are a variety of services for you to choose from in the other categories, and the number of offerings keeps growing.
Three ways to interact with AWS
You might wonder how to access the broad array of services that are offered by AWS. There are three ways to create and manage resources on the AWS Cloud:
AWS Management Console: The console provides a rich graphical interface to a majority of the features offered by AWS. (Note: From time to time, new features might not have all of their capabilities included in the console when the feature initially launches.)
AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI): The AWS CLI provides a suite of utilities that can be launched from a command script in Linux, macOS, or Microsoft Windows.
Software development kits (SDKs): AWS provides packages that enable accessing AWS in a variety of popular programming languages. This makes it easy to use AWS in your existing applications and it also enables you to create applications that deploy and monitor complex systems entirely through code. All three options are built on a common REST-like API that serves as the foundation of AWS.
Section 4: Moving to the AWS Cloud – The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF)
AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF)
Each organization’s cloud adoption journey is unique. However, in order for any organization to successfully migrate its IT portfolio to the cloud, three elements (that is, people, process, and technology) must be in alignment. Business and technology leaders in an organization must understand the organization’s current state, target state, and the transition that is needed to achieve the target state so they can set goals and create processes for staff.
The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) provides guidance and best practices to help organizations identify gaps in skills and processes. It also helps organizations build a comprehensive approach to cloud computing—both across the organization and throughout the IT lifecycle—to accelerate successful cloud adoption.
At the highest level, the AWS CAF organizes guidance into six areas of focus, called perspectives. Perspectives span people, processes, and technology. Each perspective consists of a set of capabilities, which covers distinct responsibilities that are owned or managed by functionally related stakeholders.
Capabilities within each perspective are used to identify which areas of an organization require attention. By identifying gaps, prescriptive work streams can be created that support a successful cloud journey.
Six Core Perspectives
Business Capabilities
Business perspective
Stakeholders from the Business perspective (for example, business managers, finance managers, budget owners, and strategy stakeholders) can use the AWS CAF to create a strong business case for cloud adoption and prioritize cloud adoption initiatives. Stakeholders should ensure that an organization’s business strategies and goals align with its IT strategies and goals.
People perspective
Stakeholders from the People perspective (for example, human resources, staffing, and people managers) can use the AWS CAF to evaluate organizational structures and roles, new skill and process requirements, and identify gaps. Performing an analysis of needs and gaps can help prioritize training, staffing, and organizational changes to build an agile organization.
Governance perspective
Stakeholders from the Governance perspective (for example, the Chief Information Officer or CIO, program managers, enterprise architects, business analysts, and portfolio managers) can use the AWS CAF to focus on the skills and processes that are needed to align IT strategy and goals with business strategy and goals. This focus helps the organization maximize the business value of its IT investment and minimize the business risks.
Technical Capabilities
Platform perspective
Stakeholders from the Platform perspective (for example, Chief Technology Officer or CTO, IT managers, and solutions architects) use a variety of architectural dimensions and models to understand and communicate the nature of IT systems and their relationships. They must be able to describe the architecture of the target state environment in detail. The AWS CAF includes principles and patterns for implementing new solutions on the cloud, and for migrating on-premises workloads to the cloud.
Security Perspective
Stakeholders from the Security perspective (for example, Chief Information Security Officer or CISO, IT security managers, and IT security analysts) must ensure that the organization meets security objectives for visibility, auditability, control, and agility. Security perspective stakeholders can use the AWS CAF to structure the selection and implementation of security controls that meet the organization’s needs.
Operations perspective
Stakeholders from the Operations perspective (for example, IT operations managers and IT support managers) define how day-to-day, quarter-to-quarter, and year-to-year business is conducted. Stakeholders from the Operations perspective align with and support the operations of the business. The AWS CAF helps these stakeholders define current operating procedures. It also helps them identify the process changes and training that are needed to implement successful cloud adoption.
