Other Services

Trusted Advisor¶

It is an online resource to help you
- reduce cost
- increase performance
- improve security
Trusted Advisor provides real time guidance to help you provision your resources following AWS best practices.
AWS Trusted Advisor offers a Service Limits check (in the Performance category) that displays your usage and limits for some aspects of some services.
No need to install anything high level AWS account assessment
Analyses your AWS accounts and provides recommendation:
- It analyses 5 categories of problems → Cost, performance, security, fault tolerance, service limits.
Trusted advisor has 2 tiers:
- First Tier → Core Checks and recommendations for all customers
- Full Trusted Advisor → Available for Business & Enterprise support plans
  - Programmatic Access using AWS Support API

Keywords: service limits, questions, support API, real time, best practice.

CodeCommit is the AWS version of GitHub/GitLab.
CodeBuild is the AWS version of CI/CD tool like Jenkins.
CodeDeploy is for deploying code. Like blue/green strategy.
CodePipeline is for orchestrating everything.
- CI/CD pipeline to deliver all the way to ElasticBeanstalk.

CloudFormation is a declarative way for of outlining our AWS infrastructure for any resources.
CloudFormation works using templates.
The templates are uploaded in S3 and then referenced in CloudFormation.

To update a template, we can't edit previous ones. We have to re-upload a new version of the template to AWS

Template is also known as stack. Stacks are identified by a name
Deleting a stack deletes every single artifact that was created by CloudFormation.
CloudFormation is IaC (infrastructure as code),
We can leverage other templates/stacks created by people and we don't have to reinvent the wheel.
We can have different stacks for different things for separation of concerns.
We can use AWS CLI to fully automate infrastructure deployment using CloudFormation.
Some important template components are resources, parameters and outputs.
With StackSets we can Create, update, or delete stacks across multiple accounts and regions with a single operation. Useful in AWS organisations.
Use direct updates when you want to quickly deploy your updates.
With change sets, you can preview the changes AWS CloudFormation will make to your stack, and then decide whether to apply those changes.

Build serverless visual workflow to orchestrate your Lambda functions
Represent flow as a JSON state machine

Key words in questions to go for Step Functions serverless, state machine, workflow or serverless workflows.

It stands for simple workflow service
Code runs on EC2 (not serverless)
Amazon SWF provides useful guarantees around task assignments. It ensures that a task is never duplicated and is assigned only once.
Step Functions is recommended to be used for new applications, except:
- If you need external signals to intervene in the processes
- If you need child processes that return values to parent processes

Elastic Map Reduce.
EMR helps creating Hadoop clusters (Big Data) to analyse and process vast amount of data
Also supports Apache Spark, HBase, Presto, Flink...
EMR takes care of all the provisioning and configuration
Auto-scaling and integrated with Spot instances
Use cases: data processing, machine learning, web indexing, big data...

Key words are hadoop,managed,spark and big data.

In the exam: Chef & Puppet needed ⇒ AWS Opsworks

Chef (Recipes) and Puppet (Manifests) help in managing configuration as code.
Chef / Puppet have similarities with SSM / Beanstalk / CloudFormation but they're open-source tools that work cross-cloud
AWS only supports Chef and Puppet and not other configuration tools.

Managed, Secure Cloud Desktop
Great to eliminate management of on-premise VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure)
Integrated with Microsoft Active Directory

Keywords are graphql,sync and mobile.

Visualise, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time
Create custom reports that analyse cost and usage data.
Choose an optimal Savings Plan (to lower prices on your bill)
Forecast usage up to 12 months based on previous usage
Compute optimiser is used to get EC2 instance type recommendations.
- It doesn't give instance purchase recommendations like going for reserved instances.

Keywords: recommendations, EC2 instances, optimise costs, reports,forecast.

Rekognition is simply a service that can identify the objects, people, text, scenes, and activities, as well as detect any inappropriate content on your images or videos.

Managing 3rd party certificates.
AWS Private Certificate manager.
If you got your certificate from a third-party CA, import the certificate into ACM or upload it to the IAM certificate store.

AWS X-Ray helps developers analyse and debug production, distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices architecture.
You can use X-Ray to collect and trace data across AWS Accounts.
Use case: There is a requirement to trace and analyse user requests as they travel through your Amazon API Gateway APIs to the underlying services.

AWS Systems Manager Run Command lets you remotely and securely manage the configuration of your managed instances.
It can be run from the AWS Management Console that to execute the script on all target EC2 instances.

Keywords: run, script, EC2 instances.

An AWS Batch multi-node parallel job is compatible with any framework that supports IP-based, internode communication, such as Apache MXNet, TensorFlow, Caffe2, or Message Passing Interface (MPI).
AWS Batch manages all the infrastructure for you, avoiding the complexities of provisioning, managing, monitoring, and scaling your batch computing jobs.

Keywords: managed, minimise operational overhead, many EC2 instances.

Last updated: 2023-03-16