Leveraging Reliability and Efficiency in AWS Solution Building: Proven Steps for Longevity

Introduction

Amazon Web Services has that breadth and depth, which makes it a platform of choice for organizations to move and to leverage AWS services covering a wide range to build solutions with a key focus on solving modern challenges and hence meeting today’s needs of their customers.

However, AWS’s capabilities must be used properly to ensure a positive and proper synchronization of the organization’s growth and adoption of AWS Cloud services and features.

There can be a lot of things that need a proper focus while running and even with long running workloads on AWS Cloud, but few major things can be focused on Infrastructure, Security, Budgeting, etc.

Let us focus on some of the proven steps.

• Modern Applications need a robust infrastructure. Databases are often used as a back end for such applications. Applications have gone internet-scaled with large user bases, millions of requests per second need to be served, global footprint, a massive volume of data need to be handled, and variety of data demands flexibility and hence pay as you go the new pricing model, eliminating capital expenditures which need robust databases in the back end to serve the purpose. AWS offers a wide range of purpose-built databases that organizations can easily map the right database(s) with the application’s need(s).
  • Relational Data Model: For traditional applications, e-commerce applications, and OLTP workloads, AWS offers Amazon Aurora and Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service)

• • Key-Value Data Model: For high-traffic web applications and gaming applications, AWS offers Amazon DynamoDB

• • Document Data Model: For content management, catalog management, and user profile management, AWS offers Amazon DocumentDB
  • Relational Data Model with OLAP: For data warehousing, AWS offers Amazon Redshift
  • Wide Column Data Model: AWS offers Amazon Keyspaces
  • Graph Data Model: For navigating relationships such as social networking and game recommendations, AWS offers Amazon Neptune
  • Ledger Data Model: For ledger-based applications such as vehicle registration systems, supply chains, and banking transaction applications, AWS offers Amazon QLDB
  • In-memory Data Model: For caching purposes session management, AWS offers Amazon ElastiCache and Amazon MemoryDB for Redis
  • Search: For personalized search, AWS offers Amazon OpenSearch Service.
  • Time-series: For IoT (Internet of Things) and operational Metrics Monitoring, AWS offers Amazon Timestream

• Automating the deployment using the concept of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) helps a lot in terms of deploying, managing, and updating the architectural needs quickly. AWS offers many options to enable organizations to leverage automation, including:
  • AWS CloudFormation
  • AWS CDK
  • AWS CDK for Kubernetes
  • AWS CDK for Terraform
  • AWS Cloud Control API (Application Programming Interfaces)

• Delivering rich and most demanded content such as music and videos quickly and seamlessly while targeting a large user base globally with having largest infrastructure footprint none other than Amazon CloudFront, the global Content Delivery Network.
• Enforcing proper authentication and authorization ensures the principle of least privilege using AWS Identity and Access Management. IAM (Identity and Access Management) (Identity and Access Management) users, IAM Policies, and IAM Roles should be properly defined to ensure risk-free access to AWS Accounts and resources get deployed as a part of the infrastructure. Use of AWS Organizations to manage multiple accounts seamlessly.
• Defining and setting up budgets in the beginning helps avoid unexpected invoices breaching the thresholds an organization can bear. AWS Budgets is the right solution for this.

Adoption of serverless services in the architecture can save a lot.

Customer Success Stories – A true motivation!

• YOUGotaGift: https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/YOUGotAGift/?did=cr_card&trk=cr_card

Services on projection: Amazon Aurora Serverless, Amazon QuickSight

• Careem: Careem Case Study (amazon.com)

Services on projection: Amazon Neptune, Amazon Redshift, Amazon S3

• Bosch: https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/bosch-case-study-and-video/?did=cr_card&trk=cr_card

Service on projection: AWS CloudFormation, AWS Lambda, Amazon SQS (Simple Queue Service)

• Capillary: https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/capillary-technologies/?did=cr_card&trk=cr_card

Service on projection: AWS CloudFormation, AWS Lambda, Amazon EMR

• GoDaddy: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/mt/godaddys-journey-to-the-cloud-and-their-standard-cloud-platform/

Services on projection: AWS Organizations, AWS IAM, AWS CloudFormation, AWS Systems Manager

• Honda: https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/honda-case-study/

Services on projection: Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Route53

Conclusion

While organizations are moving to AWS Cloud at the same time, it is extremely important, especially for the startups, to have a proper execution plan while having an eye on infrastructure deployment and management best practices security aspects to be taken care of with the utmost care and proper planning around investments as this entire idea maps to the AWS Shared Responsibility Model and AWS Well-Architected Framework where we as a customer has certain degree of responsibility and accountability. Hence, this will ensure to better leverage the richness of AWS Cloud.

About CloudThat