My AWS Article Collection: Exploring a Multitude of Topics
- Let's Talk about IAM Users in AWS
- Exploring AWS EC2 Instances: Features, Deployment, and Hands-On Insights (c-sharpcorner.com)
- From Novie to Pro: Navigating AWS EC2 Instances Hands-On
- Launching & Configuring an EC2 Web Server on AWS
IAAS (Infrastructure as a Service)
Until now, we have created multiple EC2 instances and explored them. What we are doing until now is what is called Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
IaaS is essentially using only the infrastructure from the cloud provider. This means making use of virtual servers that the cloud provider provides. We have associated elastic IP addresses to these instances, using the networking features.
Iaas is also referred to as "Lift and Shift". Imagine you have an application running in your local data center. With IaaS, you can take the application and deploy it to the cloud as is. For instance, we've set up a web server running on our data center and replicated it in the cloud using EC2 instances, and Linux Operating Systems.
Samples of IaaS Include using EC2 to deploy applications or even creating a database using EC2 instances with specific instance families, choosing an operating system, installing the database software, and configuring the databases.
Cloud Provider Responsibilities
With IaaS, the cloud provider is responsible for the physical infrastructure, which includes the hardware, networking, and virtualization layer. Virtualization software is used before the hardware is exposed to the cloud.
Customer Responsibilities
In our Specific example, the cloud provider is AWS, which takes care of these responsibilities. As a customer, you manage the OS, Application Code, and configurations. You need to ensure that your application is available. The cloud provider just provides Infrastructure, and it's up to you to make the best use of it.
Now, let's discuss about an alternative to IAAS.
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
This Paas goes beyond infrastructure and provides additional features built on top of the infrastructure. When using PaaS, the cloud provider takes on more responsibilities. They manage the OS, including upgrades and patches, the application runtime, load balancing, and auto-scaling.
As a customer using PaaS, your main responsibility is your application code and configurations.
Below is the list that PaaS offers, also known as Managed Services from AWS
- Elastic Load Balancing: If you have multiple instances and want to distribute traffic between them, you can use ELB. As a customer, you can configure which EC2 instances should receive the traffic and how to monitor their health. AWS takes care of the rest, ensuring the load balance infrastructure is up-to-date, highly available, and auto-scaled.
- Elastic Beanstalk: This is the simplest way to run web applications in AWS. You can specify the web application you want to run, and AWS handles the underlying infrastructure.
- RDS: You can use RDS to create a relational database in the cloud. Your responsibility is the data in the database. AWS manages everything needed to run and maintain it.
There are many other AWS-managed services available.
In the next article, we'll dive deeper into one of the above Elastic Load Balancing.