The AWS Alphabet Soup

AWS. EC2. S3. S3 Buckets. SQS. SNS. ARN. IAM. Eb. AMI. Cloud Trail. Cloud Formation. Diving through our product documentation on my first day at Threat Stack, and I couldn't understand a word!

I am getting exposure to AWS -- that is, Amazon Web Services -- for the first time in my new Software Development Engineer in Test role. All the companies I have worked at in the past had their own physical servers hosting whatever SaaS -- Software as a Service -- web or mobile product I was testing.

With SaaS, like the Software as a Service name implies, it's like Microsoft Office: You can choose to rent the software per month or per year. Yes, you could purchase the student version, and apply any patches and bug fixes yourself, but when using SaaS, Microsoft handles everything.

Likewise, the same business model applies for infrastructure and platforms.



What is AWS - Amazon Web Services?
https://youtu.be/mZ5H8sn_2ZI

According to Amazon's "Types of Cloud Computing" there is:

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): "Infrastructure as a Service, sometimes abbreviated as IaaS, contains the basic building blocks for cloud IT and typically provide access to networking features, computers (virtual or on dedicated hardware), and data storage space".
• Platform as a Service (PaaS): "Platforms as a service remove the need for organizations to manage the underlying infrastructure (usually hardware and operating systems) and allow you to focus on the deployment and management of your applications. This helps you be more efficient as you don’t need to worry about resource procurement, capacity planning, software maintenance, patching, or any of the other undifferentiated heavy lifting involved in running your application".

The problem I am finding? There are way too many products. Right now, I need to focus on just what TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) are being used at my workplace.

Let's see... there is...

AWS: Amazon Web Services

EC2: Elastic Compute Cloud: "Resizable compute capacity in the cloud". Shorten boot up time. Scale up or scale down as needs dictate.

CloudTrail: "AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of your AWS account. With CloudTrail, you can log, continuously monitor, and retain account activity related to actions across your AWS infrastructure".

CloudFormation: "AWS CloudFormation provides a common language for you to describe and provision all the infrastructure resources in your cloud environment. CloudFormation allows you to use a simple text file to model and provision, in an automated and secure manner, all the resources needed for your applications across all regions and accounts. This file serves as the single source of truth for your cloud environment".

S3: Simple Storage Service: "Companies today need the ability to simply and securely collect, store, and analyze their data at a massive scale. Amazon S3 is object storage built to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere – web sites and mobile apps, corporate applications, and data from IoT sensors or devices".

S3 Buckets: "Amazon S3 is cloud storage for the Internet. To upload your data (photos, videos, documents etc.), you first create a bucket in one of the AWS Regions. You can then upload any number of objects to the bucket. In terms of implementation, buckets and objects are resources, and Amazon S3 provides APIs for you to manage them. For example, you can create a bucket and upload objects using the Amazon S3 API. You can also use the Amazon S3 console to perform these operations. The console internally uses the Amazon S3 APIs to send requests to Amazon S3". 

SQS: "Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a fully managed message queuing service that makes it easy to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. Building applications from individual components that each perform a discrete function improves scalability and reliability, and is best practice design for modern applications". 

SNS: "Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is a flexible, fully managed pub/sub messaging and mobile notifications service for coordinating the delivery of messages to subscribing endpoints and clients. With SNS you can fan-out messages to a large number of subscribers, including distributed systems and services, and mobile devices".

ARN: "Amazon Resource Names (ARNs) uniquely identify AWS resources. We require an ARN when you need to specify a resource unambiguously across all of AWS, such as in IAM policies, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) tags, and API calls".

IAM: "AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a web service for securely controlling access to AWS services. With IAM, you can centrally manage users, security credentials such as access keys, and permissions that control which AWS resources users and applications can access".

Eb: "With AWS Elastic Beanstalk, you can quickly deploy and manage applications in the AWS Cloud without worrying about the infrastructure that runs those applications. AWS Elastic Beanstalk reduces management complexity without restricting choice or control. You simply upload your application, and AWS Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, scaling, and application health monitoring".

AMI: Amazon Machine Image: "When you create an AWS Elastic Beanstalk environment, you can specify an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to use instead of the standard Elastic Beanstalk AMI included in your platform configuration's solution stack. A custom AMI can improve provisioning times when instances are launched in your environment if you need to install a lot of software that isn't included in the standard AMIs".

Amazon ElasticCache: "Amazon ElastiCache offers fully managed Redis and Memcached. Seamlessly deploy, operate, and scale popular open source compatible in-memory data stores. Build data-intensive apps or improve the performance of your existing apps by retrieving data from high throughput and low latency in-memory data stores. Amazon ElastiCache is a popular choice for Gaming, Ad-Tech, Financial Services, Healthcare, and IoT apps".

Redis: Acronym for REmote DIctionary Server. "Redis is an open source, in-memory data store that delivers sub-millisecond response times enabling millions of requests per second to power real-time applications. It can be used as a fast database, cache, message broker, and queue. Redis provides a variety of data structures including strings, lists, sets, sorted sets, hashmaps, hyperloglogs, and bitmaps".

To get more exposure, I signed up for the AWS Free Tier.

• Some services are free for 12 months, provided I do not go over 750 hrs per month of usage of EC2, and over 5 GB of Storage in Amazon EFS or 30 GB of Elastic Block Storage for long term. 
• Some services seem to be always free.

... Pardon me as I mark my Google Calendar to unsubscribe. 

There are also a series of 10 Minute Tutorials on everything listed above that I need to check out!

Wish me luck! Happy Testing!

-T.J. Maher
Sr. QA Engineer, Software Engineer in Test
Meetup Organizer, Ministry of Testing - Boston

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