AWS Regions

• AWS has regions all around the world, it is a separate geographic area. e.g. us-east-1 eu-west-1 ap-northeast-1
• Pricing
  • ❗ Costs of products may vary from region to region.
  • There’s a charge for data transfers between regions
• Each region has at least two availability zones
  • E.g. us-east-1a, us-east-1b
  • Availability zone is one or more physical data centers.
    • They’re separate from one another. They’re isolated deliberately to survive any unforseen circumstances like disasters.
  • Name of AZ can correspond to different data centers in one account than in other.
    • E.g. same data center can be us-east-1a for one account while us-east-1b for another, this is purposefully done by aws to distribute resources across AZ.
• Each AWS console are region scoped (except IAM, Route53 and S3{Anyhow buckets inside are regional})
  • I.e. changes, actions are specific to a region
• See where the regions are and how many AZ’s within them
• There are also many Edge Locations for caching content for CloudFront (CDN).

Basic Terminology

• Availability
  • Percentage uptime
    • Downtime can be due to faults or other such as planned maintenance.
  • E.g. the storage system is operational and can deliver data upon request
  • 📝High availability in AWS = Multiple AZ
  • Resiliency
    • Being able to adapt under stress or faults in order to avoid failure
      • Self-recover & remain functional to customers
    • Often provided by redundancies and automatic re-routing of operations within a system
  • Durability
    • Long-term data protection
    • E.g. the stored data does not suffer from bit rot, degradation or other corruption
  • Redundancy
    • The inclusion of extra components in a system so it will continue to function in case of a component failure.
    • E.g. automatic back-ups to Azure in case of AWS failure
  • Throughput
    • Measures of how many units of information a system can process in a given amount of time
• Consistency
  • Application is expected to remain stable
  • Reliability
    • Percentage uptime, considering the downtime due only to faults
    • Measures consistency
    • Ability of a system to recover from infrastructure or service disruptions.
    • 💡 Kill unhealthy & spin up new => Quicker than human debugging
  • Fault-tolerance
    • App ability to self-detect and correct all types of problems in its environment
    • Requires extra redundancy to work in inconsistent environments.
    • 📝 Elastic Load Balancer, Route 53 with Auto Scaling Groups
  • Robustness
    • App ability to self-detect and correct all types of problems from its inputs.
    • Can work with inconsistent data.
• 🤗Trivia: In distributed data store, CAP Theorem means you cannot reach more than two of: Consistency & Availability & Partition tolerance (packages being dropping/delayed between nodes).
• Billing: You can see your bills in -> My billing dashboard -> bills

Basic Services

• AWS Health: Provides ongoing visibility into the state of your AWS resources, services, and accounts.
  • Health events
    • Maintainance events that’ll affect your services
    • Can set-up CloudWatch alarms.

AWS Support

• Support types

  	Basic	Developer	Business	Enterprise
  Cost	Free	$29/mo	$100/mo	$15.000/mo
  Use case	Account and billing questions only	Experimenting	Production use	Mission-critical use
  Tech support	NO	Business hour via e-mail	24x7 via email, chat & phone	24x7 via email, chat & phone
  SLA	✕	12-24 hrs at local business hours	1 hr response to urgent support cases	15 min to critical support cases w/ priority
  TAM & Support Concierge	✕	✕	✕	✓
  Support cases	✕	1 Person, unlimited cases	Unlimited contacts / cases	Unlimited contacts / cases

• AWS Trusted Advisor

  • High level AWS account assessment, very useful to know whether our account is sticking to AWS’ best practices.
  • Serverless global service
  • Pricing: Most checks requires different support plans (developer, only 7).
  • Analyzes your AWS accounts and provides AWS-defined recommendations based on core checks:
    • Cost Optimization: e.g. Low utilization Amazon EC2 instances, Idle Load Balancers, unassociated Elastic IP address…
    • Performance: e.g. High Utilization Amazon EC2 Instances, Large Number of Rules in an EC2 security group
    • Security: e.g. “specific ports unrestricted”, “Amazon EBS public snapshots”
    • Fault Tolerance: e.g. “VPN Tunnel Redundancy”, “Age of EBS snapshots”, “EC2 AZ Balance”.
    • Service Limits
      • Free to 📝check if you’re getting close to limits
      • E.g. “EC2 On-Demand instances”, “Cloud formation stacks”
  • Can enable weekly email notification from the console

AWS Pricing

• More information about AWS service pricing, see Cloud Services Pricing.

AWS Pricing Calculator

• Provides an estimate of AWS fees and charges for different cases/services.
• ❗ Doesn’t include any taxes
• Uses AWS Price List API
• Quick estimates
  • Ballpark estimate while requiring minimal information and parameters
• Advanced estimates
  • Allows you to fine-tune the estimate
• See calculator.aws

Data transfer charges

• Applies globally to all AWS services
• Ingress: Free
• Egress
  • Free within same region, costs extra for Internet and other regions.
  • 💡 Always double check, not so cheap

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