Started learning about Amazon Web Services

I started learning about Amazon Web Services this week. Holy cow, I wish we had this technology several years ago when we first started Jetrad. AWS would have made our deployment SO much faster and less capital intensive. I remember setting up servers in a data center in OKC, trying to make sure we had reliable backups, redundant connections, plenty of speed, and eventually installing a backup server in Tulsa with failover capabilities. What took us months and hundreds of thousands of dollars in up-front investment could have been done in hours or even minutes with AWS with zero up-front investment and a simple monthly fee that would have been covered by our increasing client load.

Setting up AWS

My first task was to set up an Amazon Web Services account. I set up root access then learned how to create users, groups and roles. This is pretty standard stuff but Amazon makes it very easy to do. They have very granular access control lists and I can easily assign user roles and permissions with a simple web interface. I thought it was interesting that I could still see the JSON command created by those roles. In addition, users can access AWS with a web interface, programmatically from a command line and through the Amazon software developer kit (SDK). This makes it very easy to scale up to any size platform with very secure global access controls.

Amazon S3

I had read about Amazon S3 and had even looked into using it a few years ago with clients. S3 is Amazon’s oldest AWS service and has now matured into a very reliable and fairly affordable product. I really like how they have added the machine-learning pricing tier that learns how you access the data and automatically archives it to the most cost-effective yet highly available storage plan based on your usage patterns. It is also very easy to share the data globally with excellent disaster recovery. Data is basically stored in AWS “buckets” – file folders – and are accessible via a globally unique URL.

It was very easy to set up an AWS bucket. The free test account works great for what I am doing right now as a test environment. I set up a billing alarm to notify me anytime my AWS bill exceeds $10 – a pretty low amount but I want to make sure I know when I run out of free storage and compute space, especially since I am just experiementing right now.

I am really getting excited about the possibilities for developing solutions for clients. I think AWS is going to pretty cool!