5 AWS Technologies That’ll Make Your Life Easier
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has simplified much of developers’ workflows and development over the past decade.
AWS allows engineers to command and control cloud-based infrastructure, data, and other technical pieces of infrastructure without the hassle of developing entire frameworks from scratch.
Initially, AWS was launched to take care of online retail operations for Amazon, but it has turned into one of the most used cloud service providers.
It can be essential for small, medium, and large business to keep up to date with all of the new services AWS is rolling out — as you never know what service might simplify your team’s development.
In this piece, we wanted to cover a few great services we’ve found useful over the past few years to help develop and deploy solutions.
Cognito
From authentication to authorization, this technology offers complete user management for your web applications. Cognito can help you by simplifying your authentication workflow.
It even tracks things like user logins so you can track users who log in for security reasons.
Amazon’s Cognito service collects the user’s profile information into user pools, which a web application uses to configure the access to AWS resources. The data-synchronization feature allows users to access information from any device. This data can also be saved locally while offline.
It can also pair with authentication and authorization APIs and plugins from Facebook and Google to further make things easier for you to manage.
Pricing: The charges are based on the amount of data in the sync store and synchronization operations. With the free version, companies can save up to 10 GB data and perform 1 million operations for 1 year. Once the administer has completed this 1-year period, Cognito charges 15 cents/GB of sync storage and 15 cents/10,000 sync operations.
Elastic Beanstalk
Have you ever wished you could just hit deploy and see your website online without too much configuration? With the service AWS Beanstalk, you can easily deploy your web applications developed in Java, Python, .NET, PHP. and several other languages without having to spend too much time configuring servers.
The Elastic Beanstalk service is used to deploy and scale applications using servers such as Apache, Nginx, and IIS. In order to use this service, you just have to upload the code on AWS, and all of the deployment processes — such as autoscaling, application monitoring, and capacity provisioning and balancing — are handled automatically by beanstalk.
Supported platforms: Elastic Beanstalk offers a variety of platforms for developers to work with, including NodeJS, Java, PHP, Python, and Ruby on Docker containers, and application servers such as Puma and Tomcat.
Pricing: The charges of running Beanstalk depend on the number of EC2 instances used to handle the web traffic and the bandwidth consumed by your application. With the free version, users can utilize one repository with 100 MB storage for a period of 12 months.
Afterward, plans for companies start from $50/month which offers 12 GB storage, 40 users, 10 servers, and 50 repositories. Individual freelancers can access a package for $15/ month that offers 3 GB storage with 5 users, 3 servers, and 10 repositories.
EventBridge
Amazon EventBridge acts as a management layer that coordinates events between different serverless modules by using an event bus with the rules-driven router.
The EventBridge builds over CloudWatchEvents by using the same service API as well as the same endpoint. The service provides way for seamlessly connecting data from the SaaS providers and customer applications.
For those who have built serverless applications, this service allows you to easily manage all your various modules.
Through the direct linking that EventBridge offers users can experience high availability and improved speed for the specific service. EventBrige’s easy setup includes zero coding, and it not only enhances performance but also security. It only takes up to one week of the developer’s time for its deployment. At the moment, the only concern is its limited adoption among SaaS providers.
Supporting platforms: About 10 SaaS partners currently support EventBridge. These include: Symantec, ZENData, SugarCRM, OneLogin, Segment, Saviynt, SignalFx, and Whispir
Pricing plans: Amazon EventBridge hasn’t provided pricing information for the service online.
RDS
With the Amazon RDS service, you can generate dedicated instances for your database in a matter of minutes. These instances are supported by AWS’s support team — which is also capable of supporting multiple different database engines, such as SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.
This takes away the hassle of needing to buy a new server every time you need to spin up a new instance. Need a test or dev instance? Done.
The Relational Database Service (RDS) allows users to create and operate with relational databases that can be managed through any AWS management console. Moreover, using RDS allows you to access databases and files from anywhere in a very cost-effective and highly scalable manner. RDS offers high availability for primary instance — which are made synchronous with the secondary instance so you can fail over to the exact point at which a problem occurs.
Supporting platforms: Amazon RDS currently supports MariaDB, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and the Microsoft SQL server. Each of these database engines have their own support features.
Pricing: The free tier is valid for 12 months in which you can get 5 GB of storage, 750 RDS hours, and a 25 GB DynamoDB. Afterward, pricing is based on the services and storage you choose.
CloudTrail
Amazon’s CloudTrail service enables enterprises to carry out operational auditing, risk auditing, compliance, and governance for their AWS account.
With this service, you can monitor and retain account activity across your entire AWS infrastructure. The overall service simplifies troubleshooting, security analysis, and resource tracking.
With the multiregion configuration feature, you can deliver log files into multiple regions with a single Amazon S3 bucket, which applies configuration across all regions consistently.
Once enabled, the CloudTrail service is always on as it records account activity upon creation. You can view/download files of the last 90 days and modify operations without having to manually set up the Amazon CloudTrail service.
Supporting platforms: CloudTrail supports logging events for almost all AWS services, including Alexa, Amazon API Gateway, App Mesh, Amazon Athena, AppStream 2.0, and Cloud9.
Pricing: The CloudTrail service is free of charge for 90 days — you can view, download, and filter the account activity in this time. Afterward, you can get management events at $2/100,000 events, record data events for $0.10/100,000 events, and get insights for $0.35/100,000 events’ analysis.
Final Thoughts
AWS offers many more services as well, but the primary objective of this article was to highlight some well-known as well as lesser-known services that Amazon offers to cloud users.
Currently, if there is some redundant task developers need to constantly do over and over again that’s a hassle, AWS probably has a service for it.
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