AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C02): 7 Application Deployment

- In this chapter, we want to be looking at several services that are very useful for application deployment and application management. These services are key services to understand, from a conceptual point of view. You need to understand what they can do for you as a solutions architect. So you can make sure you choose the appropriate service for your given needs. And there are actually many different services in AWS. We saw this at the very beginning, in Chapter one as we started into this course. I want to take you back to that place again, let you see a little bit about the different service categories that we have available, because as we go through this chapter, we're going to be reminding you of the category that the service we're talking about is actually in. So that you can easily find it within the AWS management console, 'cause the reality is, it can be a little challenging to find things in there sometimes. So remember, we've got service categories that range from Compute, to Storage and Databases, Networking and Content Delivery, Management tools, Analytics, Application Integration and many, many more. The point is that there are dozens of categories, and then in some of those categories, there's nearly a dozen actual services. So you have a lot of services. We need to understand some of them in great detail as we've been doing, and in this chapter as well as in the next, we're looking at some extra services that we need to understand it more of a conceptual level, to make sure that you grasp when you would use them, and what applications they actually offer to your environment. As a solutions architect, you're not always asked to do the thing that is to actually configure something in AWS or implement something and get it working, but rather, you're often just asked, what should I use? How do I accomplish this task? For example, if someone says to you, "How do I accomplish deploying "a large solution that has multiple instances, "multiple services and many other things as well?" Well the answer is in this chapter. As a refresher, let's take a look at the AWS management console, and see what we're talking about by these service categories. When you come into the AWS console, you'll see your various services broken into categories like Compute, Storage, Database and Migration, as we saw in the first chapter of this course. An important thing to keep in mind is that these categories can grow and change over time. They can grow because new services can be added to the categories. They can change because entirely new categories can be added. For example, here in the lower right, we see Game Development, and we have Amazon GameLift in. I'm sure you'll see more game development items added into that category as time goes on, because the goal for Amazon is for that to become an even bigger part of use of AWS. We see the entire IoT category, that was added in the last couple of years. So the point is that things do change, and new services are added. But we'll be letting you know the category, in which the services we talk about in this chapter are actually located. The big thing to keep in mind with the services we're covering this chapter, is that for the most part, you need to understand them from a conceptual perspective. How are they used, and why would I choose one of them? For example, let's say someone comes to you and says, "Hey, I need a full infrastructure "launched into the Cloud, "and I just want to do one click and get it." Needs to include load balancing, and clusters, and database services and several instances, and S3 containers and on and on it goes. So the point is that they want a solution to launch automatically that includes everything they need. Well, you might choose to use Cloud Formation for that, because you can design the entire solution as a template, and then the template can simply be launched, and you can implement all the parts and pieces of that template using Cloud Formation. That's just one example. As we go through the different services, we'll talk about how and why you might select them.