DEV Community: Ashish Dedaniya

What is AWS Lambda

Ashish Dedaniya — Fri, 28 Oct 2022 08:02:18 +0000

AWS Lambda is an event-driven, serverless computing platform provided by Amazon as a part of Amazon Web Services. It is a computing service that runs code in response to events and automatically manages the computing resources required by that code.

Developers can start using AWS Lambda services, either by uploading the code or coding directly in the Lambda’s code editor and mention the conditions triggers the code. The code executed on the lambda run time environment is called a lambda function. With this any event can prompt your function, without developers worrying about handling the server or getting the right type of application or resource. Meaning that businesses don’t have to pay when your code is not running, thereby saving on server costs.

Once an event triggers, Lambda runs associated code by picking resources to execute an event, by making use of the best resources available in the infrastructure ecosystem. Thereby enabling businesses to have intelligent management of IT infrastructure. The AWS Lambda run-time environment's control plane entity consists of APIs that facilitate AWS resources for the application execution. Another key aspect of run time environment is data pane, this provides APIs to run the functions. Whenever a function is called to run a function, data pane facilitates either a dedicated execution environment or uses the allotted one. This execution environment is never shared with other functions.

AWS Lambda Benefit

1.Users can run the applications either from the web or in a mobile platform.

2.Lambda makes use of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) module to ensure that only the right users or groups get access to the application or function.

3.Lambda speeds up the execution process and scales your application or code, by executing the events triggering a particular code.
Developers don't have to focus on infrastructure to run an application, allowing them to focus on business logic.

4.Strong APIs enable user applications to easily integrate with innovative AWS services like AI and machine learning to develop intelligent business applications or add intelligence into your applications.

AWS Lambda Limitations

There’s no piece of technology without some limitations, and AWS Lambda is certainly no exception to the rule. Let’s quickly cover some of its important limitations.

For starters, the Lambda function deployment package size is limited at 50MB, already zipped. Additionally, the maximum value allowed for function timeout is 900 seconds (15 minutes), being that the default is 3 seconds.

Another important limitation of AWS Lambda is the overhead of calling the function for the first time, which is often called “cold start.” You can read more about these limits on the AWS Lambda limits page by Amazon.

In general, the other limitations are more about the serverless architecture itself, which lends itself well to more short-lived applications. That’s why Lambda functions are short-lived, so you have to resort to other services for persistence, such as the already-mentioned DynamoDB.

A final potential limitation of AWS Lambda has to do with monitoring. As mentioned, it only logs to CloudWatch, which might create generate some friction for your monitoring needs. Fortunately, that’s not a problem if you use Scalyr’s log management solution. Among many valuable features, Scalyr has the ability to import CloudWatch logs, allowing you to have a centralized view of your serverless infrastructure.

For more information on Lambda refer here https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/

What is AWS S3

Ashish Dedaniya — Fri, 28 Oct 2022 07:08:32 +0000

Amazon S3 or Amazon Simple Storage Service is a service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that provides object storage through a web service interface.

Amazon Simple Storage Service, widely known as Amazon S3, is a highly scalable, fast, and durable solution for object-level storage of any data type. Unlike the operating systems we are all used to, Amazon S3 does not store files in a file system, instead it stores files as objects. Object Storage allows users to upload files, videos, and documents like you were to upload files, videos, and documents to popular cloud storage products like Dropbox and Google Drive. This makes Amazon S3 very flexible and platform agnostic.

Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 are different enough that the average person should be able to draw the distinction without much difficulty.

Amazon EC2s provide a way to access cloud-based servers, also known as virtual machines. You can do pretty much anything on these virtual machines. Consider them the same as your own home computer, but running Linux (or Windows in some cases), and you need a terminal or shell to connect to them virtually.

S3 buckets are used as a storage location for backing up data in conjunction with EC2s. You can store photos, text logs, videos, songs, books, and other files in an S3 bucket.

In short, think of Amazon EC2 as your personal computer but it lives in the cloud, and Amazon S3 would be an external hard drive or cloud storage service similar to Dropbox.

How S3 works
Amazon S3 works as an object storage service. This is different from your typical file storage or even block storage. When a user uploads data to S3, that file is stored as an object with metadata intact and the object as a whole is given an ID.

There are two different kinds of metadata. System-Defined and User-Defined Metadata. System metadata is used for S3 to maintain important things such as creation date, size, and last-modified.

Objects also take in user-defined metadata. User-defined metadata allows users to assign key-value pairs to the data they upload. These key-value pairs help users identify, organize, and assign objects to specific resources, or allow for easy retrieval.

For more information on s3 refer here https://docs.aws.amazon.com/s3/

What is AWS EC2

Ashish Dedaniya — Fri, 28 Oct 2022 06:51:27 +0000

EC2 is a virtual machine that represents a physical server for you to deploy your applications. Instead of purchasing your own hardware and connecting it to a network, Amazon gives you nearly unlimited virtual machines to run your applications while they take care of the hardware.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud is a part of Amazon.com's cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services, that allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications

The cloud providers like AWS buy high configuration machines and install multiple virtual machines in a single physical system. A single system can contain a Linux OS, Windows OS, or a Mac OS.

When you create an EC2 instance from AWS, you basically rent a dedicated virtual machine on a shared computer. That is how Cloud providers provide you with Virtual Machines.

Also, it is free to start for few hours in initial trial.

You have a Mac OS but you need a Windows OS to run a certain software which is compatible with Mac OS. Instead of investing in a new laptop/desktop for a few hours of work, you can rent a Windows Virtual Machine through EC2 and use it whenever you need.

You need a Windows system with an 8 GB RAM and a 100 GB storage to run your software, you could rent a system with the exact specifications via AWS. Also, a cloud-based virtual machine is not as expensive as buying a new computer.

You can connect to your virtual machine with your mobile phone or your PC which makes it completely portable.

For more information about EC2 refer https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ec2/

Hope this helps!

What is AWS

Ashish Dedaniya — Fri, 28 Oct 2022 06:27:05 +0000

AWS is "Amazon Web Services" a cloud platform.
Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage and computing power, without direct active management by the user.

AWS is Amazon’s ancillary and technically speaking it is a cloud computing platform that provides customers with a wide arrangement of cloud services. We can define AWS (Amazon Web Services) as a very safe cloud services platform that offers computing power, storage of the database, delivery of the content and various other functionalities.

In layman’s term, suppose we need electricity at our home, either we can generate our own electricity or purchase it from other power brands. Instead of that, we could purchase electricity and pay as we use it. Similarly, AWS is one of the cloud computing providers that provide us computing, storage, networking and a lot more services that we can pay while we use.

AWS is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 200 fully featured services from data centers globally. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—are using AWS to lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster.

AWS has many services you can get more detail from here
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/index.html

What is Cloud Computing

Ashish Dedaniya — Fri, 28 Oct 2022 06:02:00 +0000

Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage and computing power, without direct active management by the user.

When we buy a Car, we have an option of buying individual parts of the car like tires, steering wheel, engine etc. and then start assembling it. Some parts are heavy, so we may need another person for lifting it. Some parts are electrical. We need electrician for that. Hence, there is a lot of work to do if we go for this option. What is the solution?

We can select the option of buying the car. In regular Software process, we just buy the Car and start driving it. But then we have to bear the cost of keeping the Car on our premises. We need to take Car for maintenance. We have to fix issues in Car by ourselves.

In Cloud computing, we just rent the Car and start driving it. There is no need to buy/rent space to store the car. As soon as we are done driving, we return it back to Cloud provider. There is no need to go for maintenance. Cloud provider will give us another Car while the earlier one is going through maintenance. No need to waste time on fixing issues in Car. We just drive the Car and for the time we are driving it.

Compared to traditional on-premises IT, and depending on the cloud services you select, cloud computing helps do the following:

Lower costs: Cloud lets you offload some or most of the costs and effort of purchasing, installing, configuring, and managing your own on-premises infrastructure.

Best agility : With cloud, your organization can start using enterprise applications in minutes, instead of waiting weeks or months for IT to respond to a request, purchase and configure supporting hardware, and install software. Cloud also lets you empower certain users—specifically developers and data scientists—to help themselves to software and support infrastructure.

Scale quickly and cost-effectively: Cloud provides elasticity—instead of purchasing excess capacity that sits unused during slow periods, you can scale capacity up and down in response to spikes and dips in traffic. You can also take advantage of your cloud provider’s global network to spread your applications closer to users around the world.