AWS services that need to be on your radar

We are avid AWS users and the AWS Summit this year really added to our excitement. AWS have grown quicker and larger than any other server host in the past few years and with it there has been a flood of new AWS technologies and services. Below are our favourite solutions, it is time to put them on your radar.

What is AWS?

AWS (Amazon Web Services) are the biggest cloud server provider, their countless services and solutions can help any company adopt the cloud. Unlike some of their competitors AWS allow you to provision server resources nearly instantly, within minutes you can have a server ready and running. This instant provisioning makes AWS a must for anyone looking into scalable infrastructure.

1) Elastic File System (EFS)

EFS has been on our radar since it was first announced, EFS is Amazons solution to NFS (Network File System) as a service. It is the perfect addition to any scalable infrastructure, enabling you to share content instantly between all of your servers and all availability zones. If you wanted your own highly available NFS infrastructure it would take at least five servers and hundreds of pounds to recreate their scale. It has been a long time coming and EFS has finally been released from beta, rolling out into other regions including the EU, huzzah!

2) Codestar

Codestar is Amazon’s new project management glue, it pulls together a number of Amazon services making application development and deployment a seamless process. Within minutes you can turn your code repository into a highly available infrastructure. Codestar automatically integrates with:

• CodeCommit – A git compatible repository hosting system which scales to your needs.
• CodeBuild – Compile, test and create applications that are ready to deploy.
• CodeDeploy – Automatic rolling out updates to your infrastructure, CodeDeploy handles the infrastructure helping you avoid downtime.
• CodePipeline -The process getting your code from CodeCommit, into testing, into CodeDeploy.
• Atlassian JIRA – CodeStar can also tie into JIRA, a popular Issue tracking and project management tool.

I have just started using CodeStar for my personal website and I love it, it makes continuous deployment a pleasure. All of those little tweaks are just one git push away from being live and if anything goes wrong CodeDeploy can quickly roll back to previous versions.

3) Athena

In a couple of clicks Athena makes your S3 data into a SQL query-able database. It natively supports: CSV, TSV, JSON, Parquet, ORC and my favourite Apache web logs. Once the data has loaded you can get started writing SQL queries.

Earlier this week there was an attack on one of our servers, in minutes I had the web logs into Athena and was manipulating the data into reports.

4) Elastic Container Service (ECS)

ECS takes all of the hassle out of your container environment letting you focus on developing your application. ECS has been designed with the cloud ethos from the ground up, designed for scaling and isolating tasks. It ties straight into AWS CloudFormation allowing you to start a cluster of EC2 instances all ready for you to push your Docker images and get your code running.

In Summary

One common theme you might have picked up on is that Amazon is ready for when you want to move fast. Streamlined processes are at the heart of their new offerings, ready for horizontal scaling and ready for continuous integration.

Are you making the most of AWS?

Is the cloud is right for you?

Drop us a line and we will help you find your perfect solution.

Feature image by Robbie Sproule licensed CC BY 2.0.