AWS Academy Cloud Foundations

Module 1: Cloud Concepts Overview

Module 1: Cloud Concepts Overview

Section 2: Advantages of cloud computing

Trade capital expense for variable expense

Capital

Data center investment Pay only for the amount

based on forecast you consume

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Capital Expense vs. Variable Expense

• Capital expense (capex): Funds

used by a company to acquire,
upgrade, and maintain physical
assets such as property, industrial
buildings, or equipment.
• i.e. you need to buy a server to run
your software

• Variable expense: A variable

expense is an expense that is
easily altered or avoided by the
person bearing the cost
 Capital Expense vs. Variable Expense
Example
• You simply need to get to work each day
• Options

• Buy a Car • Hire a Taxi

• Capital expense (capex): • Variable expense:
• You need the money to buy, you then have • You only pay as you need it
set costs each month to keep on the road
• If you do not like the taxi then
• If you do not like the car then save up by
simply hire another one
buy again
Massive economies of scale
Because of aggregate usage from all customers, AWS can achieve
higher economies of scale and pass savings on to customers.

AWS Cloud

Economies of scale Savings

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 Economies of Scale
• In a lot of cases you would not be buying enough
hardware to request a discount
• No purchasing power
• Cloud providers leverage hundreds of thousands of
customers to achieve economies of scale
• Consider the same as buying a computer you usually pay what
is asked
• If you buy 1000 computers you would expect a reduced price per unit
• These savings can then be passed on rather than being kept
Stop guessing capacity

Overestimated Underestimated Scaling on

server capacity server capacity demand

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 Guessing about Capacity

• What are the potential maximum

peaks in usage?
• Is there enough resource capacity
at peak?
• Is the amount of storage sufficient?
• for NOW or for 3 years time?
Increase speed and agility

Launch

Weeks between wanting Minutes between wanting

resources and having resources and having
resources resources
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 Increase Speed and Agility

• Rapid availability of new resources

• Provision resources in minutes, not weeks
• The resources can be anything you like, but to help
understand this just consider it as a Web Server
• Increase Innovation
• Quick, low cost experimentation.
• Leverage pre-fabricated functionality without
requiring in-house expertise. (i.e., data warehousing,
analytics)
• Increase experimentation
• Explore new avenues of business with minimal risk
and expense
• Test with different configurations
 Increase Speed and Agility

• Increase experimentation
• Consider an example where John has told you that the queries on
a database will be 15% more efficient if we change to using
Oracle
• In the physical world, you will need to purchase the hardware (or reallocate it)
• Setup the server, purchase the license, load the data structure and experiment
• If it works great - if not then this needs to be broken down again
• In the cloud world you simply request a Relational Database Service (RDS)
running Oracle and start this server
• In a few minutes it will be operational, you create the table(s), load the data and
start experimenting
• When you have the results you need you simply stop using it
• You are just hiring the server (and potentially the license) and paying only as you
use it
• This means you can experiment a lot more to get what your business needs,
rather than being held back by physical restrictions
Stop spending money on
running and maintaining data centers

Investment

Running data Business and

centers customers
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Stop Spending Money on Data Centers

• Focus on customers and what makes YOU

money

• Focus on projects that differentiate the

business
○ Rather than being restricted by physical
limits

• Delegate the racking, stacking and

powering of servers to the cloud provider
Go global in minutes

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 Go Global in Minutes
• AWS infrastructure as of August 2023 https://www.infrastructure.aws/
 Go Global in Minutes
• The intention for companies is to make money
• The difficulty can be trying to predict how this will happen and sometimes where
it will happen
• The closer you get your infrastructure to the customer the faster the response time
• This also helps with the satisfaction of the customers
• In this respect you can launch your infrastructure in UK to benefit the customers you believe
will be mostly based in Stoke-on-Trent
• If you then later realise that your customer base is mostly in Japan you can quickly move
your data centre to this area due to the virtual nature of it
• Taking account of GDPR requirements with personal data, so the infrastructure can move but not
the customer database
• https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protection/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-
regulation-gdpr/
 Speed Test
• Here we can see the differences depending on where we are located
• The quicker the response time the happier the customers will be
• http://www.cloudping.info/
Region Latency
• https://awsspeedtest.com/latency
US-East (Virginia) 156 ms

US East (Ohio) 179 ms

US-West (California) 204 ms

US-West (Oregon) 234 ms

Canada (Central) 163 ms

Europe (Ireland) 91 ms

Europe (London) 86 ms

Europe (Frankfurt) 117 ms

Europe (Paris) 86 ms

• The response times shown here were run off a mobile network so it will Europe (Stockholm) 132 ms
be higher than we expect off a wired network device AWS GovCloud (US) 228 ms
 • Trade capital expense for
Section 2 key variable expense
takeaways • Benefit from massive economies
of scale
• Stop guessing capacity
• Increase speed and agility
• Stop spending money on running
and maintaining data centers
• Go global in minutes

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Module 1: Cloud Concepts Overview
Section 3: Introduction to Amazon Web Services
(AWS)
What are Web Services?

Request message

Internet
Response message
Client Web service
What are web services?

A web service is any piece of software that makes itself available

over the internet and uses a standardized format—such as
Extensible Markup Language (XML) or JavaScript Object Notation
(JSON)—for the request and the response of an application
programming interface (API) interaction.

Request message

Internet
Response message
Client Web service

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 What is AWS?

• One of the things which does cause people stress when they first start
is the simple question what is AWS or simply what is the Cloud?
• As we have seen earlier in this lecture Cloud Computing is
intended to replicate and build upon your physical infrastructure
• Look at how this has changed as new technology has come along
• It is the same for Cloud Computing, new technology is being
released all of the time
• as such there are a lot of services and products which are available as you
will see on the following slides
• Chances are by the time you see the slides there are even more services
• Do not worry about this and just memorise a few like EC2, S3, RDS
• You will then build upon these over time so do not worry about memorising the
slides which follow on
• This simply gives you a grouping of technologies
What is AWS?

• AWS is a secure cloud platform that offers a broad set of global

cloud-based products.
• AWS provides you with on-demand access to compute, storage,
network, database, and other IT resources and management tools.
• AWS offers flexibility.
• You pay only for the individual services you need, for as long as
you use them.
• AWS services work together like building blocks.

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Categories of AWS services

Analytic Application AR and Blockchai Business Compute

s Integration VR n Applications

Cost Customer Database Developer End User Game

Management Engagement Tools Computing Tech

Internet Machine Management and Media Migration and Mobile

of Things Learning Governance Services Transfer

Networking and Robotic Satellite Security, Identity, and Storage

Content s Compliance
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Delivery
Simple solution example

Networking Compute Database Storage

AWS Cloud

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

Amazon
DynamoDB
Users Amazon S3

Amazon
EC2
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 Choosing a service
The service you select depends on your business goals and technology
requirements.
Amazon
VMware Cloud EC2 AWS
on AWS Lambda

Amazon ? AWS
Elastic
ECS
Beanstalk
Amazon
EKS
Amazon
AWS
AWS Lightsail
Fargate
Outposts AWS
Batch 27
 Services covered in this course
Compute services – Storage services – Management and
• Amazon EC2 • Amazon S3 Governance services –
• AWS Lambda • Amazon S3 Glacier • AWS Trusted Advisor
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk • Amazon EFS • AWS CloudWatch
• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling • Amazon EBS • AWS CloudTrail
• Amazon ECS • AWS Well-Architected Tool
• Amazon EKS Database services – • AWS Auto Scaling
• Amazon ECR • Amazon RDS • AWS Command Line Interface
• AWS Fargate • Amazon DynamoDB • AWS Config
• Amazon Redshift • AWS Management Console
• Amazon Aurora • AWS Organizations
Security, Identity, and
Compliance services – Networking and Content AWS Cost Management
• AWS IAM Delivery services – services –
• Amazon Cognito • Amazon VPC • AWS Cost & Usage
• AWS Shield • Amazon Route 53 Report
• AWS Artifact • Amazon CloudFront • AWS Budgets
• AWS KMS • Elastic Load Balancing • AWS Cost Explorer
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 Access to AWS Services

• If you have not had chance yet to use your access to AWS
learning portal we have put a link below showing using AWS to
launch a Windows based Server
• This console access is the same if
you are Netflix or Justin Champion
• It is a graphical way using a web
browser to manage your
infrastructure
• The version you use will look slightly
different simply as new technology comes
online they adjust the environment make
it more usable
 Access to AWS Services

• If you prefer not to use this you can use

• AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI)
• in this you can carry out instructions on your virtual servers
informing the infrastructure how to start and operate
• Software Development Kits (SDK)
• These are provided to let you interact with the environment
• SDK’s are provided for all of the major languages, so it can
easily be adapted to your work
• If you normally develop in Java you do not want to be forced into
using Python as an example
• https://aws.amazon.com/tools/
 • AWS is a secure cloud platform that
Section 3 key offers a broad set of global cloud-
takeaways based products called services that are
designed to work together.
• There are many categories of AWS
services, and each category has many
services to choose from.
• Choose a service based on your
business goals and technology
requirements.
• There are three ways to interact with
AWS services.

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Module 1: Cloud Concepts Overview
Section 4: Moving to the AWS Cloud – The AWS
Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF)
 Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF)
• The Cloud Adoption Framework is a set of guidance
which can be applied to any Cloud role out in a
company
• The framework is intended to ensure that the process is as
smooth as possible
• Here you can see the various areas which need to be
considered
• It might be that one of these areas you can not agree to and
as such the process could be stopped early on
• An example might be that the software which you need will only run
on a Windows 2000 desktop edition due to the libraries and the
license states it can only run on a physical machine rather than virtual
• In this case a detailed investigation will of saved money and time
• This example given is quite an extreme and would be very rare
AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF)

• AWS CAF provides guidance

and best practices to help
organizations build a
comprehensive approach to
cloud computing across the
organization and throughout the
IT lifecycle to accelerate
AWS CAF successful cloud adoption.
perspectives
• AWS CAF is organized into six
perspectives.
• Perspectives consist of sets of
capabilities.
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Six core perspectives

Focus on Focus on
business technical
capabilities capabilities

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Business perspective

We must ensure that IT is aligned with

business needs, and that IT investments can be
traced to demonstrable business results.
IT
finance

IT
strategy

Benefits
realization

Business risk
management Business managers,
Business perspective finance
capabilities managers, budget owners,
and strategy stakeholders
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People perspective

We must prioritize training, staffing,

and organizational changes to build
Resource management
an agile organization.

Incentive management

Career management

Training management

Organizational change
management
Human resources, staffing,
and people managers
People perspective
capabilities
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Governance perspective

We must ensure that skills and processes align IT

strategy and goals with business strategy and goals so
the organization can maximize the business value of its IT
Portfolio management investment and minimize business risks.

Program and
project management

Business performance
measurement

License management

Governance perspective
capabilities CIO, program managers,
enterprise
architects, business analysts, and
portfolio managers 38
Platform perspective

We must understand and communicate the

nature of IT systems and their relationships.
Compute provisioning
We must be able to describe the architecture
of the target state environment in detail.
Network provisioning

Storage provisioning

Database provisioning

Systems and solution

architecture
CTO, IT managers,
Application development and
solutions architects
Platform perspective
capabilities 39
Security perspective

We must ensure that the organization meets its

security objectives.
Identity and access
management

Detective control

Infrastructure security

Data protection

CISO, IT security
Incident managers,
response
and IT security analysts
Security perspective
capabilities 40
Operations perspective

We align with and support the operations of the

Service monitoring
business, and define how day-to-day, quarter-
to-quarter, and year-to-year business will be
Application performance
monitoring
conducted.
Resource inventory
management
Release management/
change management

Reporting and analytics

Business continuity/
Disaster recovery
IT operations managers and
IT support managers
IT service catalog

Operations perspective 41

capabilities
 Adoption of Cloud Computing
• As we saw earlier in the lecture adoption of the Cloud for a lot of
established companies will be a hybrid approach
• It is difficult to justify just shutting down a fully working
infrastructure
• The hybrid approach means that you move only a small
amount and experiment and see how well it works for you
• as an example a simple web server which hold some
information but really is not critical to your company
• This lets you learn how this operates and then you can
transition something else across once you are confident
 Adoption of Cloud Computing
• An alternative is what we saw earlier in the lecture about
experimenting
• Just start off using the Cloud for experiments
• you want to see how well a RDS instance using MySQL
operates
• Simply experiment and play with this to get your confidence
up on the technology
• Once you are happy it works and it does everything you
expected and meets the needs you might decide to start
using this as it works out cheaper than an onsite solution
• remember though it is not just about cheaper, it is all of
the other factors as well for cloud computing
 • Cloud adoption is not instantaneous for
Section 4 key most organizations and requires a
takeaways thoughtful, deliberate strategy and
alignment across the whole
organization.
• The AWS CAF was created to help
organizations develop efficient and
effective plans for their cloud adoption
journey.
• The AWS CAF organizes guidance into
six areas of focus, called perspectives.
• Perspectives consist of sets of
business or technology capabilities that
are the responsibility of key
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stakeholders.
Module 1: Cloud Concepts Overview

Module wrap-up
Module summary

In summary, in this module you learned how to:

• Define different types of cloud computing models
• Describe six advantages of cloud computing
• Recognize the main AWS service categories and core services
• Review the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework

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Complete the knowledge check

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Sample exam question

Why is AWS more economical than traditional data centers for applications with
varying compute workloads?

A. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) costs are billed on a monthly
basis.
B. Customers retain full administrative access to their Amazon EC2 instances.
C. Amazon EC2 instances can be launched on-demand when needed.
D. Customers can permanently run enough instances to handle peak workloads.

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Additional resources

• What is AWS? YouTube video

• Cloud computing with AWS website
• Overview of Amazon Web Services whitepaper
• An Overview of the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework whitepaper
• 6 Strategies for Migrating Applications to the Cloud AWS Cloud
Enterprise Strategy blog post

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Thank You

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