We will continue with the discussion on the important AWS services you should know as an AWS Cloud professional. This post is the continuation part to the first post on the overview of the most essential AWS services. I decided to break it into two. I believe it will also help to put the information fresh to you.

There are a handful of services that are very popular and works well with most used cases. These services are very important and you will need to know them for your daily responsibility as AWS cloud engineer. Some of the important services we talked about includes AWS Elastic Beanstalk, EC2 instance, SNS, Relational Database (RDS). The VPC, Subnet, Security Group, IAM, Elastic Block Storage, AWS Outpost, SQS, Code Pipeline. Also, the AWS Elastic Container Registry, AWS Apprunner, Elastic Container Service, Elastic Kubernetes Service, and so on.

Why Should You choose AWS Services?

Some of the advantages of using AWS services includes.
Low Ongoing Cost.
Instant Elasticity & Flexible Capacity..
Speed & Agility.
Apps not Ops..
Global Reach. 
Open and Flexible.
Secure.

meet the important aws services

aws cloudfront

AWS CloudFront is a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that allows you to store a fragment or small copies of your application content at Edge Locations located all around the world. These fragments are called Cache. Edge Locations are collection of AWS infrastructure between major regional infrastructures. Edge locations are closer datacenters to consumers that are using the AWS services. This allows your Customers to access your content more quickly and also provides additional security especially against DDOS attacks. And it makes your application loads faster.
Amazon CloudFront is a global Content Delivery Network (CDN) service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APls to your viewers with low latency and high transfer speeds.
CloudFront is integrated with AWS – both at physical locations that are directly connected to the AWS global infrastructure, as well as software that works seamlessly with services such as AWS Shield for DDOS mitigation, Amazon S3, Elastic Load Balancer or Amazon Ec2 as origins for your applications, and AWS Lambda to run custom code close to your viewers. See how to use CloudFront and S3 here.

AWS CLOUDWATCH

When you talk of most essential services in AWS, monitoring is at the top of the list. The AWS cloudWatch is a service that allows you to monitor various elements of your AWS account. With Amazon CloudWatch you can monitor your Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources and the applications you run on AWS in real time. You can use CloudWatch to collect and track metrics, which are variables you can measure for your resources and applications. 
CloudWatch alarms send notifications or automatically make changes to the resources you are monitoring based on rules that you define. Also, with the custom dashboard you create, you have a good visibility of the state of your application you choose to, including when your billing is going above the budget. Read more about cloudwatch here.

aws cloudtrail

CloudTrail allows you to monitor all actions taken by IAM users. This includes services  accessed and actions taken by the user. For example logging who deleted an S3 object.
AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of your AWS account. With CloudTrail, you can log, continuously monitor, and retain account activity related to actions across your AWS infrastructure. 
CloudTrail provides event history of your AWS account activity, including actions taken through the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command line tools, and other AWS services. This essential event history simplifies security analysis, resource change tracking, and troubleshooting of your AWS services. I recommend reading more about CloudTrail here.

AWS SIMPLE NOTIFICATION SERVICE (SNS)

Further on the list is the AWS service that allows you to automate the sending of email or text message notifications. These notifications are based on events that happens in your AWS account.
Simple Notification Service is a web service that coordinates and manages the delivery or sending of messages to subscribing endpoints or clients. In Amazon SNS, there are two types of clients-publishers and subscribers –also referred to as producers and consumers. 
Publishers communicate asynchronously with subscribers. It does this by producing and sending a message to a topic, which is a logical access point and communication channel.
Subscribers which can be a web servers, email addresses, Amazon SQS queues, AWS Lambda functions consume or receive the message or notification over one of the supported protocols. These protocols can be Amazon SQS, HTTP/S, email, SMS, Lambda) when they are subscribed to the topic.
With AWS SNS you can:
Send automated or manual notifications.
Send notification to email, mobile numbers, and HTTP endpoints.
Closely integrated with other AWS service like CloudWatch so that alarms, events, and actions in your AWS can trigger notifications.
Also learn how to configure an SNS service here.

AWS RELATIONAL DATABASE SERVICE (RDS)

AWS Relational Database Service (RDS) is a SQL database service that provides a wide range of SQL database options to select from.
You can choose from Amazon Aurora, MysQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQLServer.
Amazon RDS service make it easier to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient, resizeable capacity while automating time-consuming administration tasks such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching and backups. It frees you to focus on your applications so you can give them the fast performance, high availability, security and compatibility they need.

aws dynamo db

The Dynamo DB is AWS serverless fully managed NoSQL key-value database service. The DynamoDB is a fast, and makes it simple and cost-effective to store and retrieve any amount of data, and serve any level of request traffic. 
For Dynamo DB, all data items are stored on Solid State Drives (SSDs). Also, these data are are replicated across 3 Availability Zones for high availability and durability. With DynamoDB, AWS gaurantees SLA up to 99.999% availability.
DynamoDB tables have no fixed schemas, and each item may have a different number of attributes. This makes it fast and can handle 10 trillion requests per day. It also support peaks of more than 20 million requests per second.
Moreso, it has no upfront costs. So, you can implements a pay as you go plan as at a flat hourly rate based on the capacity reserved.

aws elasticache

Still discussing about most essesntial services in AWS, we would have an incomplete list without the Elasticache. The AWS ElastiCache is a data caching service used to help improve speed/performance of web applications running on AWS.
AWS ElastiCache is an essential web service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale an in-memory data store or cache in the cloud. The service improves the performance of web applications by allowing you to retrieve information from fast, managed, secure in-memory data stores, instead of relying entirely on slower disk-based databases. Also, you can achieve a 99.99% SLA with the AWS Elasticache service.
Amazon ElastiCache supports two open-source in-memory engines:
Redis: A fast, open source, in-memory data store and cache.
Memcached: a widely adopted memory object caching system.

aws redshift

You want to gain up to 5x performance for your spend of your data wharehouse cloud service? Then look to the AWS Redshift service. The data warehouse database service designed to handle petabytes of data for analysis from AWS.
Amazon Redshift is a fast, fully managed data warehouse that makes it simple and cost-effective to analyze all your data using standard SQL and your existing Business Intelligence (BI) tools.
It also allows you to run complex analytic queries against petabytes of structured data, using sophisticated query optimization, columnar storage on high-performance local disks, and massively parallel query execution.

AWS ORGANIZATION

AWS Organizations helps you centrally govern your environment as you grow and scale your workloads on AWS. Whether you are a growing startup or a large enterprise, AWS Organizations helps you to centrally manage billing. In addition, you can control access, compliance, and security, and also share resources across your AWS accounts.
With AWS Organizations, you can automate account creation, create groups of accounts to reflect your business needs, and apply policies for these groups for governance.
Also simplify billing by setting up a single payment method for all of your AWS accounts through Consolidated billing. 
Through integrations with other AWS services, use Organizations to define central configurations and resource sharing across accounts in your organization. AWS Organizations is available to all AWS customers at no additional charge.

aws elastic mapreduce

Amazon EMR is a web service that makes it easy to quickly and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data using Hadoop.
Amazon EMR distribute the data and processing across a resizable cluster of Amazon EC2 instances. 
With Amazon EMR you can launch a persistent cluster that stays up indefinitely or a temporary cluster that terminates after the analysis is complete. 
Amazon EMR supports a variety of Amazon EC2 instance types and Amazon EC2 pricing options (On-Demand, Reserved, and Spot). 
When launching an Amazon EMR cluster also called a job flow, you choose how many and what type of Amazon EC2 Instances to provision. 
The Amazon EMR price is in addition to the Amazon EC2 price.
Amazon EMR is used in a variety of applications, including log analysis, web indexing, data warehousing, machine learning, financial analysis, scientific simulation, and bioinformatics.

aws elastic beanstalk

AWS Elastic Beanstalk provides a solution to quickly deploy and manage applications in the AWS cloud. 
Elastic Beanstalk is AWS managed service for deploying, scaling and managing web application and services. Being a managed service means that AWS Elastic Beanstalk will take care of all deployment from capacity provisioning, load balancing, and auto scaling to application health monitoring. All you need to do is upload your code, and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring. 
Elastic Beanstalk leverages AWS services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, …. 
To ensure easy portability of your application, Elastic Beanstalk is built using familiar software stacks such as: Apache HTTP Server for Node.js, PHP and Python
Passenger for Ruby, IIS 7.5 for .NET and Apache Tomcat for Java. 
There is no additional charge for Elastic Beanstalk. However, you pay only for the AWS resources needed to store and run your applications.
I showed how to efficiently deploy applications using Elastic Beanstalk and Docker here.

amazon aurora

The Amazon Aurora is AWS owned fully managed relational database engine. It combine the speed and reliability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open-source databases. This make the Amazon Aurora compatible with PostgreSQL and MySQL databases. In other words, you can easily migrate your PostgreSQL or MySQL database to Aurora without worry. In addition, Aurora boost of delivering up to five times the throughput of MySQL. Also it can achieve up to three times the throughput of PostgreSQL without requiring changes to most of your existing applications.

AWS TRUSTED ADVISOR

AWS Trusted Advisor is a service that “advises” and helps you optimize aspects of your AWS account. It is an online resource to help you reduce cost, increase performance, and improve security by optimizing your AWS environment. It also suggests practises to achieve a fault tolerant infrastructure. Trusted Advisor provides real-time guidance to help you provision your resources following AWS best practices.

aws total cost of ownership (TCO) calculator

The AWS TCO calculator is free tool provided by AWS that allows you to estimate the cost savings of using the AWS Cloud vs. using an on-premises data center.
An essential service among the AWS services which is capable of showing you how much you can save by using AWS. You can reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by avoiding large capital expenditures on l.T. hardware and infrastructure.
The TCO Calculator can also provide directional guidance on cost savings.
Simply input elements of your current/or theoretical on-premises data center, and comparing those cost requirements to how much it would cost in AWS. The elements can be added/modified as you move through the process to best estimate the cost savings.

aws cost explorer

The Cost Explorer is another free tool that allows you to view and analyze charts of your costs. You can view Cost data for the past 13 months, and also forecast how much you are likely to spend over the next three months. Use the explorer to discover patterns in how much you spend on AWS resources over time. Also identify (cost) problem areas that can be optimized. In addition, identify which services you use the most, and/or metrics. You can trace the Availability Zones has the most traffic, or which linked AWS account is used the most costing you more spend.

CONCLUSION.

AWS has a long list of services that can meet your business needs irrespective of the size and budget. In this post, we touched on some of the important AWS services that you will need. This is especially useful if you are just coming into the AWS community, preparing for any AWS certifications. It could be you simply want to know what service suites your business the most too.

Once again, I recommend you bookmark this page and revisit as many times as you need for the most essential services you need from AWS.