AWS: S3 and Lambda

AWS S3

1. What is Amazon S3?

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. Customers of all sizes and industries can store and protect any amount of data for virtually any use case, such as data lakes, cloud-native applications, and mobile apps. With cost-effective storage classes and easy-to-use management features, you can optimize costs, organize data, and configure fine-tuned access controls to meet specific business, organizational, and compliance requirements.

2. Name some use cases for Amazon S3.

• Build a data lake: Run big data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and high performance computing (HPC) applications to unlock data insights.
• Back up and restore critical data: Meet Recovery Time Objectives (RTO), Recovery Point Objectives (RPO), and compliance requirements with S3’s robust replication features.
• Archive data at the lowest cost: Move data archives to the Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes to lower costs, eliminate operational complexities, and gain new insights.
• Run cloud-native applications: Build fast, powerful mobile and web-based cloud-native apps that scale automatically in a highly available configuration.

3. Name some benefits of using Amazon S3.

• With S3 bucket names, prefixes, object tags, and S3 Inventory, you have a range of ways to categorize and report on your data, and subsequently can configure other S3 features to take action.
• Amazon S3 also supports features that help maintain data version control, prevent accidental deletions, and replicate data to the same or different AWS Region. With S3 Versioning, you can easily preserve, retrieve, and restore every version of an object stored in Amazon S3, which allows you to recover from unintended user actions and application failures.
• With S3 Replication, you can replicate objects (and their respective metadata and object tags) to one or more destination buckets into the same or different AWS Regions for reduced latency, compliance, security, disaster recovery, and other use cases. You can configure S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR) to replicate objects from a source S3 bucket to one or more destination buckets in different AWS Regions.
• Amazon S3 Multi-Region Access Points accelerate performance by up to 60% when accessing data sets that are replicated across multiple AWS Regions. Based on AWS Global Accelerator, S3 Multi-Region Access Points consider factors like network congestion and the location of the requesting application to dynamically route your requests over the AWS network to the lowest latency copy of your data.
• You can also enforce write-once-read-many (WORM) policies with S3 Object Lock. This S3 management feature blocks object version deletion during a customer-defined retention period so that you can enforce retention policies as an added layer of data protection or to meet compliance obligations.

AWS Lambda Basics

1. What is AWS Lambda?

AWS Lambda is a serverless computing service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). Users of AWS Lambda create functions, self-contained applications written in one of the supported languages and runtimes, and upload them to AWS Lambda, which executes those functions in an efficient and flexible manner.

The Lambda functions can perform any kind of computing task, from serving web pages and processing streams of data to calling APIs and integrating with other AWS services.

2. Name some use cases for AWS Lambdas.

1. individual tasks run for a short time;
2. each task is generally self-contained;
3. there is a large difference between the lowest and highest levels in the workload of the application.

3. Describe “serverless” to a non-technical friend.

The concept of “serverless” computing refers to not needing to maintain your own servers to run these functions. AWS Lambda is a fully managed service that takes care of all the infrastructure for you. And so “serverless” doesn’t mean that there are no servers involved: it just means that the servers, the operating systems, the network layer and the rest of the infrastructure have already been taken care of, so that you can focus on writing application code

CDN

1. What is a CDN?

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a geographically distributed group of servers that work together to provide fast delivery of Internet content. A CDN allows for the fast transfer of data needed for loading Internet content including HTML pages, javascript files, stylesheets, images, and videos.

2. How does a CDN work with relation to the website visitor?

CDNs work through servers nearest to the website visitor respond to the request. The content delivery network copies the pages of a website to a network of servers that are spread out at geographically different locations, caching the contents of the page. When a user requests a webpage that is part of a content delivery network, the CDN will redirect the request from the originating site’s server to a server in the CDN that is closest to the user and deliver the cached content. CDNs will also communicate with the originating server to deliver any content that has not been previously cached. In turn, the speed is improved by distributing content closer to the website visitors by using a nearby CDN server, causing visitors to experience faster page loading times. In simpler terms, for example, instead of a user in London trying to access a server in LA, which can cause slower Internet speeds, the user would be redirected through a CDN that is geographically closest to them (London, Paris, Stockholm, etc). As of today, the majority of web traffic goes through through CDNs, including traffic from major sites like Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon.

3. What are the benefits of employing a CDN?

Employing a CDN doesn’t only speed up the delivery of Internet content, it helps protect your website against certain forms of cyber attacks, such as Denial of Service attacks. It protects against these threats because CDNs allow for the handling of more traffic and withstanding hardware failure better than many origin servers.