Notes by Thay
Day 11 of My 100-Day DevOps Challenge

Day 11 of My 100-Day DevOps Challenge

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Thay
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Top 15 AWS Services for DevOps Engineers

In the world of DevOps, automation and efficiency are the cornerstones of success. As a DevOps engineer, your primary responsibility is to streamline operations, enable seamless integration, and improve delivery pipelines. AWS provides a vast array of services tailored to support these objectives.

Below, we outline the top 15 AWS services every DevOps engineer should know. This overview will give you a head start on understanding these services, with detailed deep dives to follow in future blogs.

1. Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)

EC2 offers scalable virtual servers to run applications. You can provision instances on demand and scale them up or down to match workloads, making it a backbone for many DevOps tasks.

  • Use Cases: Hosting CI/CD tools, running build servers, deploying applications.

2. Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)

A highly reliable and scalable object storage solution for storing and retrieving any amount of data.

  • Use Cases: Backup and recovery, storing logs, hosting static websites, and managing build artifacts.

3. AWS IAM (Identity and Access Management)

IAM provides secure access control by managing users, groups, roles, and permissions within your AWS environment.

  • Use Cases: Enforcing least-privilege access, managing multi-user environments securely.

4. Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud)

VPC lets you define a logically isolated network for your AWS resources, enhancing security and enabling custom configurations.

  • Use Cases: Setting up private networks for sensitive workloads, controlling inbound and outbound traffic.

5. Amazon CloudWatch

A monitoring and observability service that collects metrics, logs, and events from AWS services and your applications.

  • Use Cases: Monitoring resource utilization, setting up alarms for unusual activity, and debugging application issues.

6. AWS Lambda

A serverless compute service that runs code in response to events. Perfect for automating tasks without managing infrastructure.

  • Use Cases: Running custom scripts for automation, processing real-time data, and responding to changes in S3 or DynamoDB.

7. AWS Elastic Beanstalk

An easy-to-use service for deploying and managing applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.

  • Use Cases: Simplifying deployment pipelines, automating application scaling and load balancing.

8. AWS CloudFormation

A service to define and provision AWS infrastructure using code (Infrastructure as Code).

  • Use Cases: Automating resource creation, managing version-controlled infrastructure templates, and maintaining consistency across environments.

9. AWS Fargate & ECS (Elastic Container Service)

ECS manages Docker containers, while Fargate eliminates the need to provision or manage servers.

  • Use Cases: Orchestrating containerized applications, running microservices, and automating deployments.

10. AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)

A managed Kubernetes service to deploy and manage containerized applications at scale.

  • Use Cases: Running Kubernetes workloads, scaling microservices, and enabling portability across environments.

11. AWS KMS (Key Management Service)

A service to create, manage, and secure cryptographic keys for data encryption.

  • Use Cases: Encrypting sensitive data, securing application secrets, and meeting compliance requirements.

12. AWS CloudTrail

Tracks user activity and API usage within your AWS account, providing logs and security insights.

  • Use Cases: Auditing compliance, troubleshooting API calls, and monitoring access patterns.

13. Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store)

Provides block storage for EC2 instances, offering high performance and durability.

  • Use Cases: Storing application data, enabling disaster recovery, and managing databases.

14. AWS Config

Tracks resource configurations and their changes over time to ensure compliance and operational insights.

  • Use Cases: Detecting configuration drifts, maintaining compliance, and auditing resource changes.

15. Amazon ELK Stack (ElasticSearch, Logstash, Kibana)

This combination helps aggregate, analyze, and visualize logs and data from various sources.

  • Use Cases: Log management, troubleshooting distributed applications, and gaining insights through data visualization.

Conclusion

These 15 AWS services form the foundation of modern DevOps workflows. From infrastructure provisioning to application deployment, monitoring, and security, AWS equips DevOps engineers with tools to automate and optimize every aspect of the development lifecycle. Stay tuned as we delve deeper into these services in upcoming blogs, helping you unlock their full potential.

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