- [Seph] When looking into all of the services that are available in AWS, it can quickly become overwhelming to try and think about how all of the various on-premises devices and components will translate into your utilization of AWS. While some of the migration services help with showing you what you need, we want to take some time to discuss what that translation of services looks like. And don't worry, I'm not going to list every one of the services one by one and talk about them, that could take years. Instead, I just want to share how I look at it. The first thing I want to share, is that while not all services will be a direct translation into AWS, many will. For those that are more direct, most of what you need to learn is the name of the service that you'll be using. And for those that are a bit less direct, you need to understand the functionality before looking into the service or feature that will meet that requirement. Moving on, when you look at the infrastructure you're running in your on-premises environment, you'll often see many things as a collection of servers and VMs. While these will likely vary in function, they are all seen as servers. Luckily enough, servers directly translate to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances. This service provides secure and resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Amazon EC2 provides many different types and sizes of instances so that even your specialized needs can be met, and even provides a variety of Amazon Elastic Block Store volumes to use as your system storage. While later optimizations might mean that you utilize other types of compute services, understanding EC2 will be an important step in understanding how many of your resources will translate. Another service that will be more of a direct translation is load balancers. As this is often presented as the entry point to an application or environment, they typically offer more functionality than simple request routing. You'll regularly be looking for features such as performance monitoring, response caching, SSL or TLS offloading, DDoS attack protection, automatic target registration, and many others. Within AWS, there is a collection of load balancers that can help meet these needs. Elastic Load Balancing in AWS has three different load balancers that can fit your various needs. Currently available is the Application Load Balancer, Gateway Load Balancer, and Network Load Balancer. These are known as the ALB, GLB, and NLB, respectively. The ALB is a Layer 7 load balancer that is best suited for HTTP and HTTPS traffic and inspecting client requests. It provides a broad level of Layer 7 functionality, such as redirects and fixed responses, as well as configuration components, including session resumption and cross-zone load balancing. The GLB assists to easily deploy, scale, and manage third-party virtual appliances. It's used to give one gateway for distributing traffic across multiple virtual appliances, while scaling them based on demand. This helps to decrease potential points of failure in your network, while increasing availability. And the third load balancer, the NLB, is a Layer 4 device for routing connections to various targets, within your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, or VPC. It's ideal for balancing both TCP and UDP traffic, and is capable of handling millions of requests per second, while maintaining low latencies. The last translation I want to discuss is around databases. It's common to assume that databases will just run on EC2 when you migrate them to AWS. And this is a solution that works for many. On the other hand, if your use case supports it, using a managed service like Amazon Relational Database Service, or RDS, can really come in handy. RDS makes it much easier to set up, operate, and scale your cloud-based databases. You have the use of many popular engines, such as Amazon Aurora with MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility, MySQL, Oracle, and more. And even though it is a managed service, you're still able to maintain high levels of customizability and control of your databases, while benefiting from the optimizations that AWS provides. While those aren't the only services that directly translate to AWS, those are some of the most common that are utilized when coming from a variety of on-premises environments. When you're looking into the services yourself, remember that AWS organizes them by a number of different ways. You can look by type such as compute, storage, analytic, and container services; and you can look by solutions, such as cloud migrations, database migrations, or DevOps. Keep diving into the services and keep learning about how your solutions will translate over. Cheers.
