Amazon Web Services
Introduction
Amazon Web Services (AWS) are a collection of remote computing services, also called web services, and make up a cloud-computing platform offered by Amazon.com. Currently (as of October 2015) these services operate from 11 geographical regions across the world. The most central and well-known of these services arguably include Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and Amazon S3. Amazon markets these products as a service to provide large computing-capacity more quickly and more cheaply than a client company building an actual physical server farm.
S3 - This is cloud storage used purely for backup purposes only, that can only be accessed via the admin panel or command line or other apps. You cannot run software on it and you cannot mount it like a hard disk drive. It is the second cheapest Amazon storage option but the data is immediately available. Current price is £0.01 per Gb.
Glacier - This is cloud storage used purely for backup purposes only, that can only be accessed via the admin panel or command line or other apps. You cannot run software on it and you cannot mount it like a hard disk drive. It is the cheapest Amazon storage option but the data is NOT immediately available. Current price is £0.005 per Gb.
EC2 - This is a virtual machine service.
Route 53 - This is the Domain Name service which includes DNS management.
SES - This is the SMTP service.
Lambda - This is an event-driven, serverless computing platform provided by Amazon as a part of the Amazon Web Services. It is a compute service that runs code in response to events and automatically manages the compute resources required by that code.
Lightsail - This is the easiest way to get started with AWS for developers who just need virtual private servers. Lightsail includes everything you need to launch your project quickly - a virtual machine, SSD-based storage, data transfer, DNS management, and a static IP - for a low, predictable price. You manage those Lightsail servers through the Lightsail console or by using the API or command-line interface (CLI).
EFS - This is the 'Elastic File System' which is AWS's implementation of NFS and allows you to have an unlimited (well, 9 Extabytes) amount of storage to use in multiple virtual machines.
WorkSpaces - This is a Desktop as a Service (DaaS) facility that enables you to use a Microsoft Windows desktop in the cloud. You have 2 payment options, fixed monthly fee or per hour.
Cloudfront - Amazon CloudFront is a web service that speeds up distribution of your static and dynamic web content, such as .html, .css, .js, and image files, to your users. CloudFront delivers your content through a worldwide network of data centers called edge locations. When a user requests content that you're serving with CloudFront, the request is routed to the edge location that provides the lowest latency (time delay), so that content is delivered with the best possible performance.
CloudWatch - Amazon CloudWatch monitors 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. The CloudWatch home page automatically displays metrics about every AWS service you use.
Kinesis - Capture, store, and process media streams for playback and analytics.
RDS - Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a distributed relational database managed service.
IAM - Identity and Access Management.
Create An AWS Account
Check Your AWS Account
aws sts get-caller-identity
Reduce AWS Costs
HOWTO: List AWS IP Addresses
curl -s https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json |sort -n |grep 'ip' |awk '{ print $2 }' |tr -d '"' |tr -d ','
...and add them to an Apache .htaccess file...
curl -s https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json |sort -n |grep 'ip' |awk '{ print $2 }' |tr -d '"' |tr -d ',' |sed -e 's/^/Deny from /'
