There are thousands of potential use cases when dealing with the cloud. AWS offers many dozens of services to help speed up time to value and productivity. However not everyone knows how to code, so that begs the question, does AWS need coding to be useful?
There are many cloud based services provided by Amazon Web Services which require no coding knowledge at all. This includes services which cover a broad array of workloads including storage, email, machine learning, media, server backup and many more.
Amazon Web Services offers an incredibly diverse amount of elastic compute cloud (EC2) instances in their cloud offering. The instances are designed to handle many different workloads, such as memory optimized, compute optimized, generic instances, and many others. Each of these have various pricing levels for what is provided.
The most expensive Amazon EC2 is currently the p3dn.24xlarge which costs $31.212 USD per hour when running a Linux OS and $35.628 per hour when running the Window OS on the instance in the US East (N. Virginia) region. The instance comes with 96 vCPUs, 768 GiB of RAM and two 900 GB NVMe SSDs.
When people first look to the cloud to host their websites or applications, they expect to have to pay for that hosting, or to pay for those cloud services. What if there was a way to run services in a cloud like Microsoft Azure for free?
All Microsoft Azure services have a pricing model attached to them, however there is a list of services that are ALWAYS free if the usage of those services stay under specific limits. The free services include services like Azure CosmosDB, Azure Functions, Azure Active Directory and more.
Working with containers can make building and packaging micro services much more simple and easier to maintain. However managing and orchestrating a cluster of these containers can be time consuming, error prone, and difficult to understand at first. This is where AWS Fargate comes in.
How does AWS Fargate Work? AWS Fargate works by having the underlying servers fully configured, hosted, patched, monitored and maintained by AWS. This enables a completely serverless experience for the customer to run distributed fleets of containers. The customer only pays for time that the container instances are used.
Most developers need a secure place to store application secrets, service passwords, encryption keys, TLS/SSL certificates and other secure information outside of the application source code. There are many options available. Microsoft Azure Key Vault is one of them.
Is Azure key vault secure? Microsoft Azure Key Vault is designed in a way that prevents Microsoft from ever seeing the raw keys or secrets. The private data is processed with FIPS 140-2 level 2 validated HSMs. Multiple permission points must be passed to retrieve any secret information. Any access can be logged for review.
On demand pricing for cloud service providers is the pricing rate at which a given service is priced during the time period in which the service is used. A pre-negotiated contract is not required to receive on demand pricing for these services.
AWS Dynamo DB has an always free use tier that provides customers with 25GB of Storage, 25 provisioned Write Capacity Units and 25 provisioned Read Capacity Units per month at zero cost. This is enough free usage for 200 million requests per month.
Amazon DynamoDB is a managed NoSQL database and is used for storing an unlimited amount of unstructured key value or document-like data. Usage examples include user data stores, metadata caches, graph relationship stores, game states, leaderboards, user event streams, and many others.
Azure Blob Storage is an object store used for storing vast amounts unstructured data, while Azure File Storage is a fully managed distributed file system based on the SMB protocol and looks like a typical hard drive once mounted.
In the AWS S3 US East Region (North Virginia) using standard storage, the first 50 terabytes will have a per terabyte cost of $23.55 USD per month. The next 450TB of storage will have a per terabyte cost of $23.53 USD per month. Every terabyte after that is an additional $21.50 USD per month.
