AWS Access Security Basics

Root credentials - To create a free tier account, AWS needs an email id. This account holder becomes the root account user for the Management Console. Root account has access to all the features including billing and accounting details. It is advisable by AWS to create individual user accounts via IAM to access AWS console. Root account user only needs the email id and passed to access the account via AWS console.

AWS Secret Key pair - A secret key pair is used to access AWS via SSH or external CLI tools.

Individual accounts - Root user can create individual user accounts and grant them access to resources on the AWS.

Overview

User - Users can be created via IAM feature in AWS Management Console. A user is created with a username, accountant, passed and AWS secret key. Users can log into AWS with their username, accountant and passed. The secret access key is used for programming via SSH or using CLI.

Group - Users can be organized into groups and each group can have one or more policies

Role - A user or an AWS service (such as EC2) can use a role to access resources or perform actions.

Policies

Technically a policy is a JSON document with an action (allowed), resource (on which action is allowed) and effect (allow or deny). The policy is auto created and can be assigned to a user or a group.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Overview

AWS is primarily a Infrastructure as a Cloud (IaaS) delivery model. Anyone can create an account to use the free tier with AWS from here. Many features in the below dashboard are available with the free tier.

Amazon Web Services uses an IaaS delivery model with a bunch of services for computer, storage, databases, networking, analytics and application services. Below are some of the most popular services (each is a web service) from AWS that I would like to explore in this blog -

• Compute
• EC2
• Storage
• S3
• CDN
• Database
• RDS
• Networking
• VPC
• DNS
• Route53
• Security and Access
• IAM

I will share some live demos as well via video covering above topics. I might touch on other services as well as we go along.

Cloud Delivery and Deployment Models

Three common Cloud Delivery Models are - Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

IaaS is primarily where a cloud provider provides compute, storage, networking, hardware and operating systems IT resources, thereby giving the cloud consumer a high level of control and responsibility compared to other models. Amazon AWS is a IaaS provider.

PaaS is predefined "ready-to-use" environment such as package of an application server, database platform giving less control to the cloud consumer but a higher level of freedom to spend more time on the actual business logic, sparing the administrative and maintenance tasks. Google App Engine is an example of PaaS.

SaaS is where the cloud provider provides the software package to the consumer as a product. Many SaaS products are available in the market. Gmail is an example of SaaS.

Different combinations of these delivery models are also possible based on consumer's requirements.

Cloud Deployment Models - Again there are three common deployment models - Public Cloud, Private Cloud and Hybrid Cloud. As the name explains, public cloud is publicly available, private cloud is within a data center and hybrid cloud is a combination of public and private cloud (mostly via a Virtual Private Network (VPN) access).

Getting Started with Amazon Web Services Cloud

I started a proof of concept (PoC) at work on Cloud technologies last year and was amazed to see the power of virtualization combined with automation. Cloud provides a set of services to the user and IT costs can be tremendously reduced if Cloud is implemented and operated with due diligence. In this blog I will cover Cloud delivery models, Cloud deployment models, basic design patterns that I think are important for each delivery model.

I will soon jump into AWS as AWS has the most extensive set of services in the Cloud. I will go over various Iaas services that AWS offers and will also post some real world deployment scenarios. My goal with this blog is to share the knowledge I have gained and also to share some of the mistakes I have made so that the readers are aware of these. I also expect much more experienced and knowledgable folks out there provide feedback to help this blog become a good resource for anyone interested to learn AWS Cloud services.

So Welcome to the AWS Cloud!