AWS Overview
Homepage
What is it?
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud infrastructure provider. In simple terms, cloud infrastructure providers have a huge range of services that aim to have everything modern website needs in one place. For example, modern websites often need database servers, cache servers, a CDN, domain management, webservers, load balancers and other elements.
Why did we choose it?
It's very reliable, and some of its offerings are fairly priced. In addition, it has very well supported APIs, making it a stable choice. It is one of the main giants of the infrastructure world, the other being Microsoft Azure; Google Cloud is a smaller competitor, and there are many others.
What do we use it for?
A lot. It's hard to put that in a short paragraph here, so this AWS section is split into one page for each AWS service we make use of.
The full list of AWS services/sections we use is:
- Lightsail (webservers, messaging servers, and the documentation servers like this one)
- EC2 (for the load balancers that route traffic to our webservers and messaging servers)
- CloudFront (to serve as an origin point for the load balancer)
- WAF (to screen all incoming requests through CloudFront for malicious traffic)
- ElastiCache for Redis (for our cache servers)
- RDS (for our database servers)
- S3 (for cloud file storage)
- Route 53 (for domain and DNS management)
- Systems Manager (specifically just the parameter store section, used for storing system credentials the webservers need to access certain resources)
- Lambda ('serverless' cloud computing)
- SES (Simple Email Service, for sending emails programmatically)
- SNS (Simple Notification Service, for monitoring when emails couldn't be delivered)
- SQS (Simple Queue Service, to gather undeliverable email notifications)