In part five of the series_._ We will learn about network and content delivery. Here is part one , part two , part three and part four. Make sure you follow Hackernoon and me (Febin John James) so that you won’t miss the later part of the series.
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
Consider a hospital, they have public places like reception, restrooms , canteen etc . Then private places such as operation theater, labs, ICU, etc . Only authorised people can access these private places. Virtual Private Cloud is about setting those network rules on who can access what. As your app gets more complex you can add an additional layer of security through VPC.
Let’s say I have a web app which does sales forecasting for it’s clients. There will be one server which handle the users of your app through which they login, signup , etc . Another one for running machine learning algorithms for forecasting. They communicate with each other through API’s. You don’t want this server to be accessible to public since it’s a security threat. It should be accessed only by your own server. You can implement this using Amazon VPC.
Some companies have their data on premise. Amazon’s VPC also allows you to build a secure link between on premise data center and your amazon cloud services.
Amazon CloudFront
When a user visits a web page on your server. There is a tiny processing load on your server. If an user is situated far away the website loads slower. A content delivery network solves this issue. A content delivery network (CDN) puts your sites content in locations around the world. Now when a user access your website, the user is served from a nearby CDN.
This minimises the load on your server and decreases the page load time. This is important because most people leave the website if it takes too much time to load. Amazon CloudFront plays the role of a CDN for you web service.
Amazon Direct Connect
One way to connect your on premise center to AWS environment is through VPC as discussed before. However, if you want to get beyond a specific bandwidth we have Amazon Direct Connect. Amazon Direct Connect connects your data center to the amazon environment through a leased line. This can help reduce network costs and increase bandwidth throughput. Hence you will be able to achieve consistent network performance.
You will need to choose a consulting partner closer to your location. Here are a list of AWS Direct Connect Consulting Partners , listed according to their geography.
Amazon Route 53
When you type www.google.com in your browser. The requests go to a directory or Domain Name Server(DNS) where it converts from google.com to server’s ip something like 192.X.X.X.
Amazon Route 53 allows you to intelligently route your requests. You can redirect higher or lower traffic to a particular server. It does health checks so that if one of your server is down , then the traffic won’t go to it. Depending on users location it redirects to a nearby server. So that user experience less latency. Hence making your application faster.
If you are interested in making apps on cloud , do checkout my book Cloud Is a Piece of Cake on Amazon.
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