Huddle Up Your Cloud Team! Here are 12 Best Practices for AWS Development

Diving into new technology is fascinating, and when that technology is Amazon Web Services (AWS), you have to keep an eye out. Large-scale migration to the cloud leads to changes in architecture patterns, operating logic, and governance models.

AWS expands its choices periodically, which is why it is essential to re-evaluate as your business evolves dynamically. There is a need to empower end-users to track their decisions’ financial impact and give them all the tools necessary to optimize good governance and, of course, the costs.

In this post, we will explore AWS’s breakthroughs that have enthralled the developers who build cloud-based applications. But first, let us cover the basics.

3 Areas Where Transformation Is Needed

Development

Along with the development, it covers testing and operations too. It contains a broad spectrum that enables businesses to develop smaller and more targeted apps, reduce business risks, react to customer’s needs, and deliver the changes swiftly.

Data

Data is the biggest differentiator of our time, where every business seeks the same computing power and storage capabilities. The repository of a company’s data assets, regardless of their native formats, forms the core of a data lake. This calls for a system that helps eliminate data duplication and sprawl and promotes centralized governance. AWS offers multiple services to manage that data efficiently.

Compute

Compute is a heterogeneous space where Serverless Computing, Containers, and Virtual Machines coexist. AWS offers several Compute Services such as Amazon EC2, Batch, Fargate, and more. Each service is designed to make web-scale computing a piece of cake for developers worldwide and compute any workload.

Development, Testing & Operations Transformation

Development, testing, and operations are the engines to bring agility in cloud product development. But most of the IT companies are taking them lightly. In this competitive era, organizations cannot wait longer to release their application or software as they have to deal with tech-savvy customers. End users continuously look for other similar options available in the market that release incremental functionality. So, if you disappoint them, then you are giving a chance to your rivals to win them.

To attain business agility, AWS has released new services that help developers to build and run their cloud products more efficiently and quickly. Moreover, organizations can improve the responsiveness of their business and operating environment using these services. Have a quick look at the various AWS services that simplify the development, testing, and operations of an application.

Amazon X-Ray

An advanced service offered by AWS to visualize, analyze and debug distributed applications. It assists developers to identify performance errors and bottlenecks.

Amazon EC2 Systems Manager

A set of AWS tools for installation, packaging, resource configuration, task automation, and patching on Amazon EC2. It aids in automating the tasks that need to be carried out on EC2 instances. The Amazon EC2 Systems Manager is integrated with AWS configuration so that it facilitates developers with constant governance and monitoring of EC2 instances and on premise.

AWS Shield

It’s a managed DDoS protection service that is generally available in two tiers: Shield Standard and Shield Advanced. If we talk about Shield Standard, it provides DDoS protection to all consumers through Route 53, EC2, Elastic Load Balancing, API Gateway and CloudFront. Shield Advanced offers protection against more sophisticated and large DDoS attacks at the application layer.

AWS Codebuild

It’s a fully managed and extensible service to compile source code and run unit tests. AWS Codebuild is integrated with other application lifecycle management services such as AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeCommit, and AWS CodeDeploy. These integrations decrease the time between iterations of application.

AWS OpsWorks for Chef

A fully managed Chef automation server to fuel more automation and reduce the heavy lifting associated with continuous deployment.

Personal Health Dashboard

It permits developers to have a personalized view of AWS Services Health for all customers. Developers can attain visibility into service heath issues that might affect their software performance.

Data Transformation

There was a time when only wealthy companies can afford to access the infrastructure resources. But, today every developer has the access of infrastructure technology services that facilitate them with the advanced technologies to boost the cloud development up to the next level.

AWS facilitates companies with a wide range of analytics capabilities including real-time processing, data processing, predictive analytics, reporting, and warehousing. All these functionalities are supported by a set of data-related services such as Elasticsearch, Redshift, EMR, Lex, Amazon Machine Learning, Quicksight, Athena, Polly, and Rekognition.

According to Werner, modern data infrastructure is agile that has to perform various data analytics tasks such as discovery, security, governance operations, storage, data acquisition, and indexing. Moreover, the data infrastructure has to manage a constantly changing variety of models, users, applications, sources, processing needs, and queries. By introducing three new services, AWS has made data transformation quite easier than ever.

AWS Batch

A fully managed batch processing at any scale. The service addresses all the challenges of larger scale batch processing such as jobs interdependencies, cluster provision, cluster scaling, batch software install, job queues, and job scheduling. It also helps in cost optimizations through the EC2 spot fleet and support priority-based queues.

Amazon Pinpoint

It’s a data-driven engagement service specially designed for mobile apps. It allows to define your preferred customer segment, schedule a push notification campaign for user engagement, and monitor the output in real-time.

AWS Glue

It’s a fully managed ETL and data catalog service. With AWS Glue, developers can easily move the data across data stores. The service also simplifies and automates time-consuming data discovery, mapping, conversation and job scheduling tasks.

Compute Transformation

Compute is a vast subject that contains updates, packaging, runtime, execution and unit of cost. In the compute transformation, AWS has introduced three key technologies such as Virtual Machines, Containers, and Lambda. Accelerate the compute transformation with a new lambda functionality, an open source container framework, and a distributed application co-ordination service.

Blox

A set of open source projects for container orchestration and management. It is available on blox.github.io.

AWS Lambda @ Edge

Run AWS Lambda Functions at CloudFront locations to process the data at the edge location to attain low latency request/response.

AWS Step Functions

Coordinate components of distributed apps using visual workflow. Coordination amongst multiple Lambda functions enables developers in gaining complex behavior such as retry policies, concatenation, long-running tasks, parallel execution, etc.

So, with these 12 highly dynamic features and new services, AWS boosts up the capabilities of developers by transforming the way they build an application or software.

This article Originally published at www.intuz.com

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