The Open Guide to Amazon Web Services
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Table of Contents
Purpose
AWS in General
Special Topics
Legal
Figures and Tables
Why an Open Guide?
A lot of information on AWS is already written. Most people learn AWS by reading a blog or a “getting started guide” and referring to the standard AWS references. Nonetheless, trustworthy and practical information and recommendations aren’t easy to come by. AWS’s own documentation is a great but sprawling resource few have time to read fully, and it doesn’t include anything but official facts, so omits experiences of engineers. The information in blogs or Stack Overflow is also not consistently up to date.
This guide is by and for engineers who use AWS. It aims to be a useful, living reference that consolidates links, tips, gotchas, and best practices. It arose from discussion and editing over beers by several engineers who have used AWS extensively.
Before using the guide, please read the license and disclaimer.
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Please help!
This is an early in-progress draft! It’s our first attempt at assembling this information, so is far from comprehensive still, and likely to have omissions or errors.
Please help by joining the Slack channel (we like to talk about AWS in general, even if you only have questions — discussion helps the community and guides improvements) and contributing to the guide. This guide is open to contributions, so unlike a blog, it can keep improving. Like any open source effort, we combine efforts but also review to ensure high quality.
Scope
- Currently, this guide covers selected “core” services, such as EC2, S3, Load Balancers, EBS, and IAM, and partial details and tips around other services. We expect it to expand.
- It is not a tutorial, but rather a collection of information you can read and return to. It is for both beginners and the experienced.
- The goal of this guide is to be:
- Brief: Keep it dense and use links
- Practical: Basic facts, concrete details, advice, gotchas, and other “folk knowledge”
- Current: We can keep updating it, and anyone can contribute improvements
- Thoughtful: The goal is to be helpful rather than present dry facts. Thoughtful opinion with rationale is welcome. Suggestions, notes, and opinions based on real experience can be extremely valuable. (We believe this is both possible with a guide of this format, unlike in some other venues.)
- This guide is not sponsored by AWS or AWS-affiliated vendors. It is written by and for engineers who use AWS.
Legend
- 📒 Marks standard/official AWS pages and docs
- 🔹 Important or often overlooked tip
- ❗ “Serious” gotcha (used where risks or time or resource costs are significant: critical security risks, mistakes with significant financial cost, or poor architectural choices that are fundamentally difficult to correct)
- 🔸 “Regular” gotcha, limitation, or quirk (used where consequences are things not working, breaking, or not scaling gracefully)
- 📜 Undocumented feature (folklore)
- 🐥 Relatively new (and perhaps immature) services or features
- ⏱ Performance discussions
- ⛓ Lock-in: Products or decisions that are likely to tie you to AWS in a new or significant way — that is, later moving to a non-AWS alternative would be costly in terms of engineering effort
- 🚪 Alternative non-AWS options
- 💸 Cost issues, discussion, and gotchas
- 🕍 A mild warning attached to “full solution” or opinionated frameworks that may take significant time to understand and/or might not fit your needs exactly; the opposite of a point solution (the cathedral is a nod to Raymond’s metaphor)
- 📗📘📙 Colors indicate basics, tips, and gotchas, respectively.
- 🚧 Areas where correction or improvement are needed (possibly with link to an issue — do help!)
When to Use AWS
- AWS is the dominant public cloud computing provider.
- In general, “cloud computing” can refer to one of three types of cloud: “public,” “private,” and “hybrid.” AWS is a public cloud provider, since anyone can use it. Private clouds are within a single (usually large) organization. Many companies use a hybrid of private and public clouds.
- The core features of AWS are infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) — that is, virtual machines and supporting infrastructure. Other cloud service models include platform-as-a-service (PaaS), which typically are more fully managed services that deploy customers’ applications, or software-as-a-service (SaaS), which are cloud-based applications. AWS does offer a few products that fit into these other models, too.
- In business terms, with infrastructure-as-a-service you have a variable cost model — it is OpEx, not CapEx (though some pre-purchased contracts are still CapEx).
- AWS’s TTM revenue was $37.549 billion as of Q1 2020 according to their earnings results (slide 14 in the linked deck), or roughly 14% of Amazon.com’s total revenue (slide 11 in the same deck) for the same TTM period.
- Main reasons to use AWS:
- If your company is building systems or products that may need to scale
- and you have technical know-how
- and you want the most flexible tools
- and you’re not significantly tied into different infrastructure already
- and you don’t have internal, regulatory, or compliance reasons you can’t use a public cloud-based solution
- and you’re not on a Microsoft-first tech stack
- and you don’t have a specific reason to use Google Cloud
- and you can afford, manage, or negotiate its somewhat higher costs
- ... then AWS is likely a good option for your company.
- Each of those reasons above might point to situations where other services are preferable. In practice, many, if not most, tech startups as well as a number of modern large companies can or already do benefit from using AWS. Many large enterprises are partly migrating internal infrastructure to Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS.
- Costs: Billing and cost management are such big topics that we have an entire section on this.
- 🔹EC2 vs. other services: Most users of AWS are most familiar with EC2, AWS’ flagship virtual server product, and possibly a few others like S3 and CLBs. But AWS products now extend far beyond basic IaaS, and often companies do not properly understand or appreciate all the many AWS services and how they can be applied, due to the sharply growing number of services, their novelty and complexity, branding confusion, and fear of ⛓lock-in to proprietary AWS technology. Although a bit daunting, it’s important for technical decision-makers in companies to understand the breadth of the AWS services and make informed decisions. (We hope this guide will help.)
- 🚪AWS vs. other cloud providers: While AWS is the dominant IaaS provider (31% market share in this 2016 estimate), there is significant competition and alternatives that are better suited to some companies. This Gartner report has a good overview of the major cloud players :
- Google Cloud Platform. GCP arrived later to market than AWS, but has vast resources and is now used widely by many companies, including a few large ones. It is gaining market share. Not all AWS services have similar or analogous services in GCP. And vice versa: In particular, GCP offers some more advanced machine learning-based services like the Vision, Speech, and Natural Language APIs. It’s not common to switch once you’re up and running, but it does happen: Spotify migrated from AWS to Google Cloud. There is more discussion on Quora about relative benefits. Of particular note is that VPCs in GCP are global by default with subnetworks per region, while AWS’ VPCs have to live within a particular region. This gives GCP an edge if you’re designing applications with geo-replication from the beginning. It’s also possible to share one GCP VPC between multiple projects (roughly analogous to AWS accounts), while in AWS you’d have to peer them. It’s also possible to peer GCP VPCs in a similar manner to how it’s done in AWS.
- Microsoft Azure is the de facto choice for companies and teams that are focused on a Microsoft stack, and it has now placed significant emphasis on Linux as well
- In China, AWS’ footprint is relatively small. The market is dominated by Alibaba’s Alibaba Cloud, formerly called Aliyun.
- Companies at (very) large scale may want to reduce costs by managing their own infrastructure. For example, Dropbox migrated to their own infrastructure.
- Other cloud providers such as Digital Ocean offer similar services, sometimes with greater ease of use, more personalized support, or lower cost. However, none of these match the breadth of products, mind-share, and market domination AWS now enjoys.
- Traditional managed hosting providers such as Rackspace offer cloud solutions as well.
- 🚪AWS vs. PaaS: If your goal is just to put up a single service that does something relatively simple, and you’re trying to minimize time managing operations engineering, consider a platform-as-a-service such as Heroku. The AWS approach to PaaS, Elastic Beanstalk, is arguably more complex, especially for simple use cases.
- 🚪AWS vs. web hosting: If your main goal is to host a website or blog, and you don’t expect to be building an app or more complex service, you may wish consider one of the myriad web hosting services.
- 🚪**AW
A free, community-maintained practical guide to Amazon Web Services — a living reference that consolidates links, tips, gotchas, and best practices, written by engineers who use AWS.