My journey to AWS Solution Architect Exam — Part 17 — Design Resilient Architectures — Introduction
Hello cloud enthusiasts and aspiring AWS certified individuals; today we delve into the second section of the “AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Associate (SAA-C03) Exam Guide”, taking a close look at the skills required in “Design scalable and loosely coupled architectures” within the AWS ecosystem.
It’s essential to highlight how designing scalable architectures is a key element in the world of cloud computing. The ability to design systems that can dynamically grow in response to user demand is crucial to maximizing the benefits offered by AWS’s flexibility and elastic resources.
Let’s delve into what “loosely coupled” means in an AWS context. When designing solutions based on AWS, the concept of loose coupling takes on particular relevance. It involves creating architectures where different components work together with minimal dependencies, allowing for greater flexibility and maintainability.
In practical terms, this means we can update or replace a component without affecting the rest of the system, a crucial aspect for maintaining and evolving solutions in a dynamic cloud environment like AWS.
Concepts and services
Now let’s take a quick look at these concepts and the related AWS services, which we will explore in more detail in future articles. These ones are crucial for designing, implementing, and managing scalable, resilient, and efficient applications on the AWS platform
Caching Strategies aim to improve system performance by temporarily storing frequently accessed data. AWS offers services like Amazon ElastiCache, supporting distributed data caching to enhance application performance.
Microservices are an architecture where an application is divided into smaller, autonomous services that can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently. AWS supports microservices architecture through services like Amazon ECS, and Amazon EKS.
Event-driven architecture involves communication between system components through events, promoting scalability and flexibility. Amazon EventBridge is an event-routing service that simplifies building event-driven architectures.
Horizontal scaling adds more instances of resources to handle load, while vertical scaling improves the performance of an existing instance by increasing its resources. AWS Auto Scaling facilitates automatic scaling of resources like EC2.
Accelerators used to improve network performance and content distribution at the edge of the network.AWS offers services like Amazon CloudFront for global content distribution through a network of edge locations.
Theprocess of moving an application from one environment to another, often using containers like Docker; Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS facilitate the management and orchestration of containers.
Load Balancing Concepts: distributing traffic among multiple resources to improve availability and performance. AWS provides Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) to distribute traffic among EC2 instances or containers.
Multi-Tier Architectures: architectures that divide an application into different functional tiers to handle specific tasks. AWS supports multi-tier architectures through services like Amazon RDS for the database tier and Amazon EC2 for the application tier.
Queuing and Messaging Concepts: using message queues for asynchronous communication between system components. Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) and Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) are used for messaging and asynchronous communication.
Serverless Technologies and patterns: architectures that eliminate the need to manage underlying infrastructure. AWS Lambda is an example of a serverless service, allowing code execution without managing servers.
Storage types with associated characteristics refers to different types of storage (object, file, block) with specific characteristics. Amazon S3 for object storage, Amazon EFS for file storage, and Amazon EBS for block storage.
Use of read replicas: using read-only data copies to enhance the performance of read operations. Amazon RDS supports creating read replicas to balance the database workload.
Workflow orchestration: managing complex workflows and sequences of tasks. AWS Step Functions simplify the orchestration of distributed workflows.
We will start by explaining the different types of storage and then move on to the concepts of scalability and high availability.
