The Basics of Networking with AWS

In this chapter, we will look at a brief overview of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its networking services so that we can get started quickly and have an idea about key services and key concepts.

To understand AWS, it is better to have a core understanding of what exactly it is and then look at AWS-related topics.

Cloud computing, cloud service models, cloud deployment models, and cloud characteristics that are based on the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) definition will help us understand the core of cloud computing. This chapter will cover how we can categorize different services of AWS by considering cloud service models and cloud deployment models.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics in detail:

• The core concepts of AWS
• Regions and Availability Zones
• Security and compliance
• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
• Security groups
• An overview of networking services
• Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) 
• Amazon CloudFront
• Amazon Route 53
• AWS Direct Connect
• Elastic Load Balancing
• Auto Scaling
• Billing Dashboard
• AWS Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculator
• Architecture—compute and networking services for a sample application