System Design on AWS

Chapter 9. AWS Network Services

People interact with multiple applications (or with one another) via the internet. We first explored communication network and protocol concepts in Chapter 6; this chapter is an extension of Chapter 6 that will introduce you to the AWS networking services Amazon VPC, Amazon Route 53, AWS Elastic Load Balancer (ELB), Amazon API Gateway, and Amazon CloudFront. The goal is to help you set up your networking infrastructure on the AWS cloud as you learn about the networking concepts related to the different services and how to establish connectivity between them.

Companies used to prefer setting up their own infrastructures in on-premises data centers to make their systems more reliable and safer and to ensure that they operated per business requirements, but that comes with a high cost for infrastructure management. If you are just launching your startup idea, it will likely be too costly for you to set up a personal data center. The cloud provides cost benefits (when analyzing the costs of all the resources and optimizing them to their full potential) along with a lot of flexibility. For example, it’s much harder to sell back a physical server that you bought for setting up your personal data center than it is to turn off an Amazon EC2 machine (server) in the AWS cloud.

AWS operates on a shared responsibility model, meaning the customer and AWS work together to make best use of services in a secure and cost-effective way, where AWS is responsible ...