STACKLEAGUE X AWS TECH SESSION: HOSTING YOUR APPS ON THE CLOUD

By StackLeague Team / August 19, 2021 / news
On the 4th of August 2021, a successful and illuminating StackLeague Tech Session was hosted in partnership with Amazon Web Services where we were accompanied by a very special resource speaker, Mr. Rom Gapuz Jr., a Senior Solutions Architect of Amazon Web Services (AWS) with the goal to illuminate developers and programmers in the Philippines the options and approaches on how to leverage the cloud for the applications you build.<br><br>

### INTRODUCING AWS AND WHAT SETS IT APART<br>
![](https://imgur.com/Vc4RKV5.png)

AWS or Amazon Web Services is a comprehensive and evolving cloud computing platform provider that was established in 2006 to handle the online retailing services and operations by Amazon. Being around for decades does not stop it from being one of the best cloud computing platforms around and here are some of the reasons why: <br><br>

1. **Security and compliance**
It offers a variety of cloud security services and has supported more security standards and compliance certification than any other offering that satisfies compliance requirements for virtually every regulatory agency around the world. AWS also offers the highest encryption standard in the industry. <br>

2. **Breadth and Depth; Pace of Innovation**
It is made up of diverse products and services and offers over 200+ fully-featured services including Analytics, Business Applications, Blockchain, Database, Development Tools, Media Services, Machine Learning, and many more. From 80 new significant services and features that were initially released in 2011, the AWS has released over 2,757 latest services in 2020 and continuously aims to produce more services and features for their customers in the future.<br>

3. **Most Experience with Operational Reliability**
Millions of customers actively use AWS and are still regarded as the most reliable, secure, and cost-effective infrastructure throughout the years.<br>

4. **Global Reach and High Availability**
It provides services from a number of data centers spread across several Availability Zones (AZs), all of which are linked by low latency, high throughput, and highly redundant networking. Currently, there are 81 AZs spread over 25 geographic regions in the world, with more to come. Five of AWS's Local Zones have latencies as low as one millisecond, making it feasible to execute demanding applications with ease. It also uses 230+ Points of Presence which is a global network used by Amazon CloudFront in 90 cities across 47 countries.<br>

5. **Improve Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)**
They practice an uncommon business procedure where they have been reducing the prices of their services since 2006. There are currently 107 proactive price reductions as of the date and the more cloud users, the more they can reduce cost, and pass down the cost savings for their customers.<br>

6. **Largest Community of Customers and Partners**
AWS has millions of monthly active users and more than 100,000 consulting and Internet Service Provider (ISP) partners in more than 150 countries that supply their clients with solutions and professional services.<br>

7. **Enterprise Leader**
AWS is still popular with the startup community and enterprise companies, and is recognized by many industry experts, with Gartner naming AWS as a Cloud Leader for the tenth year in a row in 2020 in terms of completeness of vision and executing abilities, the 2020 Cloud Leader in IDC Iaas MarketSpace for being the most strategic and most capable in terms of cloud service, and is acknowledged by Forrester in terms of container platforms. <br>

Now that you know about AWS, let’s go straight into the very core of the event. <br><br>

### HOW DO WE HOST APPLICATIONS IN THE CLOUD?<br>
First of all, a cloud is referred to as servers or systems that are accessed over the Internet. Computation and storage take place on servers in a data center rather than locally, it has made it possible for users to access the same files and apps from practically any device. Computing services such as storage, databases, networking, and many more can be done through the use of cloud computing to offer faster innovation, flexibility, and cost-efficiency for your business or applications.<br>

In hosting applications in the cloud, there is a multitude of approaches to consider when hosting apps in the cloud,  depending on the sort of applications or services you'll be developing. Mr. Rom reviewed and presented three of the most frequent and commonly used AWS hosting options and services for developers, and we will be delving further into them.<br><br>

- **Virtual Machine**
A virtual machine (VM) is a type of virtual server that can host and execute programs on a variety of operating systems that acts as a full computing platform on its own. In hosting applications through virtual machines, you as the user or developer have full control on the server you have. AWS has created a perfect web service for developers known as Amazon EC2, or Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, that offers a variety of instance types that are geared for different types of application. Instance types come in a variety of processors, memory, storage, and networking capacities, giving developers the freedom to select the best resource mix for their applications.<br>

![](https://imgur.com/QOS9EZE.png)

As a developer,  you have a lot of platform choices and categories to choose and use depending on the type of application you’re running or planning to develop on Amazon EC2. If it's more computational, you would utilize Compute intensive. If it requires a lot of memory, you would need a Memory intensive application. In developing applications such as games, machine learning, or rendering high-quality videos, you can utilize the GPU compute or Graphics intensive.<br>

In terms of capabilities, you can choose from a variety of processors such as Intel, AMD, Mac, and Graviton powered instances in Amazon EC2 to run on-demand workloads in the cloud depending on your needs, as well as a variety of GPU-based instances or accelerators such as Nvidia and AWS Inferential to provide high performance, particularly on machine learning and AI.<br>


- **Container**
Containers, on the other hand, are a layer of abstraction over a virtual machine. It's a type of software package that includes all of the components needed to operate fast and consistently in any environment. A container, unlike a virtual machine server, may be fully managed by you, AWS, or both parties. Multiple containers can be built or hosted on a single server. Mr. Rom also talked through the orchestration or the operational effort of the deployment of a container. In AWS, they offer a variety of container services, including Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes, and Amazon Fargate. <br>

![](https://imgur.com/7w2jT4Z.png)

- **Serverless**
The concept behind Serverless is that you don't have to manage the servers, as opposed to virtual machines, where you have full control over the server. AWS manages the server completely in Serverless. You don't need to be familiar with the underlying infrastructure, such as servers and networking. A popular example of how to execute Serverless applications is AWS Lambda, which is basically a function that lets you run your code without provisioning and management of servers or managing runtimes, gives you the benefit of continuous scaling, and is cost-optimized with millisecond metering, meaning you only pay for the time you use. In hosting your applications in Serverless through AWS, different categories of services are available in the workflow. <br>

![](https://imgur.com/YYCTR8B.png)

Knowing how AWS works and gaining an understanding of the different options in hosting applications in AWS, we will now dwell on the usual journey of hosting an application in AWS.<br><br>

### THE CLOUD ARCHITECTURE JOURNEY<br><br>
From having a Monolithic Architecture in 1994, Amazon changed its ways and transformed into a Microservice Architecture in 2002 where it divides the system into smaller, self-contained components where every application procedure is handled by these units as a distinct service. As a result, each service has its own logic and database, as well as the ability to execute specialized activities. In terms of the transformation done by the company, three concepts of the Amazon DevOps were utilized and these are:<br>

1. **Break things down (Process)**
Many companies originating from a monolithic architecture are migrating to a microservices approach and usually follow what they call the Strangler Fig Application. It was coined the term by computer scientist Martin Fowler, as like a Strangler Fig tree, where the strangler vines grow on top of a tree and make their way down to the base of the tree and replace it completely. This migration strategy is based on gradually replacing existing system functions with new applications and services until the new application system replaces all of the old system's features.<br>

2. **Teams are Autonomous Business (People)**
AWS has the concept of a 2-Pizza team which is basically a small decentralized team that is agile and nimble and usually consists of 5 to 10 people that is composed of the developers, the product managers, administrator, the analyst, etc. Sir Rom also discussed the different teams that developers can adopt when building their applications. <br>

3. **Automate Everything (Technology)**
AWS has the tools for developers that can be utilized to do DevOps from authoring, building, testing, deploying, and monitoring, which allows developers to have a way to model, visualize, and automate the steps required to release the software they build. <br>

![](https://imgur.com/iPMU6Ky.png)

### Final Thoughts<br><br>
In hosting your applications on the cloud, we learned how AWS can provide a variety of services based on your needs, as well as different approaches to hosting your applications on the cloud using AWS that can assist you, as a developer, in managing, growing, and upgrading the apps you develop.. If you want to learn more and gain more insights to further improve your applications, join us in our next StackLeague x AWS Tech Session: Serverless & Containers on August 11, 6 pm.<br>

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<p style="text-align:center;">***</p>

This article is written by Jaymee Rae Figueroa, an intern of StackLeague and a student of BS Mathematics with a Specialization in Computer Science from Bulacan State University. Her hobbies include reading novels and manga, playing video games, and drawing. Her interest in reading has indeed contributed to her comprehensive writing. She can also be resilient as much as she can be adaptive in every situation.

You can connect with Jaymee [here](https://accounts.stacktrek.com/profile/jaymee-figueroa-Tr4z-5M_vqvs): <br>
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