Summary - Domain One - Designing Resilient Architectures

Summary - Domain One - Designing Resilient Architectures

In this module, we introduced the concepts of high availability and fault tolerance and we learn how to recognize and explain how we go about designing highly available, fault-tolerant solutions on AWS.

We introduced and explained the concept of business continuity, the concept of a recovery point objective and a recovery time objective - and how AWS services can be effective enablers when designing for disaster recovery

We then learned to recognize and explain the core AWS services that when used together can reduce single points of failure and improve scalability in a multi-tier solution.  

In our hands-on labs we created and worked with Auto Scaling groups to improve add elasticity and durability. We worked with Amazon Simple Queue service - a core service as it can increase resilience by acting as a messaging service between services and applications, thereby enabling us to decouple layers and reduce dependency on state.  

Next, we had a hands-on introduction to Amazon CloudWatch monitoring service. Amazon CloudWatch is the “eyes and ears of your environment and an important component when designing a resilient architecture. Cloudwatch alarms and triggers can increase resilience by allowing you to react to changes and events - you can automate auto scaling based on predefined CloudWatch performance metrics.

Finally, we learned to apply the Amazon CloudWatch CDN service to add resilience to a static website served out of Amazon S3. Amazon Cloudfront is tightly integrated with other AWS services such as Amazon S3, AWS WAF and Amazon GuardDuty making Amazon CloudFront an important component to increasing the resilience of your solution.