These are my notes from day 3 of the Amazon ‘Architecting on AWS’ course which was run in Sydney in March 2014. The trainer/presenter was John Rotenstein from AWS.

Simple Queue Service

• Regionally based
• Automatically replicated throughout AZs
• Concept of dead letter queues
• Eventually consistent
• FIFO, kind of…
• “Visibility Timeout” is the invisibility timeout
  • Can be overridden in code
• Messages can be retained for up to 14 days
• Messages are base64 encoded
• Important for loosely coupled services

Simple Notification Service

1. Publish a message
2. Subscribers get the message

• Email
• HTTP/HTTPS
• SMS (USA only)
• SQS

• Push to iOS and Android

• SNS can be used to fan out messages. e.g. send same message to multiple SQS queues

• You wouldn’t use SNS to email customers

• 1 million free mobile push

Simple Workflow Service

• Orchestration tool

• Decider
  • Business logic
  • Decision logic
• Activity workers do work assigned by the Decider

Simple Email Service

• Bulk and transactional email service
• No SPAM is allowed
• SES not available in Australia

Cloud Search

• Search engine for your web app
• Runs as an instance
• Auto scales
• Managed Apache Solr

Migrating Applications

• Whitepaper
• Build a cloud strategy
  • New apps
    • Build as cloud ready
  • Existing apps
    • “No brainer”
    • Planned phase
• Run a PoC

• Engage AWS to help

• Migrate your data
  • Riverbed
  • Aspera

Cloud benefits

• Zero upfront costs (OPEX vs CAPEX)
  • Simple calculator
  • TCO calculator
• On demand provisioning
• Instant scalability
• Business agility
• Developer productivity
• etc..