Discover how Amazon fits into your Company
In this article I approach the AWS Services in a more business-oriented manner by use of presumed case studies;
Case One
Suppose you own an online store selling baby kits and you would like to collect bi-weekly customer reviews and purchases. If your company wishes to process such customer records with business logic to validate customers’ review using Amazon cloud services, your ought to design a high performing solution to handle the compressed data, which is un-partitioned and archived in columnar format. In such a case, AWS Glue could be used to process the records and load the processed records into Amazon Redshift. Also, Spot instances within EMR cluster using EMR File System can be developed to process the records, then load the processed data into Amazon Redshift and generate reports. You can read more here.
When the data is stored in the cloud databases it is possible that your company data scientists who use EMR cluster to regularly analyze data can leave the clusters running. To avoid unnecessary costs, it’s advisable to use AWS CloudWatch metrics alarm on Isldle metric on EMR cluster to send an automatic message to Amazon SNS. You can subscribe to an AWS Lambda function to terminate the EMR cluster since the running clusters attract unnecessary costs for the company. To read more about EMR costing this link is resourceful.
Case Two
In this case, I take an example of a motor company that writes data locally on IoT sensors. The data is available for analysis by the data team. Suppose the company wishes to migrate services to AWS for storage and analytics and then start using Amazon Athena, QuickSight, and EMR in data processing and Business intelligence services. The company management can opt to deploy AWS DataSync agent on-premise then replicate the data to specific S3 buckets to facilitate data encryption and integrity validation. DataSync allows the copying of large datasets from the on-premises environment to AWS storage locations. It helps when setting up a scheduled incremental data transfers. This link details DataSync
Suppose the security department at the motor company wants to develop a cost-effective solution by using a unique AWS account to analyze daily logs from employees’ accounts. The AWS Solution Architect can advise the security team to use Amazon's S3 bucket in a single account to collect logs from employees’ accounts, then use AWS Lambda event trigger to add log indexes to the Amazon Elastic search cluster within their account. Explore more about Cloudwatch log here
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