Choosing the Right Additional AWS Service Integration Approach

pre-requisite: AWS

It’s crucial to choose AWS essential services to use with the proper strategy. These services significantly increase efficiency it is not required to include them in your program. A wide range of various services are available from Amazon Web Services (AWS), and all of these services can be managed to develop effective solutions. Methods for connecting Amazon services are listed below:

1. API Integration: APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), which enable programmatic interaction with AWS services, are designed to be exposed by AWS services. Applications can exchange information and connect to Amazon services thanks to APIs. Programming languages like Ruby, Python, and Java are just a few that support AWS APIs.

2. Event-Driven Integration: The Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform provides a number of event-driven services, including Amazon SNS (Simple Notification Service) and Amazon SQS (Simple Queue Service), that let applications publish and receive events. To develop event-driven processes that respond to changes in data or state, these services can be combined.

3. Integration using Service Mesh: Service Mesh is a well-liked method for connecting microservice architectures that are set up in a cloud environment. Developers may monitor and regulate the connection between microservices using Amazon App Mesh, an entirely managed service mesh, which is available from AWS.

4. Data Integration: AWS provides several data integration services, such as Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Kinesis, that allow applications to store, handle and analyze enormous amounts of data. The combination of these services can result in effective data-driven solutions.

5. Integration for Identity and Access Management (IAM): Amazon provides IAM services that let programmers control user access and permissions to AWS services. In order to restrict access to AWS services based on particular user roles or groups, developers can incorporate IAM services into their applications.

Key points for Service Integration

1. If you lack experience in this service area, let the AWS specialists handle it: Since time is of the essence to all of us, learning a new skill when under pressure is both ineffective and pointless. You can use your time more effectively in areas where you are an expert because you are not going to be any better at it than Amazon is.

2. Use the AWS service if this service area doesn’t offer any special features or helps your application stand out: Even if having your application’s content locally cached may make your users considerably happier, no one will pay for your service because you personally set up a group of servers that are dispersed throughout the globe to offer low-latency access. You’ll benefit more if you concentrate on the material itself rather than the method of delivery. Focus your efforts on something that adds value for users and rely on CloudFront for its strengths.

3. If you’re unsure whether you can offer this service for a lot less money than Amazon can, let Amazon handle the implementation: If there’s even a remote chance that Amazon is more cost-effective, you’re better off using AWS because Amazon can probably run it far less expensively than you can. Most IT businesses are bad at predicting their genuine costs to supply a service.

Additional AWS Services Integration for Your Application

The fact that Amazon offers application services on a use-if-you-choose basis is a key advantage of its strategy. Even if you choose to operate that product or service in AWS, there is nothing stopping you from utilizing another product or service to implement functionality that is identical to that provided by one of Amazon’s services.

Using an AWS core service in your application entails two tasks:

• Develop and set up the service itself.
• Utilize the service directly from your application.

In terms of the initial task, using the Amazon alternative as opposed to setting up your own is frequently simpler. For instance, it is much simpler to complete a short wizard to create, say, a sizable Memcached pool and let Amazon handle the creation of the instances, installation of the Memcached software, the configuration of them to communicate with one another, and management of their uptime.

To put it another way, if you do it yourself, you must complete all of the work yourself in order to get the benefits of the core service. When using the Amazon version, on the other hand, you get the advantages of the service without having to spend any of your valuable time managing it. You can evaluate the financial gains of delegating the duty to Amazon in relation to the price of the Amazon service depending on how highly you value your time. Financially speaking,

The second task, accessing the service from within your application, demonstrates the wisdom of Amazon’s approach to providing these services. Amazon has often left the used model undisturbed, or comparable to the model used by the alternatives you would use if you decided to implement the feature yourself, rather than creating a distinct or comprehensive solution that necessitates you learning an offering-specific use model. For instance, even if Amazon’s RDS service has actual advantages for managing databases, you can still communicate with the databases that RDS manages without any restrictions.

This approach to these services, which are included in the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) category, is very different from the other one. A similar capability is available in those offers, but it’s so closely connected to the PaaS offering that using it necessitates learning a new strategy and occasionally a whole different manner in order to get the same outcome as with well-established goods.

How to Manage Amazon Web Service Lock-in

Some people worry that by adopting some of the main (or expanded, for that matter) services offered by AWS, they’ll be permanently tied to the company. In other words, if an application uses other AWS services, it will be challenging to move it away from AWS. Although lock-in is a legitimate concern and a recurrent fear for IT firms, I think that for the majority of people, the advantages of using AWS outweigh the problems presented by the potential for lock-in. 

1. Acknowledge your concerns: Most users who use the term “lock-in” worry that they won’t be able to move their applications to another site in the future. My first piece of advice is to precisely determine how much your application is locked in, or how much your use of AWS services compels it to run exclusively on AWS. No matter where your application runs, a number of AWS services are helpful. No matter where your application runs, the DNS provider, Route 53, for instance, can be helpful. The AWS CDN solution, CloudFront, is also usable even if your application runs somewhere else. In actuality, CloudFront is used by a large number of applications that run in different cloud environments or in local data centers. Therefore, it’s crucial to comprehend what and how much of your use of particular AWS services really locks you in.

2. A portable design: Make migration of your application simple. Instead of writing directly to a provider API, one tried-and-true method for avoiding lock-in is to design and employ an encapsulation layer. In this manner, you can add additional API calls to the encapsulation layer without affecting the application’s mainline code. This method is quite simple to apply within your application and is undoubtedly much simpler with AWS than with other PaaS providers due to the tendency of Amazon’s services to imitate other capabilities that you can access by creating software yourself (ElastiCache, for example).

3. The cost-benefit analysis must always take into account both sides: Because of the advantages an offering offers in comparison to the drawbacks of a long-term commitment to the providing, people are willing to put up with lock-in. Because of Amazon’s incredible cost- and user-friendliness, you may be willing to accept some lock-in as a trade-off.

4. Recognize your fear of being ripped off financially: A well-founded concern about being financially taken advantage of is the main deterrent to lock-in that prevents people from participating. Historically, merchants have exploited client loyalty to boost their financial performance after securing lock-in on the side of their consumers. The long list of consumer grievances against lock-in includes payments for forced upgrades, application modules that customers were forced to pay for even though they didn’t want to as part of a version update, or arbitrarily raised maintenance fees. Although it’s impossible to forecast what Amazon will do, up until this moment, its pricing has always gone down; now, people pay between 50% and 70% less for an EC2 instance than they did three years ago. Even though it hasn’t been a problem with AWS, it’s always a good idea to be cautious about potential price gouging.