AWS

One of the fantastic things that Amazon has done is to provide a years worth of free AWS usage(Check the free tier category) before you use any service to avoid fees. This really provides an opportunity for first time users to test out everything there is to within AWS. Below I list a few services that I leverage and use:

Users

Used to manage the EC2 and other activities using IAM user account. Some of the key roles and users that could be created are

1. Developers

2. Dev-ops

3. Bill viewer

4. Bill Payment

5. Github or any 3rd party connections (Very important to create a separate one for each integration as this will help in maintaining the access and security stringent)

EC2

Choose wisely as to what location you would need for your server as this decides the latency and performance. With the free tier you have to end up using Amazon distribution of linux. However, for testing purpose this is good, unless you are very particular about the distribution of the OS.

Code Deploy

This service works really well with github so you can really enable CD using this service. The best way to get this is to commit a change to github which runs all the tests(TravisCI, Cadeship, Jenkins etc..) and then deploys the changes to EC2 using this service.

Cloud Trail

This service records AWS API calls for your account and delivers log files to you. The recorded information includes the identity of the API caller, the time of the API call, the source IP address of the API caller, the request parameters, and the response elements returned by the AWS service. This helps with monitoring your API usage and controlling it.

S3

Simple Storage Service(S3) is mainly used to store and retrieve data through the service. This is highly scalable and can expand as needed.

Redshift

This is the amazon version of a Data Warehouse. Almost all end up using this as it provides easy integration with other AWS services and also many vendors provide good integration with Redshift. If there are a lot of key values grabs, which wouldn’t make sense with a database like Redshift that doesn’t support indexes.

Note: There are numerous services available through AWS which would require a lot of uses cases to leverage it. One key thing to keep in mind is that with each use of services the costs increase. So planning and budgeting is really important to keep the costs under control.