Learning Path: AWS: Building Secured Applications with AWS
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a secure cloud services platform, offering compute power, database storage, content delivery, and other functionality to help businesses scale and grow. Are you an application developer or an architect looking to develop or architect applications for AWS? Or are you interested in securing applications running in the AWS cloud system? If yes, then this Learning Path is for you.
Packt’s Video Learning Paths are a series of individual video products put together in a logical and stepwise manner such that each video builds on the skills learned in the video before it.
The highlights of this Learning Path are:
- Learn how to store a nearly unlimited number of files in a low-cost object store
- Build your own custom virtual private cloud
Let’s take a look at your journey. This Learning Path will show you how to get started with some of the powerful and exciting core technologies available on AWS enabling you to fully manage user information and privilege service on your virtual network environment. It will then teach you Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), offering you nearly infinite flexible compute power in the cloud, with bespoke virtualized, compute options including database optimized instances, GPU instances, and FPGA instances, and Simple Storage Service (S3), allowing you to store a nearly unlimited number of files in a low-cost object store. Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) gives you a fully-managed application load balancing service, similar to NGINX and HAPROXY, but fine-tuned for the Amazon environment allowing you to manage your traffic. Moving ahead, you’ll explore Identity Access Management (IAM) and Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) that gives you the essential capability to create a secure and isolated virtual datacenter in the cloud, complete with fine-grained user access controls and activity monitoring. The Learning Path will also show by how to run a Node.JS-based web API, making use of all of these fully-managed services, resulting in a fully functionally, fault–tolerant, next-generation web scale application.
After completing this Learning Path, you’ll be able to secure your applications from the beginning of the architecture/development process.
Meet Your Expert:
We have the best works of the following esteemed authors to ensure that your learning journey is smooth:
- Colibri is a technology consultancy company founded in 2015 by James Cross and Ingrid Funie. The company works to help its clients navigate the rapidly changing and complex world of emerging technologies, with deep expertise in areas like big data, data science, machine learning, and cloud computing. Over the past few years they have worked with some of the world’s largest and most prestigious companies, including a tier 1 investment bank, a leading management consultancy group, and one of the world’s most popular soft drinks companies, helping each of them to make better sense of their data, and process it in more intelligent ways. The company lives by its motto: Data -> Intelligence -> Action. James Cross is a big data engineer and certified AWS solutions architect with a passion for data-driven applications. He’s spent the last 3-5 years helping his clients to design and implement huge-scale, streaming big data platforms, cloud-based analytics stacks, and serverless architectures. As the CTO of Scout Solutions Ltd, he built a fully serverless set of API’s and analytics stacks based around Lambda and Redshift. He is interested in almost anything that has to do with technology. He has worked with everything from WordPress to Hadoop, from C++ to Java, and from Oracle to DynamoDB. If it’s new and solves a problem in an innovative way he’s keen to give it a go!
AWS Bootcamp - Autoscaling Applications in the Cloud
This video provides an overview of the entire course.
In this section, we’ll show our audience how to register for and sign into their AWS account as well as install some basic NodeJS development tooling (Sublime text and the NodeJS command-line package), which will be required later in the course.
An introduction to the history of AWS and a high level glance at its core architectural principles and the services on offer.
A comparison of the different EC2 instance types available, and examples of when to use them.
A tutorial on how to create EC2 instances and connect to them.
An introduction to roles and their importance in the context of working with EC2.
Understanding EC2 metadata and how to use it in your application.
An introduction to the Amazon Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) and how to configure it.
An introduction to storage and content delivery on AWS with an overview of S3 and CloudFront.
How to create your first S3 bucket using the console and upload some data to it.
An overview of the different storage options available on S3 and their implications.
How to apply version control to objects in S3, how to leverage it, and when you might want to use it.
Understanding how to apply lifecycling policies to Amazon S3 buckets in order to automatically transition objects between the available storage tiers.
A more detailed overview of CloudFront along with a hands-on example of how to set up your own CDN distribution.
An overview of some more advanced S3 features such as CORS, Bucket Policies, ACLs, and Encryption.
An overview of a very simple NodeJS express app that presents a simple REST API and reads a files contents from S3.
How to wrap our application with a Dockerfile and deploy it to EC2?
- Wrap with a Dockerfile
- Run an automatic script to deploy the application
- Test the app
A hands-on example of how to add an Elastic Load Balancer in front of our API.
Autoscaling our API automatically across multiple instances in multiple data centers.
Networking and Security Best Practices on AWS
This video provides an overview of the entire course.
In this video, you will gain a first glance understanding of IAM and why it’s so important to cloud computing.
In this video, we have an example of how to create users, groups, and roles with IAM.
In this video, you will gain an understanding of how we can leverage IAM roles and policies to secure our infrastructure without
needing to store access credentials.
In this video, you will learn what a virtual private cloud is, the components of a VPC, and how this technology allows us to replicate complex on-premise networks in the cloud.
In this video, we have an example of how to create your own custom VPC.
This video teaches us what NAT is and explores the differences between NAT instances and NAT gateways.
Understanding network access control lists and when to use them versus security groups.
A hands-on example of how to create and leverage VPC flow logs to monitor network traffic within our VPC.
A brief overview of how to peer multiple VPCs, including across multiple accounts, and the limitations of doing so.
A hands-on tutorial showing you how to tear down your virtual infrastructure to prevent you being charged.
An overview of the options available for integrating on-premise services with VPCs in the cloud.
