Real-world Scenarios: How AWS Certified Solutions Architects Tackle Cloud Challenges

AWS, or Amazon Web Services, is a modern-day cloud computing platform that allows you to benefit from IT Resources hosted over the internet. AWS provides a virtual environment that lets you load the software and services your application requires. With AWS, you can easily select your operating system, programming language, web application program, database, and other needed services. Hence, it becomes easy to migrate the existing processes and preserve options for building new solutions. Consider exploring AWS Cloud Architect roles and learn how to implement cloud computing on AWS.

AWS Services

AWS provides cloud computing services to all businesses and start-ups. The services are highly reliable, scalable, and low-cost infrastructure platforms. It benefits organizations because they no longer need to spend much on owning physical storage devices and IT resources. It has also eliminated the need to plan these resources. AWS simply charges for the services based on the Pay-as-you-go model. The pricing details can only be known through AWS’s official website. Talking about the AWS Services, here is a brief explanation of it:

Compute: AWS provides computing services with the help of Amazon EC2, an infrastructure over the cloud. Think of it as Infrastructure as a service(IaaS). Selecting the operating system, web applications, etc., can all be done with the help of EC2. Other compute services are AWS Lambda and AWS Elastic Beanstalk.

Networking: networking services like Amazon VPC and Amazon Route 53 provide the facility of setting up private networks as well as domain name and router services.

Storage: with the help of Amazon S3(Simple storage service) and Amazon Glacier, organizations can store the data. Data can also be retrieved and modified in the AWS platforms.

Databases: Database services are provided with the help of Amazon RDS(Relational Databases services) and Amazon DynamoDB(Non-Relational Database). Amazon RDS provides six database engines, i.e., Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server. Amazon DynamoDB is a flexible database used on mobile devices, gaming, the Internet of Things (IoT), and web applications.

AWS Certified Solutions Architects

AWS-certified solutions architects are professionals skilled in designing and implementing services and applications on AWS. These professionals mainly focus on developing cost-effective and performance-optimized solutions to modern-day challenges. The professionals have a good understanding of AWS’s architectured framework and principles. However, it is rightly said that modern-day problems require modern solutions. Even shifting the work base to the AWS’s Database and its frameworks can bring new challenges. However, the professionals should be skilled enough to address these challenges and find effective solutions.

Cloud challenges

Here is the list of challenges the AWS solutions architects face and how they tackle them:

• Scalability requirements

A company that sees rapid growth in its performance faces different challenges. It becomes challenging to manage the workload with the current resources they have. It often requires hiring new employees or investing money in new technology for the need.

The AWS solutions architect solves these challenges by designing the new architecture using AWS auto-scaling, automatically adjusting the digital resources based on the demand. Other Amazon services, like Amazon elastic load balancing(ELB), distribute traffic across multiple instances.

• Availability and fault tolerance of applications

The challenge here is the availability of applications and how they remain fault-tolerant throughout their operations. The solution architect can address this challenge with the help of AWS services. Multi-availability zone deployments can be implemented. Amazon Route 53 is for DNS routing, Amazon S3 is for durable object storage, and AWS Elastic Beanstalk is for deploying fault-tolerant applications.

• Security 

When hosting applications over the cloud, their security is one of the main concerns. Some AWS services can be implemented, like identity and access management (IAM) for access control, AWS key management services for encryption, and AWS WAF and AWS shield for protection against web application attacks. Regular security audits and monitoring are also key components.

• Cost

Increasing cloud services might also increase the cost of its resources. So, to solve these challenges, services like AWS Cost Explorer and AWS budgets are used. They monitor and analyze costs, implementing cost-saving measures such as reserved instances, spot instances, and right-sizing resources based on usage patterns.

• Data Storage and Management

With the growth, the data also increases. The professionals look for resources to store and manage this new data properly. For that, the AWS services that can be utilized are:

• Amazon RDS for relational databases
• Amazon DynamoDB for NoSQL databases
• Amazon S3 for scalable and durable object storage and
• Amazon Redshift for data warehousing

It means designing a data architecture that aligns with performance, durability, and cost requirements.

• Hybrid Cloud Integration

Integrating on-premises infrastructure with AWS services is challenging when the organization shifts to cloud infrastructure. AWS directly connects for secured connectivity, AWS storage gateway for hybrid storage, and designing architectures for both on-premises and cloud components easily.

• DevOps and Automation

DevOps operations like continuous integration and deployment pipelines are the challenge in this situation. AWS services like CodePipeline, code build, and code deploy are used to build, test, and deploy applications automatically. Integrating with other DevOps tools and practices to streamline the development lifecycle.

• Compliance and Governance

As the company modifies its work, meeting industry-specific standards and governance policies becomes challenging. To ensure it meets such standards, AWS config can be implemented for tracking changes, and AWS cloud trail can be used for logging and auditing. AWS Organizations for managing multiple AWS accounts. Some compliance frameworks like HIPAA, GDPR, or PCI DCS can be implemented whenever required.

Wrap up

Dealing with challenges and solving them is one of the core purposes technology serves. Be it any challenge mentioned above, a cloud professional must be skilled enough to tackle and solve these challenges. Long-term growth of businesses requires moving services over the cloud, and these latest services should not leave them behind. Professionals can take advantage by becoming AWs Certified cloud architect and accessing the applications over the cloud.