A Guide to AWS Administrative Tools for Seamless Cloud Operations

Management Tools

Amazon CloudWatch

CloudWatch is a monitoring service for AWS that tracks various services and provides detailed information about applications, including logs and metrics. Users can set up alarms to ensure their applications operate smoothly.

AWS CloudFormation

It serves as a comprehensive solution for developers and systems administrators, allowing them to efficiently create and manage all AWS resources. JSON is used to create the necessary templates, and resources can be scaled up or down based on user needs. Additionally, users can submit existing templates for configuration.

AWS CloudTrail

It logs all API calls made within the account, such as creating, modifying, stopping, and starting instances programmatically. These logs are delivered for auditing and review, along with the responses provided by the service.

AWS Configure

AWS Config provides organizations with comprehensive auditing, security analysis, resource change tracking, and troubleshooting capabilities. Being a fully managed service, it offers complete resources, inventory, and configuration details.

Security and Identity

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

IAM provides organizations the ability to create and manage AWS users and groups, allowing them to set permissions that control access to AWS resources. It regulates access to AWS cloud services and their resources.

AWS Key Management Service (KMS)

KMS simplifies the process for organizations to create and manage encryption keys for securing their data, utilizing Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) to ensure the safety of these keys.

AWS Directory Service

This service allows AWS resources to integrate with on-premises Microsoft Active Directory. Organizations can manage Linux and Windows workloads in the cloud, handle user and group administration, provide single sign-on for apps and services, create and apply Group Policies, domain join Amazon EC2 instances, and streamline both deployment and management processes.

AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF)

WAF safeguards web applications from attacks and exploits that can impact cloud availability and lead to data breaches. It controls traffic by allowing or blocking specific requests and enables customization of web security rules.

Application Services

Amazon API Gateway

API Gateway functions as a front door for accessing data, business logic, and functionality from backend servers. As a fully managed service, it empowers developers to create, manage, publish, and monitor APIs at any scale. It efficiently handles tasks such as processing thousands of concurrent API calls, managing traffic, authorizing access, monitoring performance, and overseeing API versioning.

Amazon Elastic Transcoder

Convert (or transcode) media files from their source formats into versions that will play back on devices like smartphones, tablets, and PCs.

Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS)

It’s a web service that orchestrates and manages the delivery of messages to recipients. There are two client types: publishers and subscribers. Publishers send messages to a topic asynchronously, while subscribers receive or consume those messages.

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES)

It’s a budget-friendly email service that organizations can utilize to send transactional emails, marketing messages, or various types of content to their customers.

Amazon Simple Workflow Service (Amazon SWF)

It’s a fully managed state tracker and task coordinator in the cloud, allowing developers to build, run, and scale background jobs with both parallel and sequential steps.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS)

It’s a fast, reliable, and scalable message queuing service. Users can transmit any volume of data at any throughput level without losing messages or needing other services to be constantly available.