Developing on AWS with C#

Chapter 2. AWS Core Services

The most popular raw materials to build a house include steel, brick, stone, and wood. These raw materials each have unique properties that enable a home builder to construct a house. Similarly, AWS Core Services are the foundational materials necessary to build complex systems. From a high level, these services include computing and storage.

When home builders construct a home, they follow comprehensive building codes, typically pulled from an international standard known as the I-Codes. According to the International Code Council, these modern safety codes aim to help ensure the engineering of “safe, sustainable, affordable and resilient structures.” Similarly, the AWS Well-Architected Framework provides “guidance to help customers apply best practices in design, delivery, and maintenance of AWS environments,” according to AWS.

These general design principles are critical in understanding how to use AWS Core Services effectively. Let’s briefly discuss them:

Stop guessing your capacity needs

In a nutshell, it is a poor strategy to guess capacity. Instead, a system should incorporate the ability to add or remove resources dynamically.

Test systems at production scale

The cloud allows for fully automated provisioning of resources; this allows a developer to test an application in an identical environment to production. The ability to replicate a production environment solves the “it works on my machine” problem endemic to the software engineering ...