The Cloud is an on-demand service of IT resources over the internet. For example, you use electricity at home, but you don’t own the powerplant. With the cloud, you use technology infrastructure, but you don’t own it. AWS is a cloud service provider who allows you to build your own applications and will handle the maintenance of datacentres on your behalf. In the next 5 minutes, I will walk you through how these services of AWS come together to function a social media site like Facebook.

1. We need a web server through which users can access Facebook. A web server is a computer that runs a website. AWS’s computing service is called EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute) and can be used to host our Facebook website. We also need an application server by which users can interact with the website, i.e., User Interface (UI) and login page [EC2]. Finally, we need a database to store user data. One example is a relational database which organizes data into a table; AWS offers a service called RDS (Relational Database Service). Another type of database is called non-relational database where tables aren’t used, but instead .json files are used (a sample is available below).

2.       Now we need to consider how Facebook may store media posts such as memes or videos. There are 3 storage options offered by AWS:

i)  Block storage called EBS (Elastic Block Storage) – mimics the storage (SSD) in your laptop and only available to one EC2

ii)  File storage called EFS (Elastic File Storage) – a more scalable storage than EBS and can be used by multiple EC2s

iii) Object storage called S3 (Simple Storage Service) – does not require an EC2, similar functionality to google drive

3. Facebook now wants to think about how it can use its data to figure what content each user will prefer. i.e., the content on your Facebook feed. For this, we need a way to organize and sort our data. EMR (Elastic Map Reduce) is a service offered by AWS to do that. Furthermore, we want to run some data analysis and gain some meaningful insights on this data. AWS’s Redshift is the service that offers those tools.

4. Facebook wants users to reach its website but for security reasons, does not want to publicize its private IP address. An IP address (i.e., internet protocol) is a unique series of numbers, similar to your mobile number, where only you can send or receive information through it. The way in which users communicate with our servers is through a public IP address. Facebook’s Domain Name: www.facebook.com  is converted into a public IP for our public users to access Facebook. AWS’s route 53 service is responsible for managing all of this.

5. Finally, Facebook will have employed some staff, each with specific roles. Based on their roles, they should only have access to certain files or resources. For example, the CFO of Facebook should be the only one to have access to sensitive financial documents whereas he may not have access to user data. AWS has a service called IAM (Identity Access Management) which prevents employees from accessing folders/resources that they shouldn’t to protect and maintain privacy

Source:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3SYDTMP3ME&ab_channel=AWSTrainingCenter