Servers
Servers
The
first building block you need to host an application is a server.
Servers usually can handle Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) requests
and send responses to clients following the client-server model,
although any API-based communication also falls under this model. A
client is a person or computer that sends a request. A server handling
the requests is a computer, or collection of computers, connected to the
internet serving websites to internet users.
Servers power your
application by providing CPU, memory, and networking capacity to process
users’ requests and transform them into responses. For context, common
HTTP servers include:
- Windows options, such as Internet Information Services (IIS)
- Linux options, such as Apache HTTP Web Server, Nginx, and Apache Tomcat
To run an HTTP server on AWS, you must find a service that provides compute power in the AWS Management Console. You can log in to the console and view the complete list of AWS compute services.
Choose the right compute option
Choose the right compute option
If
you’re responsible for setting up servers on AWS to run your
infrastructure, you have many compute options. You need to know which
service to use for which use case. At a fundamental level, three types
of compute options are available – virtual machines (VMs), container
services, and serverless.
If you have prior infrastructure
knowledge, a virtual machine is often be the easiest compute option to
understand. This is because a virtual machine emulates a physical server
and allows you to install an HTTP server to run your applications. To
run virtual machines, you install a hypervisor on a host machine. The
hypervisor provisions the resources to create and run your VMs.
In
AWS, virtual machines are called Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, or
Amazon EC2. Behind the scenes, AWS operates and manages the host
machines and the hypervisor layer. AWS also installs the virtual machine
operating system, called the guest operating system.
Some AWS
compute services use Amazon EC2 or use virtualization concepts under the
hood. You should understand this service before advancing to container
services and serverless compute.
Source: AWS