Management and Development Tools

• Application Programming Interface (API) is software that allows two applications or services to talk to each other, and the most common type of API is via HTTP requests.
• The AWS API is an HTTP API and can be interacted with by sending HTTPS requests using an application like Postman.
• Each database service generally has a service endpoint, for example, CloudWatch.
• Authenticating or authorizing a request to an API requires signing the request with your credentials, which involves making a separate request to get a temporary token.
• The AWS API includes a variety of actions that can be called, such as describe EC2 instances or list buckets.
• The AWS API can be accessed through the AWS Management Console, the AWS SDK, or the AWS CLI.
• AWS Management Console is a web-based unified console that provides a single point of access to manage AWS resources. It is for building, managing and monitoring everything from simple web-based apps to complex cloud deployments.
• ClickOps is the ability to click on a button and have the system respond in a way that is automated. Click manually to launch and configure resources with limited programming language.
• Every AWS Account ID is a unique account ID which can be easily found by dropping down the current user in the global navigation.
• AWS Account ID is composed of 12 digits.
• The AWS account ID is used when logging in with a non-root user account, but many people like to set their own alias because it's tiring to remember their account ID.
• The AWS Account ID is used when creating cross-account roles, with the target account and the source account ID needed to gain access to resources in another AWS account.
• When dealing with support cases, AWS will commonly ask for the account ID to identify the account they want to look at.
• It is generally good to keep the AWS account ID private as it is one of the many components used to identify an account for attack by malicious actors.
• Powershell is a task automation, configuration management framework, a command-like shell, and a scripting language.
• Powershell is built on top of the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR) and accepts and returns .NET objects.
• AWS provides tools for Powershell, which allows you to interact with the AWS API via PowerShell cmdlets.
• Cmdlets are a special type of command in Powershell, in the form of the capitalized verb and noun.
• Powershell is another type of shell, similar to Bash, that is popular among users of Microsoft workloads and Azure workloads.
• Amazon Resource Names (ARNs) uniquely identify AWS resources and are required to specify resources across all of AWS.
• ARNs follow a specific format with variations such as having a resource ID or path, being separated by a colon, or having a service identifier.
• A command line interface (CLI) processes commands to a computer program in the form of lines of text.
• Operating systems implement a command line interface in a shell.
• A terminal is a text-only interface that has input and output environment.
• A console is the physical computer to physically input information into a terminal.
• A shell is the command line program that users interact with through input commands.
• Popular shell programs include Bash, Zsh, PowerShell, and MS DOS Prompt.
• The AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) allows you to pragmatically interact with the Ibis API via entering single or multi-line commands into a shell or terminal.
• AWS CLI is a python based executable program.
• Software Development Kit (SDK) is a collection of software development tools in one installable package.
• AWS SDK is used to programmatically create, modify, update, delete or interact with AWS resources.
• AWS Cloud Shell is a browser-based shell built into the AWS Management Console, scoped per region, with the same credentials as the login user.
• AWS Cloud Shell provides one gigabyte of storage free per AWS region, saving files in a home directory available for future sessions.
• AWS Cloud Shell can support more than a single shell environment, with options including Bash, PowerShell, and Zsh.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) allows you to write a configuration script to automate creating, updating, or destroying your cloud infrastructure.
• IaC is a blueprint of your infrastructure that allows you to easily share version or inventory your cloud infrastructure.
• AWS has two different offerings for IaC: CloudFormation (CFN), which is a declarative IaC tool, and the Cloud Development Kit (CDK), which is an imperative IaC tool.
• Declarative IaC means what you see is what you get, it's explicit, and there is zero chance of misconfiguration unless the file is so big that you're missing something.
• Declarative files are commonly written in things like JSON, YAML, and XML.
• Imperative IaC means you say what you want and the rest is filled in, it's implicit, and it's less verbose.