As mentioned in the previous section, AWS has many innovative services that can help architect a multitude of use cases and business problems. However, there are few services that are like AWS differentiators, and so AWS highly recommends that you utilize those instead of trying to build your own comparative capabilities, which may not be as scalable, feature rich, or robust such as AWS offerings.
These services together are known as KRADL, and what each letter represents is as follows:
- K: Amazon Kinesis
- R: Amazon Redshift
- A: Amazon Aurora
- D: Amazon DynamoDB
- L: AWS Lambda
Let's analyze the preceding points in a little detail, based on AWS' definition of these services.
Amazon Kinesis: Amazon Kinesis makes it easy to collect, process, and analyze real-time streaming data so that you can get timely insights and react quickly to new information. With Amazon Kinesis, you can ingest real-time data such as application logs, website clickstreams, IoT telemetry data, and more into your databases, data lakes, and data warehouses, or build your own real-time applications using this data. Amazon Kinesis enables you to process and analyze data as it arrives and respond in real-time instead of having to wait until all of your data is collected before the processing can begin. More details are available at https://aws.amazon.com/kinesis/.
Amazon Redshift: Amazon Redshift is a fast, fully managed data warehouse that makes it simple and cost-effective to analyze all your data using standard SQL and your existing business intelligence (BI) tools. It allows you to run complex analytic queries against petabytes of structured data, using sophisticated query optimization, columnar storage on high-performance local disks, and massively parallel query execution. More details are available at https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/.
Amazon Aurora: Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database engine that combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. It provides up to five times better performance than MySQL with the security, availability, and reliability of a commercial database at one tenth of the cost. Amazon Aurora is a managed database service, built on a fully distributed and self-healing storage system that keeps your data safe. More details are available at https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/.
Amazon DynamoDB: Amazon DynamoDB is a fast and flexible NoSQL database service for all applications that need consistent, single-digit millisecond latency at any scale. It is a fully managed cloud database and supports both document and key-value store models. Its flexible data model, reliable performance, and automatic scaling of throughput capacity, makes it a great fit for mobile, web, gaming, ad tech, IoT, and many other applications. More details are available at https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/.
AWS Lambda: AWS Lambda lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. You only pay for the compute time you consume – there is no charge when your code is not running. With Lambda, you can run code for virtually any type of application or backend service – all with zero administration. Just upload your code and Lambda takes care of everything required to run and scale your code with high availability. You can set up your code to automatically trigger from other AWS services or call it directly from any web or mobile app. More details are available at https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/.
Most of the preceding services are Amazon proprietary, so sometimes, end users become conscious about the fear of lock-in. However, the reality is that even in an on-premises world, customers make use of so many different packaged applications (such as databases and ERPs), which themselves are hard to get away with. So, it's more of a perception of lock-in than reality when the same logic is applied to these cloud-native services. In fact, if we take a deeper look, services such as Amazon Aurora and Amazon Redshift offer the same PostgreSQL/SQL interface, so that creates an easily portable mechanism for the applications to be rewired to another platform, if need be. Another perspective to it is that if the customer wants to create similar services on their own, then it will probably take quite a bit of time and effort to not just create but to operate as well as iterate on new features, like AWS does. So, at the end of the day, it's always beneficial to focus on your core business and rather consume these higher-level services from AWS.
Another angle to look at here is that the KRADL services are very unique to AWS platform compared to other cloud providers. For some of these, other cloud providers have come up with comparative offerings, but as AWS was first in the space with many of these and has been iterating regularly on new features ever since, they have the most mature offerings.