CloudWatch and X-Ray provide visibility into the health of the application and allow you to identify where there may be issues through correlation IDs provided by X-Ray. X-Ray integrates with many of the AWS services in this Guidance and can surface where in the chain of events the issue occurred.

Additionally, CloudWatch offers monitoring dashboards and sets thresholds against metrics to alert you when there are issues. Many of the services can also write logs to CloudWatch for post-analysis of an issue. CloudWatch automatically monitors the infrastructure and enables build automation into the workflows to notify you of operational issues.

To access the APIs, Amazon Cognito must provide authentication. Without authenticating, an individual cannot access any of the backend services. Amazon Cognito is scalable to set up and has native integration with API Gateway. API Gateway automatically delivers protection from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks for the backend services.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) allows you to provide granular, least privilege access to resources. IAM restricts access across the Guidance by applying policies to Lambda to confirm it can only invoke certain APIs explicitly provided in the IAM policy.

CloudFront allows you to reduce the latency of page load times, so editors can access the system from multiple geographies. CloudFront serves images back to the editor and allows the editor to cache images closer to their location, reducing latency of larger files.

CloudFront uses a global network of 450+ Points of Presence, which provides low latency and faster HTTPS connections. Lambda allows the user to optimize how much memory is required to run the function and can scale out to thousands of requests per second within seconds. Amazon OpenSearch Serverless will automatically upgrade as new versions are released, removing overhead of managing indexes as storage and traffic scales.

With the services in this Guidance, you do not need to plan for capacity as the cost is per request, and the services will automatically scale out to meet demand. For example, OpenSearch Serverless will scale with your demand, so you don’t need to state how many indexes you require upfront. As these services are serverless, there is no infrastructure to manage, which significantly reduces the total cost of ownership.

Amazon S3 scales as data volumes increase, and you can set up S3 Lifecycle policies to automatically archive or delete data you no longer need. Amazon S3 provisions underlying resources as your storage grows and scales back when you delete objects, reducing overall resource consumption.