The services used in this Guidance provide capabilities for infrastructure as code, workflow orchestration, serverless computing, and observability. Specifically, the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) allows the Guidance to be deployed using infrastructure as code, making it easy to manage and update. Step Functions provides a visual workflow with capabilities for orchestration, debugging, retries, and monitoring. Lambda enables complex functionality, such as time manipulation. All logs are centralized in CloudWatch, and X-Ray provides end-to-end traceability. Together, these services make this Guidance easy to deploy, manage, and troubleshoot.

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This Guidance includes services with capabilities for access control, encryption, and configuration management. For example, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) allows granular control over AWS services to help ensure least privilege access, and the IAM roles used by Step Functions are scoped to only the necessary resources and services. The Amazon S3 bucket and Amazon SNS topic enforce SSL connectivity. In addition, encryption at rest is enabled using AWS KMS, while TLS helps ensure encrypted communication between services. This Guidance also uses the Systems Manager Parameter Store to store state information, further reducing the need for human interaction.

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Step Functions incorporates built-in mechanisms to handle exceptions and automatically retry when necessary while Systems Manager manages the required state information. These services allow the Guidance to automatically recover from known failure modes through the retry capabilities inherent to Step Functions, as well as the state information stored in the Systems Manager Parameter Store. Furthermore, as the workflow is entirely serverless, there is no need to manually manage capacity.

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This Guidance uses advanced serverless technologies so that the most suitable service is used for each specific task. For example, it uses the Systems Manager Parameter Store for managing state information and Lambda for handling complex time-related operations.

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The various services used within this Guidance, including Step Functions, can be fine-tuned through the adjustment of multiple parameters. This flexibility enables users to control the frequency at which the incremental exports are executed. For instance, implementing longer export windows would result in fewer runs, albeit potentially larger export files. Additionally, users can use the lifecycle management features of Amazon S3 to transition older data objects to more cost-effective storage classes, further optimizing the overall expenditure.

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In a traditional, server-based infrastructure, organizations often need to provision computing resources to handle peak workloads, leading to significant over-provisioning and underutilization of hardware during off-peak periods. This inefficient use of resources can have a detrimental impact on the environment. By adopting a serverless approach, this Guidance helps ensure that computing resources are only used when actively required, automatically scaling the underlying infrastructure based on real-time demands. This dynamic scaling optimizes resource utilization and reduces the overall carbon footprint and energy consumption associated with the infrastructure.

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