Table of contents
1.
Introduction
2.
AWS Cloud Directory
3.
Understanding Cloud Directory Concepts
3.1.
Schema
3.2.
Directory
3.3.
Directory Structure
4.
Frequently Asked Questions
4.1.
What does AWS do?
4.2.
What is Amazon Cloud Directory?
4.3.
What are core use cases for Cloud Directory?
4.4.
What is Schema in AWS Cloud Directory?
4.5.
What is a directory?
5.
Conclusion
Last Updated: Mar 27, 2024
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AWS Cloud Directory

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Introduction

AWS' Amazon Cloud Directory is a multi-tenant directory-based store with high availability. You may use Amazon Cloud Directory to create customizable cloud-native directories for managing data hierarchies across various dimensions. You may create directories for various purposes with Cloud Directory, including organizational charts, course catalogs, and device registries. Traditional directory solutions, such as Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS) and other LDAP-based directories, confine you to a single hierarchy. Still, Cloud Directory allows you to establish directories with multiple hierarchies. You can, for example, design an organizational chart with separate hierarchies for reporting structure, location, and cost center navigation.

Amazon Cloud Directory expands to hundreds of millions of objects automatically and has a flexible structure that can be shared across various applications. Being a fully managed service, Cloud Directory eliminates time-consuming and costly administrative duties like growing infrastructure and managing servers. You establish the structure, create a directory, and then populate it with data via the Cloud Directory API.

Now, we will learn about AWS Amazon Cloud Discovery and its various concepts.

AWS Cloud Directory

Cloud Directory is, at its heart, a specialized graph-based directory store that serves as a basis for developers. Developers can use Cloud Directory to do the following:

  • Easily create directory-based applications without worrying about deployment, global scalability, availability, or performance.
  • Create apps that handle users and groups, permissions or policies, device registries, customer management, address books, and application or product catalogs.
  • Create new directory objects or expand current types to match their application's requirements, decreasing the amount of code they must write.
  • Layering applications on top of Cloud Directory should be as simple as possible.
  • Manage the evolution of schema data over time to ensure customer compatibility in the future.
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Understanding Cloud Directory Concepts

Amazon Cloud Directory is a schema-oriented directory-based data storage that may build various items. Following are various basic concepts you should know before starting with AWS Cloud Directory.

Schema

Schemas in Amazon Cloud Directory determine what types of objects (people, devices, and organizations) can be produced within a directory, require data validation for each object class, and handle schema changes over time.

When a schema is applied to a directory, all data contained within that directory must follow that schema. In this way, the schema definition functions as a template for creating additional folders with applied schemas. Once constructed, the applied schemas may differ from the original blueprint in various ways.

Cloud Directory provides API operations to create, read, update, and delete schemas. This makes it simple for programmatic agents to consume the schema's contents. Such agents search the directory for all aspects, characteristics, and restrictions that apply to the data it contains. 

Directory

A directory is a schema-based data store that holds a multi-hierarchical structure of specific categories of objects. A user directory, for example, could offer a hierarchical view based on reporting structure, location, and project affiliation. A device directory, for example, could have several hierarchical views depending on the manufacturer, current owner, and physical location.

The logical order for the datastore is defined by a directory, which isolates it from all other directories in the service. It also establishes the parameters for a specific request. Within the context of a single directory, a single transaction or query runs. A directory cannot be formed without a schema, and most directories have only one schema. You can, however, apply additional schemas to a directory using the Cloud Directory API methods.

Directory Structure

As indicated in the below diagram, data in a directory is organized hierarchically in a tree pattern consisting of nodes, leaf nodes, and links between nodes. This is important for modeling, storing, and swiftly traversing hierarchical data in application development.

source: docs.aws.amazon.com

 

Now, we will learn about various terms used in Directory Structure.

  • Root Node: The root node is the top node in a directory, and it is used to organize the hierarchy's parent and child nodes. Folders in a file system can similarly contain subfolders and files.
  • Node: A node represents an item that can have children. For example, a node can theoretically represent a group of managers, with the children, or leaf nodes, being various user objects. There can only be one parent for a node object.
  • Leaf Node: A leaf node is an entity that has no offspring and is either directly connected to a parent node or not. Consider a user or a gadget object. There can be several parents for a leaf node object. While it is not needed to connect leaf node objects to a parent node, it is strongly advised because, without a path from the root, the object can only be retrieved by its NodeId. If you lose the id of such an Object, you won't be able to find it again.
  • Node Link: The connection between two nodes is known as a node-link. Parent-child links, policy links, and index attribute links are among the link types supported by Cloud Directory.

We are done with the blog; let's move to faqs.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does AWS do?

AWS provides servers, storage, networking, remote computing, email, mobile development, and security

What is Amazon Cloud Directory?

Amazon Cloud Directory is a multi-tenant, cloud-native directory service that delivers web-based directories to help you organize and manage all of your application resources, including people, groups, locations, devices, policies, and the rich relationships between them. Cloud Directory is a core building piece that allows developers to quickly design directory-based systems without worrying about deployment, global scalability, availability, or performance.

What are core use cases for Cloud Directory?

Customers can utilize Cloud Directory to create IoT device registries, social networks, network setups, and user directories, among other uses. Each of these use cases requires hierarchical data organization, high-volume, and low-latency lookups, and the ability to expand to hundreds of millions of items with worldwide availability.

What is Schema in AWS Cloud Directory?

Schemas in Amazon Cloud Directory determine what types of objects (people, devices, and organizations) can be produced within a directory, require data validation for each object class, and handle schema changes over time.

What is a directory?

The scope of the data store (such as a table in Amazon DynamoDB) is defined by a directory, which is isolated from all other directories in the service. It also specifies transaction and query scopes, among other things. A directory can have several objects as its children and serve as the root object for a customer's tree. Schemas must be applied at the directory level by customers.

Conclusion

In this article, we have extensively discussed AWS Cloud Directory. We start with a brief introduction to AWS Cloud Directory, then discussed its basic concepts.

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