AWS Administration ??? The Definitive Guide

Chapter 1. Introducing Amazon Web Services

Being in the IT industry, we all have gone through the long and tedious process of procuring new infrastructure for our data centers at one time or another. Let's be honest, it is not a task for the faint-hearted At a minimum, a brand new server can take weeks if not months to get delivered from its date of ordering, and this is too heavily dependent on a lot of external factors which, most of the time, are not in our control. Even if the new server comes in on time, there is the additional burden of prepping the rack, clearing space for the new resources, cabling, cooling, mounting, installation of software, configuration, and the list just keeps on going on for another mile. Putting the server and storage on one side, the same can also apply for networking, applications, software, and a whole lot of other things. But what if all this was to change? What if tomorrow, you could simply jump start your business or scale your application to thousands of servers, all with the simple click of a button? Seems farfetched, doesn't it, but in reality, this is possible today with a little help from something called as cloud computing.

Cloud computing has definitely evolved a lot over the years, and today it has become almost a mainstream part of our lives. Everything from storing large amounts of data, to having burst compute capacity at your fingertips and having enterprise software applications available on demand any time anywhere are just some of the key benefits that clouds provide today. At the helm of this new way of computing is Amazon Web Services (AWS).

In this chapter, we are going to look at some of the key features and benefits provided by cloud computing in general along with few interesting enterprise use cases. Later on, you will learn a bit more about Amazon Web Services and its core components, and finally have a look at how to sign up and get started with AWS.

What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing has become one of the most discussed topics over the last few years, but what does it actually mean? Why is it important for you and your business? Let's take a quick look at what cloud computing actually is and how you as an end user can benefit from it.

NIST defines cloud computing as a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (for example, networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. Was that a bit confusing? Let's break it down to understand it a little bit better:

On demand: Contrary to traditional IT data centers where requesting and obtaining resources for your applications used to take weeks, the same resources can be made available on an on-demand basis in the cloud, without requiring any human interventions at all.
Network access: One of the key features of any cloud is that all of its resources can be accessed over the Internet or a network in general. This makes it really easy for the end user to access and leverage cloud from heterogeneous devices such as laptops, workstations, mobile phones, and so on.
Shared pool: We must have all experienced the silo-based infrastructure setup in our traditional IT data centers. Silos of resources are often created by individual departments where each application gets overcommitted resources, which are more than often wasted. In case of the cloud, IT resources such as compute, storage, and network are pooled and abstracted together from the end user. This pooling enables the cloud to dynamically provide resources to its tenants as and when required without the end user having any knowledge of where their application will actually reside in a cluster or a rack.
Rapid provisioning: Rapid provisioning or elasticity as it is referred to nowadays, is the ability of a cloud to scale its resources either horizontally (scale out) or vertically (scale up) on an automated basis. This elasticity provides end users with a lot of flexibility and control over their resources and how they get consumed.

Cloud computing features and benefits

Okay, so now we know what cloud computing really means, but why should you as an end user use it? How are you and your organization going to benefit from it? Let's look at some of the key benefits and features cloud computing has to offer:

Lower costs: Cloud computing does not have any upfront costs. Capital expenditure is virtually zero as the entire necessary infrastructure and resources are already made available and ready for use by the Cloud provider. All the end user has to do is consume these resources and pay only for what they use.
This also reduces the overall maintenance costs as well. Since the organization now has less hardware to manage, it doesn't necessarily have to bother about its server, network, and storage capacity or have a full time staff to manage them.
Self-service: Cloud computing provides a simple, centralized, self-service-based model that end users can use to interact with the cloud platform. The interaction can be in terms of performing simple tasks, such as spinning up new compute resources, adding more storage resources at runtime, or more complex ones, such as scheduling resources and so on. This ensures that the end user can leverage and consume any of the cloud's resources on an on-demand basis.
Faster time to markets: Unlike traditional IT, compute resources can be brought up in a cloud in a matter of minutes as compared to the weeks it used to take. This provides the end users with the ability to deploy new applications much faster, thus decreasing overall time to markets and reducing management overheads and costs.
Scale as required: The best part of using the cloud is that your backend resources can grow as your application grows. This means that you are never lagging behind with your application's needs and demands, you are always scaling with your application's needs.

Cloud computing use cases

With such features and benefits it is easy to see why there has been such a boom in the overall adoption and utilization of the cloud. Let's take a quick look at some interesting real-world use cases where your organization can leverage clouds:

Website hosting: Perhaps the most common of the use cases, you as an end user can leverage cloud to build and host your websites with relative ease. The cloud enables your website to scale up and down dynamically as per its demands.
Storage and sharing: The cloud offers virtually unlimited storage capacity that can used to store and share anything, from documents, media, files, and so on. Dropbox and Google Drive are classic examples of cloud being used as a storage and sharing medium.
Disaster recovery (DR): This is a more upcoming use case with clouds as more and more companies are now realizing that it is way easier and cost efficient to host a disaster recovery environment on the cloud, rather than hosting and managing a DR site of its own. Organizations can spin up failover environments on the cloud in a matter of minutes, test the failover and then shut down the entire stack. This helps save on the costs and also reduces overall management overheads and failover time.
Dev/test: Dev and test are way easier to set up and run on clouds as the entire development and test environments can be built up, tested, and torn back down quickly as per requirements.
Short term projects/ advertising: Similar to the Dev/test scenario, the cloud can also be leveraged to perform a variety of short-term projects/proof of concepts. A classic example is the advertising campaigns hosted on the cloud that are created for a very short duration of time, however, they need a global presence to reach out to a wider set of audiences.
Big data analytics: Organizations leverage the cloud's scalability and on-demand infrastructure to capture and perform real-time analytics and data mining on extremely large datasets (big data).

Introducing Amazon Web Services

Now, that you clearly understand what cloud computing is all about and what it can do for you, let's get to know the main topic of this book—Amazon Web Services—a little better.

Amazon Web Services or AWS is a comprehensive public cloud computing platform that offers a variety of web-based products and services on an on-demand and pay-per-use basis. AWS was earlier a part of the e-commerce giant Amazon.com, and it wasn't until 2006 that AWS became a separate entity of its own. Today, AWS operates globally with data centers located in USA, Europe, Brazil, Singapore, Japan, China, and Australia. AWS provides a variety of mechanisms, using which the end users can connect to and leverage its services, the most common form of interaction being the web-based dashboard also called as AWS Management Console.

So how does the whole thing work? Well, it is very easy to understand when you compare the way AWS works with a power and utilities company. AWS offers its customers certain services just as a power company would to its consumers. You as an end user simply consume the electricity without having to worry about the underlying necessities such as generator costs, cabling, and so on. At the end of the month, all you get is a bill based on your electricity consumption and that's it! In a similar way, AWS provides its products such as compute, storage, and networking all as a service, and you only have to pay for the amount of service that you use. No upfront costs or heavy investments whatsoever!

The other important thing worth mentioning here is that AWS allows organizations to use their own operating systems, databases, and programming/architecting models as well, without requiring any major re-engineering. This provides a lot of flexibility and cost optimization to organizations as they get to operate and work with platforms that they are familiar with. This, accompanied with AWS's massively scalable and highly available infrastructure, ensures that your applications and data remain secure and available for use no matter what.

AWS architecture and components

Before we begin with the actual signup process, it is important to take a look at some of the key architecture and core components of services offered by AWS.

Regions and availability zones

We do know that AWS is spread out globally and has its presence across USA, Europe, Asia, Australia, and so on. Each of these areas is termed as a region. AWS currently has about 10 regions, each containing multiple data centers within themselves. So what's with all these regions and why do they matter? In simple terms, the resources that are geographically close to your organization are served much faster! For example, an organization running predominantly from USA can leverage the USA's regions to host their resources and gain access to them must faster.

For most of the AWS services that you use, you will be prompted to select a region in which you want to deploy the service. Each region is completely isolated from the other and runs independently as well.

Note

AWS does not replicate resources across regions automatically. It is up to the end user to set up the replication process.

A list of regions and their corresponding codes is provided here for your reference. The code is basically how AWS refers to its multiple regions:

Region	Name	Code
North America	US East (N. Virginia)	us-east-1
	US West (N. California)	us-west-1
	US West (Oregon)	us-west-2
South America	Sao Paulo	sa-east-1
Europe	EU (Frankfurt)	eu-central-1
Europe	EU (Ireland)	eu-west-1
Asia	Asia Pacific (Tokyo)	ap-northeast-1
	Asia Pacific (Singapore)	ap-southeast-1
	Asia Pacific (Sydney)	ap-southeast-2
	Asia Pacific (Beijing)	cn-north-1

Each region is split up into one or more Availability Zones (AZs) and pronounced as A-Zees. An A Z is an isolated location inside a region. AZs within a particular region connect to other AZs via low-latency links. What do these AZs contain? Well, ideally they are made up of one or more physical data centers that host AWS services on them. Just as with regions, even AZs have corresponding codes to identify them, generally they are regional names followed by a numerical value. For example, if you select and use us-east-1, which is the North Virginia region, then it would have AZs listed as us-east-1b, us-east-1c, us-east-1d, and so on:

AZs are very important from a design and deployment point of view. Being data centers, they are more than capable of failure and downtime, so it is always good practice to distribute your resources across multiple AZs and design your applications such that they can remain available even if one AZ goes completely offline.

An important point to note here is that AWS will always provide the services and products to you as a customer; however, it is your duty to design and distribute your applications so that they do not suffer any potential outages or failures.

RULE OF THUMB: Design for failure and nothing will fail! This is what we will be sticking with for the remainder of this book as we go along the different AWS services and products; so keep this in mind, always!

Note

AWS provides a health dashboard of all its services running across each of the regions. You can view the current status and availability of each AWS service by visiting the following link: http://status.aws.amazon.com/.

AWS platform overview

The AWS platform consists of a variety of services that you can use either in isolation or in combination based on your organization's needs. This section will introduce you to some of the most commonly used services as well as some newly launched ones. To begin with, let's divide the services into three major classes:

Foundation services: This is generally the pillars on which the entire AWS infrastructure commonly runs on, including the compute, storage, network, and databases.
Application services: This class of services is usually more specific and generally used in conjunction with the foundation services to add functionality to your applications. For example, services such as distributed computing, messaging and Media Transcoding, and other services fall under this class.
Administration services: This class deals with all aspects of your AWS environment, primarily with identity and access management tools, monitoring your AWS services and resources, application deployments, and automation.

Let's take a quick look at some of the key services provided by AWS. However, do note that this is not an exhaustive list: