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Learning AWS
Learning AWS

Learning AWS: Design, build, and deploy responsive applications using AWS cloud components

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Learning AWS

Chapter 2. Designing Cloud Applications – An Architect's Perspective

As an architect, we are sure you have come across terms such as loosely coupled, multi-tier, services oriented, highly scalable, and many more. These terms are associated with architectural best practices and you find them listed in the first couple of pages of any system architecture document. These concepts are generally applicable to all architectures, and the cloud is no exception.

In this chapter, we want to highlight how these are accomplished on the cloud. You will notice that the approach you take towards cloud application architecture remains the same to a large extent. However, you need to be aware of certain peculiarities of the cloud environment, in order to architect scalable, available, and secure cloud applications. For example, if you are architecting a web-scale application, you need to take into consideration the ability to automatically scale up and down. What are the implications...

Multi-tier architecture

A simple three-tier architecture consists of a UI tier, an application or business tier, and a data tier.

These tiers are ordinarily implemented using web servers, application servers, and databases, respectively.

Cloud applications can be deployed at multiple locations. Typically, these locations are regions (that is, separate geographical areas) or zones (that is, distinct locations within a region connected by low latency networks).

This tiered architecture on the cloud supports auto scaling and load balancing of web servers and application servers. Further, it also implements a master-slave database model across two different zones or data centers (connected with high speed links). The master database is synchronously replicated to the slave. Overall, the architecture represents a simple way to achieve a highly scalable and highly available application in a cloud environment.

Let's take a look at the following diagram:

Multi-tier architecture

It is also possible to separate the tiers...

Designing for multi-tenancy

The major benefit of multi-tenancy is cost saving due to infrastructure sharing and the operational efficiency of managing a single instance of the application across multiple customers or tenants. However, multi-tenancy introduces complexity. Issues can arise when a tenant's action or usage affects the performance and availability of the application for other tenants on the shared infrastructure. In addition, security, customization, upgrades, recovery, and many more requirements of one tenant can create issues for other tenants as well.

Multi-tenancy models may lie anywhere from the share-nothing to share-everything continuum. While technical ease may be a key factor from the IT department's perspective, the cloud architect should never lose sight of the business implications and costs of selecting the approach to multi-tenancy.

Whatever the multi-tenancy model, the data architecture needs to ensure robust security, extensibility, and scalability in...

Designing for scale

Traditionally, designing for scale meant carefully sizing your infrastructure for peak usage, and then adding a factor to handle variability in load. At some point when you reach a certain threshold on CPU, memory, disk (capacity and throughput), or network bandwidth, you will repeat the exercise to handle increased loads and initiate a lengthy procurement and provisioning process. Depending on the application, this could mean a scale up (vertical scaling) with bigger machines or scale out (horizontal scaling) with more number of machines being deployed. Once deployed, the new capacity would be fixed (and run continuously) whether the additional capacity was being utilized fully or not.

In cloud applications, it is easy to scale both vertically and horizontally. Additionally, the increase and the decrease in the number of nodes (in horizontal scalability) can be done automatically to improve resource utilization, and manage costs better.

Typically, cloud applications are...

Automating infrastructure

During failures or spikes in load, you do not want to be provisioning resources, identifying and deploying the right version of the application, configuring parameters (for example, database connection strings), and so on. Hence, you need to invest in creating ready-to-launch machine images, centrally storing application configuration parameters, and booting new instances quickly by bootstrapping your instances. In addition, you will need to continuously monitor your system metrics to dynamically take actions such as auto scaling.

It is possible to automate almost everything on the cloud platform via APIs and scripts, and you should attempt to do so. This includes typical operations, deployments, automatic recovery actions against alerts, scaling, and so on. For example, your cloud service may also provide an auto-healing feature. You should leverage this feature to ensure failed/unhealthy instances are replaced and restarted with the original configurations.

There...

Designing for failure

Assuming things will fail, ensure you carefully review every aspect of your cloud architecture and design for failure scenarios against each one of them. In particular, assume hardware will fail, cloud data center outages will happen, database failure or performance degradation will occur, expected volumes of transactions will be exceeded, and so on. In addition, in an auto-scaled environment, for example, nodes may be shutdown in response to loads getting back to normal levels after a spike. Nodes might be rebooted by the cloud platform. There can also be unexpected application failures. In all cases, the design goal should be to handle such error conditions gracefully and minimize any impact to the user experience.

There should be a strong preference to minimize human or manual intervention. Hence, it is preferred to implement strategies using services made available by the cloud platform to reduce the chances of failures or automate recovery from such failures. For...

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Description

With the increasing global interest in leveraging cloud infrastructure, AWS Cloud from Amazon offers a cutting-edge platform for architecting, building, and deploying web-scale cloud applications. The variety of features available within AWS can reduce overall infrastructure costs and accelerate the development process for both large enterprises and startups alike. Beginning with basic cloud concepts, you'll learn about the various cloud services models and the design implications of multi-tenant applications. You'll then design, implement, and deploy a multi-tier, scalable, highly-available and secure application on the AWS platform. At every step, we explain the key guiding principles driving real-world production-ready application architectures. Finally, you will learn how to automate your cloud infrastructure, set up operations, application monitoring, and DevOps pipeline.

Who is this book for?

This book is targeted at expert programmers and architects wanting to learn AWS. Some familiarity with Spring, MySQL, and RESTful web services is assumed.

What you will learn

  • Multitenant design approaches for SaaS applications
  • Planning dev, test, staging, and production environments
  • Design considerations for scalability and highavailability
  • Planning for DR
  • The security considerations and implementation of AWS applications
  • Production deployment processes and tools
  • Monitoring AWS applications using CloudWatch
  • Automating infrastructure using CloudFormation

Product Details

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Publication date, Length, Edition, Language, ISBN-13
Publication date : Jul 30, 2015
Length: 236 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781784394639
Vendor :
Amazon
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Product Details

Publication date : Jul 30, 2015
Length: 236 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781784394639
Vendor :
Amazon
Tools :

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Table of Contents

8 Chapters
1. Cloud 101 – Understanding the Basics Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
2. Designing Cloud Applications – An Architect's Perspective Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
3. AWS Components, Cost Model, and Application Development Environments Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
4. Designing for and Implementing Scalability Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
5. Designing for and Implementing High Availability Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
6. Designing for and Implementing Security Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
7. Deploying to Production and Going Live Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Index Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

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Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon Empty star icon 3.1
(9 Ratings)
5 star 11.1%
4 star 44.4%
3 star 11.1%
2 star 11.1%
1 star 22.2%
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SD Oct 12, 2017
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
I purchased this book 3 weeks ago and have gone through the first four chapters in detail and skimmed the last three chapters. The book provides a good introduction to Amazon Web Services. It also provides handy tips as well as extensive instructions on how to set your account and explore the . It also gives bird’s eye view of system architect trying to build an e-commerce by outlining the cost drivers and how to build flexibility to accommodate rapid scaling of the business. I will not classify this book as “introductory” but will definitely recommend it to someone who has some familiarity with cloud computing architecture. I hope the author will include more case studies in the future edition.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Daragh McBreen Aug 16, 2015
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
Haveing recently done a log of academic study on cloud concepts I wanted to add practicalskills to the knowledge. AWS have a free trial introductory period and its smart to usethat access and time in a productive manner.Therefore a guide to get off the groundfast is essential.This Packt publication brings you through the structure of an application and how itcan be built on the AWS infrastructure in logical step and bring it live on AWS.There are a lot of services available in AWS and this book providers a very goodfoundation for the experienced or improveing IT professional to improve skills inthe practical application of these services.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Oleg Okun Sep 28, 2015
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
This book covers a lot of topics related to Amazon Web Services (AWS) - the leading cloud services: setting up an own AWS account, a high-level overview of the main AWS components, criteria for designing cloud applications, AWS cost model, application development environment, solutions for scalability, high availability, fault tolerance, disaster recovery, security, and deployment to live production. Due to so many topics and practical recommendations, this book could serve as a quick guide for expert users who are however new to cloud-based services. Despite the fact that many topics are not described in depth, it is still useful to have all of them under the same cover.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Brian Aug 21, 2015
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This is a great resource. It's written in an "easy to follow" yet functionally technical manner. The ways it's organized is helping me grasp everything quicker than expected.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Shari Card Aug 16, 2015
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
I'll preface this review by stating that I have used AWS in the distant past, but I needed to find a resource to get me up to speed on all of the new service offerings. This book did just that. The overview of the service offerings in the early chapters were clear and concise. In my opinion, the chapters on optimization and security will be a great resource for any AWS user. I like the step-by-step setup instructions for the different services. They were clearly written and easy to follow. Learning AWS will definitely become one of my go to resources.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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