In this article, by Prabhakaran Kuppusamy and Uchit Vyas, authors of AWS Development Essentials, you will learn different tools and methods available to perform the same operation with different, varying complexities. Various options are available, depending on the user's level of experience. In this article, we will start with an overview of each service, learn about the various tools available for programmer interaction, and finally see the troubleshooting and best practices to be followed while using these services. AWS provides a handful of services in every area. In this article, we will cover the following topics:

• Navigate through the AWS Management Console
• Describe the security measures that AWS provides
• AWS interaction through the SDK and IDE tools

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.)

Background of AWS and its needs

AWS is based on an idea presented by Chris Pinkham and Benjamin Black with a vision towards Amazon's retail computing infrastructure. The first Amazon offering was SQS, in the year 2004. Officially, AWS was launched and made available online in 2006, and within a year, 200,000 developers signed up for these services. Later, due to a natural disaster (June 29, 2012 storm in North Virginia, which brought down most of the servers residing at this location) and technical events, AWS faced a lot of challenges. A similar event happened on December 2012, after which AWS has been providing services as stated. AWS learned from these events and made sure that the same kind of outage didn't occur even if the same event occurred again. AWS is an idea born in a single room, but the idea is now made available and used by almost all the cloud developers and IT giants.

AWS is greatly loved by all kinds of technology admirers. Irrespective of the user's expertise, AWS has something for various types of users. For an expert programmer, AWS has SDKs for each service. Using these SDKs, the programmer can perform operations by entering commands in the command-line interface. However an end user with limited knowledge of programming can still perform similar operations using the graphical user interface of the AWS Management Console, which is accessible through a web browser. If the programmers need interactions between a low-level (SDK) and a high-level (Management Console), they can go for the integrated development environment (IDE) tools, for which AWS provides plugins and add-ons. One such commonly used IDE for which AWS has provided add-ons is the Eclipse IDE. As of now, we will start with the AWS Management Console.

The AWS Management Console

The most popular method of accessing AWS is via the Management Console because of its simplicity of usage and power. Another reason why the end user prefers the Management Console is that it doesn't require any software to start with; having an Internet connection and a browser is sufficient. As the name suggests, the Management Console is a place where administrative and advanced operations can be performed on your AWS account details or AWS services. The Management Console mainly focuses on the following features:

• One-click access to AWS's services
• AWS account administration
• AWS management using handheld devices
• AWS infrastructure management across the globe

One-click access to the AWS services

To access the Management Console, all you need to do is first sign up with AWS. Once done, the Management Console will be available at https://console.aws.amazon.com/. Once you have signed up, you will be directed to the following page:

Each and every icon on this page is an Amazon Web Service. Two or more services will be grouped under a category. For example, in the Analytics category, you can see three services, namely, Data Pipeline, Elastic MapReduce, and Kinesis. Starting with any of these services is very easy. Have a look at the description of the service at the bottom of the service icon. As soon as you click on the service icon, it will take you to the Getting started page of the corresponding service, where brief as well as detailed guidelines are available. In order to start with any of the services, only two things are required. The first one is an AWS account and the second one is the supported browser. The Getting started section usually will have a video, which explains the specialty and use cases of the service that you selected. Once you finish reading the Getting started section, optionally you can go through the DOC files specific to the service to know more about the syntaxes and usage of the service operations.

AWS account administration

The account administration is one of the most important things to make note of. To do this, click on your displayed name (in this case, Prabhakar) at the top of the page, and then click on the My Account option, as shown in the preceding screenshot. At the beginning of every month, you don't want AWS to deduct all your salary by stating that you have used these many services costing this much money; hence, all this management information is available in the Management Console. Using the Management Console, you can infer the following information:

• The monthly billing in brief as well as the detailed manner (cost split-up of each service) along with a provision to view VAT and tax exemption
• Account details, such as the display name and contact information
• Provision to close the AWS account

All the preceding operations and much more are possible.

AWS management using handheld devices

Managing and accessing the AWS services is through (but not limited to) PC. AWS provides a handful of applications almost for all or most of the mobile platforms, such as Android, iOS, and so on. Using these applications, you can perform all the AWS operations on the move. You won't believe that having a 7-inch Android tablet with the installed AWS Console application from Google Play will enable you to ask for any Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance from Amazon and control it (start, stop, and terminate) very easily. You can install an SSH client in the tablet and connect to the Linux terminal. However, if you wish to make use of the Windows instance from EC2, you might use the Graphics User Interface (GUI) more frequently than a command line. A few more sophisticated software and hardware might be needed, for example, you should have a VNC viewer or remote desktop connection software to get the GUI of the EC2 instance borrowed. As you are making use of the GUI in addition to the keyboard, you will need a pointer device, such as a mouse. As a result, you will almost get addicted to the concept of cloud computing going mobile.

AWS infrastructure management across the globe

At this point, you might be aware that you can get all of these AWS services from servers residing at any of the following locations. To control these services used by you in different regions, you don't have to go anywhere else. You can control it right here in the same Management Console. Using the same Management Console, just by clicking on N.Virginia and choosing the location (at the top of the Management Console), you can make the service available in that region, as shown in the following screenshot:

You can choose the server location at which you want the service (data and machine) to be made available based on the following two factors:

• The first factor is the distance between the server's location and the client's location. For example, if you have deployed a web application for a client from North California at a Tokyo location, obviously the latency will be high while accessing the application. Therefore, choosing the optimum service location is the primary factor.
• The second factor is the charge for the service in a specific location. AWS charges more for certain crowded servers. Just for illustration, assume that the server for North California is used by many critical companies. So this might cost you twice if you create your servers at North California compared to the other locations. Hence, you should always consider the tradeoff between the location and cost and then decide on the server location.

Whenever you click on any of the services, AWS will always select the location that costs you less money as the default.

AWS security measures

Whenever you think of moving your data center to a public cloud, the first question that arises in your mind is about data security. In a public cloud, through virtualization technology, multiple users might be using the same hardware (server) in which your data is available. You will learn in detail about how AWS ensures data security.

Instance isolation

Before learning about instance isolation, you must know how AWS EC2 provisions the instances to the user. This service allows you to rent virtual machines (AWS calls it instances) with whatever configurations you ask.

Let's assume that you requested AWS to provision a 2 GB RAM, a 100 GB HDD, and an Ubuntu instance. Within a minute, you will be given the instance's connection details (public DNS, private IP, and so on), and the instance starts running. Does this mean that AWS assembled a 2*1 GB RAM and 100 GB HDD into a CPU cabinet and then installed Ubuntu OS in it and gave you the access? The answer is no. The provisioned instance is not a single PC (or bare metal) with an OS installed in it. The instance is the outcome of a virtual machine provisioned by Amazon's private cloud. The following diagram shows how a virtual machine can be provisioned by a private cloud:

Let's examine the diagram from bottom to top. First, we will start with the underlying Hardware/Host. Hardware is the server, which usually has a very high specification. Here, assume that your hardware has the configuration of a 99 GB RAM, a 450 TB HDD, and a few other elements, such as NIC, which you need not consider now. The next component in your sights is the Hypervisor.

A hypervisor or virtual machine monitor (VMM) is used to create and run virtual machines on the hardware. In private cloud terms, whichever machine runs a hypervisor on it is called the host machine. Three users can request each of them need instances with a 33 GB RAM and 150 TB HDD space. This request goes to the hypervisor and it then starts creating those VMs.

After creating the VMs, a notification about the connection parameters will be sent to each user. In the preceding diagram, you can see the three virtual machines (VMs) created by the hypervisor. All the three VMs are running on different operating systems. Even if all the three virtual machines are used by different users, each will feel that only he/she has access to the single piece of hardware, which is only used by them; user 1 might not know that the same hardware is also being used by user 2, and so on. The process of creating a virtual version of a machine or storage or network is called virtualization. The funny part is that none of the virtual machines knows that it is being virtualized (that is, all the VMs are created on the same host). After getting this information about your instances, some users may feel deceived, and some will be even disappointed and cry out loud, has your instance been created on a shared disc or resource? Even though the disc (or hardware) is shared, one instance (or owner of the instance) is isolated from the other instances on the same disc through a firewall. This concept is termed as instance isolation. The following diagram demonstrates instance isolation in AWS:

The preceding diagram clearly demonstrates how EC2 provides instances to every user. Even though all the instances are lying in the same disc, they are isolated by hypervisor. Hypervisor has a firewall that does this isolation. So, the physical interface will not interact with the underlying hardware (machine or disc where instances are available) or virtual interface directly. All these interactions will be through hypervisor's firewall. This way AWS ensures that no user can directly access the disc, and no instance can directly interact with another instance even if both instances are running on the same hardware. In addition to the firewall, during the creation of the EC2 instance, the user can specify the permitted and denied security groups of the instance. These two ideologies provide instance isolation.

In the preceding diagram, Customer 1, Customer 2, and so on are virtualized discs since the customer instances have no access to raw or actual disc devices. As an added security measure, the user can encrypt his/her disc so that other users cannot access the disc content (even if someone gets in contact with the disc).

Isolated GovCloud

Similar to North California or Asia Pacific, GovCloud is also a location where you can get your AWS services. This location is specifically designed only for government and agencies whose data is very confidential and valuable, and disclosing this data might result in disaster. By default, this location will not be available to the user. If you want access to this location, then you need to raise a compliance request at http://aws.amazon.com/compliance/contact/ submit the FedRAMP Package Request Form downloadable at http://cloud.cio.gov/document/fedramp-package-request-form. From these two URLs, you can understand how secured the cloud location really is.

CloudTrail

CloudTrail is an AWS service that performs the user activity and changes tracking. Enabling CloudTrail will log all the API request information into your S3 bucket, which you have created solely for this purpose. CloudTrail also allows you to create an SNS topic as soon as a new logfile is created by CloudTrail. CloudTrail, in hand with SNS, provides real-time user activity as messages to the user.

Password

This might sound funny. After looking at CloudTrail, if you feel that someone else is accessing your account, the best option is to change the password. Never let anyone look at your password, as this could easily comprise an entire account. Sharing the password is like leaving your treasury door open.

Multi-Factor Authentication

Until now, to access AWS through a browser, you had to log in at http://aws.amazon.com and enter your username and password. However, enabling Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) will add another layer of security and ask you to provide an authentication code sent to the device configured with this account. In the security credential page at https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam/home?#security_credential, there is a provision to enable MFA. Clicking on Enable will display the following window:

Selecting the first option A virtual MFA device will not cost you money, but this requires a smartphone (with an Android OS), and you need to download an app from the App Store. After this, during every login, you need to look at your smartphone and enter the authentication token. More information is available at https://youtu.be/MWJtuthUs0w.

Access Keys (Access Key ID and Secret Access Key)

In the same security credentials page, next to MFA, these access keys will be made available. AWS will not allow you to have more than two access keys. However, you can delete and create as many access keys as possible, as shown in the following screenshot:

This access key ID is used while accessing the service via the API and SDK. During this time, you must provide this ID. Otherwise, you won't be able to perform any operation. To put it in other words, if someone else gets or knows this ID, they could pretend to be you through the SDK and API. In the preceding screenshot, the first key is inactive and the second key is active. The Create New Access Key button is disabled because I already have a maximum number of allowed access keys. As an added measure, I forged my actual IDs.

It is a very good practice to delete a key and create a new key every month using the Delete command link and toggle the active keys every week (by making it active and inactive) by clicking on the Make Active or Make Inactive command links. Never let anyone see these IDs. If you are ever in doubt, delete the ID and create a new one.

Clicking on Create New Access Key button (assuming that you have less than two IDs) will display the following window, asking you to download the new access key ID as a CSV file:

The CloudFront key pairs

The CloudFront key pairs are very similar to the access-key IDs. Without these keys, you will not be able to perform any operation on CloudFront. Unlike the access key ID (which has only access key ID and secret access key), here you will have a private key and a public key along with the access key ID, as shown in the following screenshot:

If you lose these keys once, then you need to delete the key pair and create a new key pair. This is also an added security measure.

X.509 certificates

X.509 certificates are mandatory if you wish to make any SOAP requests on any AWS service. Clicking on Create new certificate will display the following window, which performs exactly the same function:

Account identifiers

There are two IDs that are used to identify ourselves when accessing the service via the API or SDK. These are the AWS account ID and the canonical user ID. These two IDs are unique. Just as with the preceding parameters, never share these IDs or let anyone see them. If someone has your access ID or key pair, the best option is generate a new one. But it is not possible to generate a new account ID or canonical user ID.

Summary

In this article, you learned the AWS Management Console and its commonly used SDKs and IDEs. You also learned how AWS secures your data. Then, you looked at the AWS plugin configuration on the Eclipse IDE.

The first part made the user familiar with the AWS Management Console. After that, you explored a few of the important security aspects of AWS and learned how AWS handles it. Finally, you learned about the different AWS tools available to the programmer to make his development work easier. In the end, you examined the common SDKs and IDE tools of AWS.

Resources for Article:

Further resources on this subject:

• Amazon DynamoDB - Modelling relationships, Error handling [article]
• A New Way to Scale [article]
• Deployment and Post Deployment [article]