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Discovering AWS: Deployment & Management

Cloud Formation

Cloud Formation gives developers and systems administrators an easy way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, provisioning and updating them in an orderly and predictable fashion. You can use AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates or create your own templates to describe the AWS resources, and any associated dependencies or runtime parameters, required to run your application. You can create a template, for example, from an entire environment and you can deploy it including parameters in execution time.

CloudFormer tool enables you to generate a template from an environment while it is running.

Data Pipeline

Data Pipeline is a web service that helps you reliably process and move data between different AWS compute and storage services as well as on-premise data sources at specified intervals. It helps you easily create complex data processing workloads that are fault tolerant, repeatable, and highly available. For example, you could move data from S3 to DynamoDB, and in DynamoDB run another process to move the data to other bucket in S3. AWS Data Pipeline also allows you to move and process data that was previously locked up in on-premise data silos.

CloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch provides monitoring for AWS cloud resources and the applications customers run on AWS. It is included by default in all EC2 instances, collecting CPU, I/O Disk and Network Latency metrics totally free. You can implement more metrics with a little cost. CloudWatch is accessible from AWS Console, APIs, SDK and CLI (Command Line Interface).

Elastic Beanstalk

It is a way to deploy and manage applications in AWS. You simply upload your application, and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring. To ensure easy portability of your application, Elastic Beanstalk is built using familiar software stacks such as the Apache HTTP Server for Node.js, PHP and Python, Passenger for Ruby, IIS 7.5 for .NET, and Apache Tomcat for Java. There is no additional charge for Elastic Beanstalk - you pay only for the AWS resources needed to store and run your applications.

 Identity and Access Management (IAM)

IAM enables you to securely control access to AWS services and resources for your users. Using IAM, you can create and manage AWS users and groups and use permissions to allow and deny their access to AWS resources.

AWS CloudHSM

This is the only non-virtual component that you can find in AWS offering. It is a hardware piece that is installed in a rack in your on-promise datacenter. It stores your private keys and in case that it is opened, the device is deprogrammed automatically and all the information is lost. The CloudHSM service allows you to protect your encryption keys within HSMs (Hardware Security Module) designed and validated to government standards for secure key management. You can securely generate, store, and manage the cryptographic keys used for data encryption such that they are accessible only by you.

OpsWorks

AWS OpsWorks is an application management service that makes it easy for DevOps users to model and manage the entire application from load balancers to databases. Start from templates for common technologies like Ruby, Node.JS, PHP, and Java, or build your own using Chef recipes to install software packages and perform any task that you can script. AWS OpsWorks can scale your application using automatic load-based or time-based scaling and maintain the health of your application by detecting failed instances and replacing them. You have full control of deployments and automation of each component.

Discovering AWS: Networking

Before to describe the different networking services in AWS, it is important to clarify that AWS doesn’t support Multicast.

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

It enables you to create a private network fully-managed in the same way you can do it in your datacenter. You have complete control over your virtual networking environment, including selection of your own IP address range, creation of subnets, and configuration of route tables and network gateways. Additionally, you can create a Hardware Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection between your corporate datacenter and your VPC and leverage the AWS cloud as an extension of your corporate datacenter.

Route 53

It is a DNS service. It use a global DNS servers network to publish DNSs, when a client needs to resolve a DNS name, it will reach the AWS DNS nearest to it, that reduce the network latency. Route 53 effectively connects user requests to infrastructure running in AWS – such as Amazon EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancers, or Amazon S3 buckets – and can also be used to route users to infrastructure outside of AWS.

Elastic Load Balancing

It is a load balancer service. ELB supports routing and load balancing for HTTP, HTTPS and TCP traffic to EC2 instances. ELB automatically scales its request handling capacity to meet the demands of application traffic. Additionally, Elastic Load Balancing offers integration with Auto Scaling to ensure that you have back-end capacity to meet varying levels of traffic levels without requiring manual intervention. Single CNAME provides stable entry point for DNS configuration.

Direct Connect

It establish a dedicated network connection from your legacy datacenter to AWS VPC. AWS Direct Connect makes it easy to scale your connection to meet your needs. AWS Direct Connect provides 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps connections, and you can easily provision multiple connections if you need more capacity. You can also use AWS Direct Connect instead of establishing a VPN connection over the Internet to your Amazon VPC, avoiding the need to utilize VPN hardware that frequently can’t support data transfer rates above 4 Gbps.