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.