Book Image

AWS Administration ??? The Definitive Guide

Book Image

AWS Administration ??? The Definitive Guide

Overview of this book

AWS is at the forefront of Cloud Computing today. Many businesses are moving away from traditional datacenters and toward AWS because of its reliability, vast service offerings, lower costs, and high rate of innovation. Because of its versatility and flexible design, AWS can be used to accomplish a variety of simple and complicated tasks such as hosting multitier websites, running large scale parallel processing, content delivery, petabyte storage and archival, and lots more. Whether you are a seasoned sysadmin or a rookie, this book will provide you with all the necessary skills to design, deploy, and manage your applications on the AWS cloud platform. The book guides you through the core AWS services such as IAM, EC2, VPC, RDS, and S3 using a simple real world application hosting example that you can relate to. Each chapter is designed to provide you with the most information possible about a particular AWS service coupled with easy to follow hands-on steps, best practices, tips, and recommendations. By the end of the book, you will be able to create a highly secure, fault tolerant, and scalable environment for your applications to run on.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
AWS Administration – The Definitive Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introducing EC2!


Remember the never ending hassles of a long and tedious procurement process? All that time you spent waiting for a brand new server to show up at your doorstep so that you could get started on it? Something we all as sysadmins have gone through. Well, that all changed on August 25, 2006 when Amazon released the first beta version of one of its flagship service offerings called the Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2.

EC2 is a service that basically provides scalable compute capacity on an on-demand, pay-per-use basis to its end users. Let's break it up a bit to understand the terms a bit better. To start with, EC2 is all about server virtualization! And with server virtualization, we get a virtually unlimited capacity of virtual machines or, as AWS calls it, instances. Users can dynamically spin up these instances, as and when required, perform their activity on them, and then shut down the same while getting billed only for the resources they consume.

EC2 is also a highly scalable...