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 images and instances


To understand images and instances a bit better, we first need to travel a little back in time; don't worry, a couple of years back is quite enough! This was the time when there was a boom in the implementation and utilization of the virtualization technology!

Almost all IT companies today run their workloads off virtualized platforms such as VMware vSphere or Citrix XenServer to even Microsoft's Hyper-V. AWS, too, got into the act but decided to use and modify a more off the shelf, open sourced Xen as its virtualization engine. And like any other virtualization technology, this platform was also used to spin up virtual machines using either some type of configuration files or some predefined templates. In AWS's vocabulary, these virtual machines came to be known as instances and their master templates came to be known as images.

By now you must have realized that instances and images are nothing new! They are just fancy nomenclature that differentiates AWS...