Book Image

AWS for System Administrators

By : Prashant Lakhera
Book Image

AWS for System Administrators

By: Prashant Lakhera

Overview of this book

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the most popular and efficient cloud platforms for administering and deploying your applications to make them resilient and robust. AWS for System Administrators will help you to learn several advanced cloud administration concepts for deploying, managing, and operating highly available systems on AWS. Starting with the fundamentals of identity and access management (IAM) for securing your environment, this book will gradually take you through AWS networking and monitoring tools. As you make your way through the chapters, you’ll get to grips with VPC, EC2, load balancer, Auto Scaling, RDS database, and data management. The book will also show you how to initiate AWS automated backups and store and keep track of log files. Later, you’ll work with AWS APIs and understand how to use them along with CloudFormation, Python Boto3 Script, and Terraform to automate infrastructure. By the end of this AWS book, you’ll be ready to build your two-tier startup with all the necessary infrastructure, monitoring, and logging components in place.

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Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Preface
Preface
Who this book is for
What this book covers
To get the most out of this book
Download the example code files
Code in Action
Download the color images
Conventions used
Get in touch
Reviews
1
Section 1: AWS Services and Tools
Section 1: AWS Services and Tools
Free Chapter
2
Chapter 1: Setting Up the AWS Environment
Chapter 1: Setting Up the AWS Environment
Technical requirements
Setting up the environment
Introducing Python Boto3
Introducing CloudFormation
Introducing Terraform
Installing tools in an automated way
Summary
3
Chapter 2: Protecting Your AWS Account Using IAM
Chapter 2: Protecting Your AWS Account Using IAM
Technical requirements
Creating IAM users and groups
Understanding IAM policies
Creating IAM roles
Introducing AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS)
Real-time use case of launching a specific instance using CloudFormation
Rotating IAM credentials using Boto3
Summary
4
Section 2: Building the Infrastructure
Section 2: Building the Infrastructure
5
Chapter 3: Creating a Data Center in the Cloud Using VPC
Chapter 3: Creating a Data Center in the Cloud Using VPC
Technical requirements
Setting up two VPCs
Introducing AWS Transit Gateway
Summary
6
Chapter 4: Scalable Compute Capacity in the Cloud via EC2
Chapter 4: Scalable Compute Capacity in the Cloud via EC2
Technical requirements
Setting up EC2 instances
Creating an AWS billing alarms
Real-time use case to clean up an unused AMI
Real-time use case to detach unused EBS volumes
Real-time use case to shutdown instances on a daily basis
Summary
7
Section 3: Adding Scalability and Elasticity to the Infrastructure
Section 3: Adding Scalability and Elasticity to the Infrastructure
8
Chapter 5: Increasing an Application's Fault Tolerance with Elastic Load Balancing
Chapter 5: Increasing an Application's Fault Tolerance with Elastic Load Balancing
Technical requirements
Different load balancers offered by AWS
Setting up the application load balancer
Automating the application load balancer using Terraform
Summary
9
Chapter 6: Increasing Application Performance Using AWS Auto Scaling
Chapter 6: Increasing Application Performance Using AWS Auto Scaling
Technical requirements
Setting up Auto Scaling
Understanding Auto Scaling policies
Scaling an application based on demand
Testing the Auto Scaling group
Creating an Auto Scaling group using Terraform
Summary
10
Chapter 7: Creating a Relational Database in the Cloud using AWS Relational Database Service (RDS)
Chapter 7: Creating a Relational Database in the Cloud using AWS Relational Database Service (RDS)
Technical requirements
The different database offerings in AWS RDS
Setting up AWS RDS in high availability mode
Setting up a MySQL read replica
Automating AWS RDS MySQL creation using Terraform
Summary
11
Section 4: The Monitoring, Metrics, and Backup Layers
Section 4: The Monitoring, Metrics, and Backup Layers
12
Chapter 8: Monitoring AWS Services Using CloudWatch and SNS
Chapter 8: Monitoring AWS Services Using CloudWatch and SNS
Technical requirements
CloudWatch monitoring
Monitoring custom metrics using CloudWatch
Introduction to SNS
Introduction to CloudWatch Events
Automating alarm notification using email and a Slack channel
Summary
13
Chapter 9: Centralizing Logs for Analysis
Chapter 9: Centralizing Logs for Analysis
Technical requirements
Why do we need log management?
Setting up the CloudWatch agent
Setting up AWS Elasticsearch and Kibana
Summary
14
Chapter 10: Centralizing Cloud Backup Solution
Chapter 10: Centralizing Cloud Backup Solution
Technical requirements
The v backup options offered by AWS
Setting up the AWS DLM
Backing up your data to S3 using the AWS CLI
Transitioning S3 data to Glacier using a lifecycle policy
Summary
15
Chapter 11: AWS Disaster Recovery Solutions
Chapter 11: AWS Disaster Recovery Solutions
Technical requirements
Discussing the various DR solutions offered by AWS
Configuring a website to fail over to an S3 bucket
Summary
16
Chapter 12: AWS Tips and Tricks
Chapter 12: AWS Tips and Tricks
Technical requirements
Some common pitfalls – VPC limitations
Which VPC subnets to choose while building a VPC
Dedicated instance versus dedicated host – which should you choose?
The power of the IAM permission boundary
Custom CloudWatch metrics
Tagging, tagging, and tagging – why is tagging important?
Protecting your EC2 instances and EBS volumes using termination protection
How to reduce your AWS bill
Choosing an AWS bucket name and how to create a random bucket name
Automating AMI creation
Summary
17
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Automating alarm notification using email and a Slack channel

So far, we have discussed CloudWatch for monitoring and SNS for alerting. But nowadays, a newly emerging field is ChatOps, whereby your DevOps/System team can receive a notification on a collaboration platform such as Slack. Unfortunately, SNS doesn't support out-of-the-box Slack integration, so we need to use AWS Lambda for that.

The way the whole integration works is that CloudWatch will trigger an alarm that sends messages to SNS topics when certain events occur—in this case, when CPU utilization goes beyond 40%. A Lambda function will get invoked in response to SNS, and it will then call the Slack API to post the message to the Slack channel.

Configuring Slack

To configure Webhooks in Slack for CloudWatch Alarms, we perform the following steps:

  1. As a first step, we need to create a Slack app. To do that, go to this URL at https://api.slack.com/apps/new and fill in the following details:

    - App...

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