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.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: AWS Services and Tools
4
Section 2: Building the Infrastructure
7
Section 3: Adding Scalability and Elasticity to the Infrastructure
11
Section 4: The Monitoring, Metrics, and Backup Layers

Setting up AWS Elasticsearch and Kibana

Before setting up Elasticsearch, we need to understand what Elasticsearch is. It's a free and open source analytic engine based on the Apache Lucene library. It works by taking unstructured data from different sources, indexing it based on user-specified mapping, and making it searchable.

Companies such as Elastic (https://www.elastic.co/) provide the other alternative solutions, such as ELK, which stands for Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. Logstash, in this case, works similar to a CloudWatch agent, and is used to send data to Elasticsearch. Kibana lets you visualize your data using graphs and charts.

AWS provides its fully managed Elasticsearch solution known as Amazon Elasticsearch service. Using the Amazon Elasticsearch service has the following benefits:

  • It's easier to deploy and manage, with Amazon taking care of heavy lifting activities, such as provisioning hardware, software installation, recovery, backup...