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

Dedicated instance versus dedicated host – which should you choose?

This is always a confusing topic, but let's first learn about dedicated instances with reference to an on-demand context, which most of us know about. On-demand is the preferred choice for most of us as it's cost-effective. When you spin up your EC2 instance, if you don't choose any option, by default it picks on-demand, which means your instance can be launched in any hypervisor running in AWS.

This might be an issue for some customers who want a hypervisor (a hypervisor is a piece of software that creates and runs virtual machines (VMs)) dedicated to their AWS account. There can be many reasons for that, but one common concern is security. You want the hypervisor you are using to only run the AWS instances of your company. This is where a dedicated instance comes into the picture. When you pick the dedicated instance option, hardware will be dedicated to your account. AWS now provides you...