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 EC2 instances

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is your virtual machine in a cloud, but instead of paying thousands of dollars to own that machine, you can choose a pay-as-you-go model. With the pay-as-you-go model, you only pay for the amount of time you use that resource.

The other advantage of using the cloud is that you can easily switch to a higher or lower family of resources based on your requirement. For example, if you start your application instance with 1 CPU and 1 GB of memory, later on, if your application demand increases, you can easily switch to 2 CPUs and 2 GB of memory (sometimes without any downtime). In the traditional environment, you're stuck with 1 CPU and a 1 GB machine forever, but you can easily switch to a bigger instance (2 CPUs and 2 GB) in the cloud.

Creating your first EC2 instance using the AWS console

To set up your application, the first step is to launch the EC2 instance, which will host your application, and for a newbie, the easiest...