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

Chapter 5: Increasing an Application's Fault Tolerance with Elastic Load Balancing

In the previous chapter, we learned how to set up our instances in AWS using EC2. In this chapter, we will further extend that concept and start placing instances behind a load balancer to distribute the load. Placing an instance behind a load balancer will not only help in distributing the load but also if your instance goes down, the load balancer will stop routing traffic to that instance, which will increase the reliability of your application.

The primary function of a load balancer is to accept the client's connection (as shown in the following diagram) and distribute it to the backend targets, for example, EC2 instances, IP addresses, Lambda functions, and containers:

Figure 5.1 – The workings of a load balancer

Figure 5.1 – The workings of a load balancer

This chapter will start by looking at various load balancer offerings by AWS and which one to use in which situation. Once we gain theoretical...