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

Different load balancers offered by AWS

Before discussing various load balancer offerings by AWS, let's first try to understand what a load balancer is. A load balancer is a device that distributes network and application traffic across multiple servers.

AWS offers three types of load balancers, and they all fulfill a slightly different set of objectives:

  • Classic load balancer: (Previous generation and now deprecated.) This was initially designed to load balance traffic to multiple EC2 instances. It supports protocols such as HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, and SSL. A common misconception about it is that it acts as a layer 7 (application layer) device, but even if it is a layer 7 device, it doesn't support routing rules based on specific paths (for example, /test). This limitation is overcome in the application load balancer.
  • Application load balancer: This works on layer 7 and supports the HTTP and HTTPS protocols. It allows users to configure and route incoming end user...