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

Understanding Auto Scaling policies

Let's revisit the concept of scaling once more. Scaling refers to the increasing or decreasing of the compute capacity of your application. It usually starts with a scaling action or an event that tells an Auto Scaling group to either launch a new instance or terminate existing ones.

AWS provides a bunch of ways to scale your Auto Scaling group. Let's look at these scaling policies one by one:

  • Scale manually: This is the most basic way to scale your resources. You only need to specify the minimum, maximum, or desired capacity of your Auto Scaling group. We used a manual scaling policy in Figure 6.14, where we manually specify the desired, minimum, and maximum capacity.
  • Scale based on demand/dynamic scaling: This is an advanced scaling policy where we can define the parameter that controls our scaling process in response to changing demand. For example, so far, we only have two EC2 web instances to handle the application load...