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

Testing the Auto Scaling group

In order to test the Auto Scaling policy we created in the last step, these are the steps we need to follow:

  1. Log in to any of the instances that were created as part of the Auto Scaling group:
    ssh -i <public key> ec2-user@<public ip of the instance>
  2. Install the stress package. This package is a utility that is used to impose load on test systems:
    yum -y install stress
  3. Now to add a load on one CPU, we can use the following command; this command will time out after 300 seconds (5 minutes):
    stress --cpu 1 --timeout 300&
  4. If you go back to the Activity tab in the Auto Scaling console, you will see that Auto Scaling will start spinning up a new instance:
Figure 6.36 – Activity tab

Figure 6.36 – Activity tab

Now you know how an Auto Scaling group adds or terminates instances based on the scaling policy.