Book Image

Amazon Web Services: Migrating your .NET Enterprise Application

By : Rob Linton
Book Image

Amazon Web Services: Migrating your .NET Enterprise Application

By: Rob Linton

Overview of this book

Amazon Web Services is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform in the Cloud, which businesses can take advantage of as their needs demand. The Amazon Cloud provides the enterprise with the flexibility to choose whichever solution is required to solve specific problems, ultimately reducing costs by only paying for what you use. While enterprises understand moving their applications among infrastructure they own and manage, the differences in Amazon's infrastructure bring up specific business, legal, technical, and regulatory issues to get to grips with. This step-by-step guide to moving your Enterprise .NET application to Amazon covers not only the concept, technical design, and strategy, but also enlightens readers about the business strategy and in-depth implementation details involved in moving an application to Amazon. You'll discover how to map your requirements against the Amazon Cloud, as well as secure and enhance your application with AWS. This book helps readers achieve their goal of migrating a .NET Enterprise Application to the AWS cloud. It guides you through the process one step at a time with a sample enterprise application migration. After comparing the existing application with the newly migrated version, it then moves on to explain how to make the hosted application better. It covers how to leverage some of the scalability and redundancy built into the Cloud, and along the way you'll learn about all of the major AWS products like EC2, S3, and EBS.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Amazon Web Services: Migrating your .NET Enterprise Application
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

A brief technical overview of AWS


It's probably time we took a brief overview of how AWS is set up.

Each AWS region is broken down into availability zones.

Each availability zone shares nothing with the other availability zones within the same region. The upshot of this is that if there is a service outage within a particular availability zone, servers in the other availability zones will not be affected. However, the downside of this is than availability zone-specific items such as Elastic Block Store (EBS) disk, cannot be made available to other availability zones within the same region.

When migrating your applications to the AWS cloud, the first decision you will need to make is to select your region, and then your availability zone.

Tip

Picking the closest geographic region will ensure the lowest latency and best performance, however, note that there are minor price differentials between regions.

Public or Virtual Private Cloud

The second decision will be whether you would like a Public Cloud or a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).

A Public Cloud is a self-contained group of servers within AWS that is protected by the AWS firewall from all external connections (including those from inside your own network). The benefit of a public cloud is that AWS allows servers—that you choose—to be selectively presented to the outside world. An example of a public cloud would be the hosting of web servers, which are available to the general public.

A Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is also a self-contained group of servers within AWS; however, these servers are, for all intents and purposes, on your own internal network. The way AWS handles a VPC is significantly different to a public cloud. IP addresses are under your control, rather that AWS's. Security between the enterprise and servers in your VPC is your responsibility, and AWS security groups do not apply within your VPC.

Note

The exception to this is making servers in your VPC visible to the outside world.

The technology behind AWS

The technology behind AWS EC2 is based around Xen, a hypervisor virtualization technology used within many major organizations today. Xen provides an environment that allows multiple virtual instances to run in the same hardware environment, similar to VMware. Each instance has a measure of compute units to represent CPU and memory, which is guaranteed by the underlying Xen environment.

Note

Currently, it is not possible to run Microsoft HyperV or VMware on an AWS EC2 instance as the instance is already virtualized.