Book Image

AWS Administration Cookbook

By : Rowan Udell, Lucas Chan
Book Image

AWS Administration Cookbook

By: Rowan Udell, Lucas Chan

Overview of this book

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a bundled remote computing service that provides cloud computing infrastructure over the Internet with storage, bandwidth, and customized support for application programming interfaces (API). Implementing these services to efficiently administer your cloud environments is a core task. This book will help you build and administer your cloud environment with AWS. We’ll begin with the AWS fundamentals, and you’ll build the foundation for the recipes you’ll work on throughout the book. Next, you will find out how to manage multiple accounts and set up consolidated billing. You will then learn to set up reliable and fast hosting for static websites, share data between running instances, and back up your data for compliance. Moving on, you will find out how to use the compute service to enable consistent and fast instance provisioning, and will see how to provision storage volumes and autoscale an application server. Next, you’ll discover how to effectively use the networking and database service of AWS. You will also learn about the different management tools of AWS along with securing your AWS cloud. Finally, you will learn to estimate the costs for your cloud. By the end of the book, you will be able to easily administer your AWS cloud.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Creating instance roles


This recipe is reasonably short but it contains a really important concept to anyone who is new to the AWS platform. Understanding and utilizing IAM roles for EC2 will significantly reduce your exposure to lost credentials and probably help you sleep a little better at night too. In a nutshell, instance roles help you get AWS credentials off your servers and out of your code base(s).

Roles contain one or more policies. We're going to create a role that has some AWS Managed Policies as well as an Inline Policy. As the name would suggest, an AWS Managed Policy is a policy that is created and fully controlled by AWS. The Inline Policy is going to be created by us and will be embedded in our role definition.

The AWS Managed Policies we'll use will allow read-only access to the S3 and EC2 APIs. The Inline Policy we'll create will allow write access to CloudWatch logs. We'll talk through why you would or wouldn't choose a Managed Policy later in this recipe.

How to do it....