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

Feeding log files into CloudWatch logs


CloudWatch logs is a managed, highly durable, log storage system in AWS. It's capable of ingesting logs from many sources. We're going to focus on what is probably the most common use case which is shipping logs off your EC2 instances into CloudWatch logs.

This capability is particularly important in highly dynamic auto scaling environments. Since the lifetime of your EC2 instances can be quite short, any logs which are written only to a local disk will be lost upon instance termination. You'll inevitably find yourself wishing you had access to server logs after an instance has disappeared.

The following pattern we're about to show you allows you to aggregate, search and filter log entries across a number of sources. You can then create custom metrics and trigger alarms based on log activity. Super handy!

In this recipe we're going to:

  • Launch an EC2 instance
  • Configure it to send logs to CloudWatch logs
  • Create a filter based on SSH logins to the instance
  • Send...