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

CloudWatch monitoring

Let's take a look at some of the metrics published by CloudWatch. To view those metrics, go to the EC2 instance Uniform Resource Locator (URL) at https://us-west-2.console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/v2/home?region=us-west-2#Instances, and then select one of the instances (created during Chapter 4, Scalable Compute Capacity in the Cloud via EC2) and click on Monitoring. In this case, we see metrics sent by EC2 to CloudWatch. These are host-level metrics that consist of the following:

  • CPU utilization, CPU credit usage, and balance
  • Network packets/data in and out
  • Disk read/write
  • Status check (instance/system)

We can see some of these metrics (for example, CPU utilization, disk read/write, and network packets) in the following screenshot:

Figure 8.1 – AWS CloudWatch dashboard for EC2 instance

Figure 8.1 – AWS CloudWatch dashboard for EC2 instance

By default, EC2 monitoring takes 5 minutes, but if you enable Detailed Monitoring, you will get data in 1 minute...