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

Chapter 9: Centralizing Logs for Analysis

Log analysis is a critical piece of any infrastructure. The log is the first place that we usually start debugging. In a dynamic environment such as the cloud, sometimes log management becomes expensive as, because of the dynamic nature of the cloud, instances can come and go at any time if placed under an autoscaling group. The other factor that we need to bear in mind is the storage cost as these instances produce large files, which will increase your storage cost.

This chapter will start by looking at how to set up the CloudWatch agent, a centralized place to store all the logs. As we are dealing with a large amount of data in the cloud environment, we need someplace where we can store it for a quicker search, and for that purpose, we will use Amazon Elasticsearch. Finally, we will need some visualization tools to view that data, and for this we will use Kibana.

In this chapter, we are going to cover the following main topics:

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