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

Custom CloudWatch metrics

If you look at the CloudWatch dashboard, there are four default metrics, as follows:

  • CPU
  • Disk I/O
  • Network
  • Instance/system status check

These default metrics (CPU, status check, and network) can be seen in the following screenshot:

Figure 12.3 – CloudWatch default metrics

Figure 12.3 – CloudWatch default metrics

But why are some of the standard metrics such as memory utilization or disk space not default metrics? The reason behind that is that an EC2 instance is a VM that emulates computer hardware such as CPU, random-access memory (RAM), and disk. Your AWS service can't look inside your instance because its operating system controls how many resources need to be allocated, such as how much memory is required. This is the main reason why it's not possible to determine memory utilization by looking at the virtual hardware. We need to install solutions such as CloudWatch agents to get these metrics and push them to CloudWatch...