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

Automating AMI creation

AMI contains information that is required to launch an instance. It consists of information such as the operating system image, the different software installed in it, and configuration information. It's important to regularly update the AMI to contain information such as operating system patches, updated software, and the latest config changes. To create an AMI, we can follow any of these three procedures:

  • Creating an AMI using the AWS console
  • Creating an AMI using the AWS CLI
  • Automating AMI creation using Packer

Let's discuss these procedures in detail in the following sections.

Creating an AMI using the AWS console

The steps to create an AMI using the AWS console are listed as follows:

  1. Go to the EC2 console at https://us-west-2.console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/v2/home. Select the instance (in this case, prod-server), and under Actions, click on Image and templates and then click on Create image, as illustrated in the...