The first patterns we will learn are considered to be the most rudimentary patterns for Cloud infrastructure. Many patterns throughout this book will be very heavily tied to AWS-specific services while the patterns here can be applied in many other Cloud virtualization infrastructures that have similar capabilities. In this chapter we will cover the following topics:
Snapshot pattern
Stamp pattern
Scale up pattern
Scale out pattern
On-demand disk pattern
For this chapter, I will use the Amazon provided and supported Amazon Machine Image (AMI) titled Amazon Linux AMI. The base AMI that you choose or the machine type to launch the AMI is not important for this chapter, as long as it is a Linux image. Images based on Windows have some inconsistencies and require special steps to be taken to create reusable images and snapshots. While following along, if you decide to use an alternate image, the code snippets may not work as expected.