AWS SysOps Cookbook

Practical recipes to build, automate, and manage your AWS-based cloud environments, 2nd Edition

Eric Z. Beard, Rowan Udell, Lucas Chan

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2019
• Edition: 2
• eBook ISBN:
  9781838553913
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: System Administration
• Index: Computer Science

Become an AWS SysOps administrator and explore best practices to maintain a well-architected, resilient, and secure AWS environment

Key Features

• Explore AWS Cloud functionalities through a recipe-based approach
• Get to grips with a variety of techniques for automating your infrastructure
• Discover industry-proven best practices for architecting reliable and efficient workloads

Book Description

AWS is an on-demand remote computing service providing cloud infrastructure over the internet with storage, bandwidth, and customized support for APIs. This updated second edition will help you implement these services and efficiently administer your AWS environment.

You will start with the AWS fundamentals and then understand how to manage multiple accounts before setting up consolidated billing. The book will assist you in setting up reliable and fast hosting for static websites, sharing data between running instances and backing up data for compliance. By understanding how to use compute service, you will also discover how to achieve quick and consistent instance provisioning. You'll then learn to provision storage volumes and autoscale an app server. Next, you'll explore serverless development with AWS Lambda, and gain insights into using networking and database services such as Amazon Neptune. The later chapters will focus on management tools like AWS CloudFormation, and how to secure your cloud resources and estimate costs for your infrastructure. Finally, you'll use the AWS well-architected framework to conduct a technology baseline review self-assessment and identify critical areas for improvement in the management and operation of your cloud-based workloads.

By the end of this book, you'll have the skills to effectively administer your AWS environment.

What you will learn

• Secure your account by creating IAM users and avoiding the use of the root login
• Simplify the creation of a multi-account landing zone using AWS Control Tower
• Master Amazon S3 for unlimited, cost-efficient storage of data
• Explore a variety of compute resources on the AWS Cloud, such as EC2 and AWS Lambda
• Configure secure networks using Amazon VPC, access control lists, and security groups
• Estimate your monthly bill by using cost estimation tools
• Learn to host a website with Amazon Route 53, Amazon CloudFront, and S3

Who this book is for

If you are an administrator, DevOps engineer, or an IT professional interested in exploring administrative tasks on the AWS Cloud, then this book is for you. Familiarity with cloud computing platforms and some understanding of virtualization, networking, and other administration-related tasks is assumed.

AWS Storage and Content Delivery

Storing data and delivering it to customers is at the heart of almost all applications, and AWS provides a myriad of services to help you accomplish these goals. Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is the foundation for storing a virtually unlimited amount of object data at very low prices, and Amazon CloudFront can easily be configured to deliver data stored in S3 to a global array of edge servers.

Storage is an integral part of any organization's cloud usage. When used correctly, servers are short-lived and replaceable. This means that having a durable, available storage service is critical to persisting and sharing state.

Here is a high-level summary of the storage services AWS offers:

Storage services from AWS

In this chapter, we will cover the following recipes:

• Setting up a secure Amazon S3 bucket
• Hosting a static website in S3
• Caching a website with CloudFront
• Working with network storage provided by Elastic File System (EFS)
• Backing up data for compliance

Amazon Elastic Block Store and Amazon EFS offer options to suit a range of data storage needs. In this chapter, you will learn the basics of each of these services.

Setting up a secure Amazon S3 bucket

Amazon S3 is one of the main services offered by AWS. It is hard to imagine implementing even the most trivial architecture without using S3 buckets. In this recipe, you will create buckets in three ways – by using the web console, the command-line interface (CLI), and with CloudFormation. You will create buckets with different properties each time to give you a sample of the various configurations that are possible.

S3 provides a web-based service for hosting files. Files are referred to as objects and grouped in buckets. An object is effectively a key-value pair, similar to a document database. Keys are used like file paths, with / used as a separator and grouping character. Buckets can be accessed easily, like a website via an automatically generated domain name.

Due to being associated with a domain name, bucket names must be globally unique.

The following are some recommended use cases for S3:

• Static website assets
• Sharing large files
• Short-term (that is, warm) backups

How to do it...

In this recipe, you will create different buckets using the web console, the CLI, and CloudFormation so that you are exposed to a variety of bucket configurations.

Using the web console to create a bucket with versioning enabled

Follow these steps to create a basic versioning-enabled bucket:

1. Log in to your AWS account and go to the S3 dashboard.
2. Click Create bucket:

Creating a bucket

3. Give your bucket a globally unique name.
4. Click Next.
5. Check the box to Keep all versions of an object in the same bucket. This enables versioning so that you can revert objects to their former state if necessary:

Versioning a bucket

6. Click Next.

7. On the next screen, leave the defaults as they are – we don't want our buckets to ever be made public:

Bucket access

8. Click Next.

9. Review the bucket settings on the following screen and click Create bucket:

Reviewing the bucket settings

10. Once the bucket has been created, click on its name and take a look at the tools that are available to administer the new bucket:

Bucket administration

11. Since we enabled versioning on this bucket, let's test it out to see how it works.

12. Create a text file on your desktop and add a single line to the file:

Creating a file to upload

13. Click the Upload button and upload that file to the new bucket:

Uploading a file

14. Click Next. Accept the defaults on the following screen and click Next again.
15. On the next screen, inspect the various storage classes that are available. It's worth spending some time learning the pros and cons of each class. Pick Standard:

Storage class

16. Scroll down to the Encryption option. Select the Amazon S3 master key. The object will be encrypted seamlessly, without requiring you to manually encrypt or decrypt it. Encryption is handled behind the scenes for you.

17. On the final screen, click Upload:

File upload

18. Click the object name to go to a screen dedicated to the object:

Object administration

19. Note that there is an object URL at the bottom, but if you click it, you will get an error since we didn't make this object public!
20. Click the Download button to retrieve a copy of the object. Open it to confirm that it's the same as what we uploaded.
21. Edit the file on your desktop to add a new line.
22. Go back to the bucket administration and click Upload again. Upload a new copy of the file using the same procedure we outlined in the previous steps.
23. Click the object name, and then click the Latest version link next to the name. Download each version to confirm that the content matches your expectations:

When versioning is enabled, all object versions are retained indefinitely

Using the CLI to create a bucket with cross-region replication enabled

In this recipe, we will do something slightly d...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright and Credits
• Dedication
• About Packt
• Contributors
• Preface
• AWS Fundamentals
• Account Setup and Management
• AWS Storage and Content Delivery
• AWS Compute
• Monitoring the Infrastructure
• Managing AWS Databases
• AWS Networking Essentials
• AWS Account Security and Identity
• Managing Costs
• Advanced AWS CloudFormation
• AWS Well-Architected Framework
• Working with Business Applications
• AWS Partner Solutions
• Other Books You May Enjoy