Amazon Web Services in Action

Michael Wittig, Andreas Wittig

• Publisher: Manning
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781638357193
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Web Services & APIs
• Index: Computer Science

Summary Amazon Web Services in Action, Second Edition is a comprehensive introduction to computing, storing, and networking in the AWS cloud. You'll find clear, relevant coverage of all the essential AWS services you to know, emphasizing best practices for security, high availability and scalability.Foreword by Ben Whaley, AWS community hero and author.Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the Technology The largest and most mature of the cloud platforms, AWS offers over 100 prebuilt services, practically limitless compute resources, bottomless secure storage, as well as top-notch automation capabilities. This book shows you how to develop, host, and manage applications on AWS. About the Book Amazon Web Services in Action, Second Edition is a comprehensive introduction to deploying web applications in the AWS cloud. You'll find clear, relevant coverage of all essential AWS services, with a focus on automation, security, high availability, and scalability. This thoroughly revised edition covers the latest additions to AWS, including serverless infrastructure with AWS Lambda, sharing data with EFS, and in-memory storage with ElastiCache. What's inside

• Completely revised bestseller
• Secure and scale distributed applications
• Deploy applications on AWS
• Design for failure to achieve high availability
• Automate your infrastructure

About the Reader Written for mid-level developers and DevOps engineers. About the Author Andreas Wittig and Michael Wittig are software engineers and DevOps consultants focused on AWS. Together, they migrated the first bank in Germany to AWS in 2013. Table of Contents

PART 1 - GETTING STARTED

• What is Amazon Web Services?
• A simple example: WordPress in five minutes

PART 2 - BUILDING VIRTUAL INFRASTRUCTURE CONSISTING OF COMPUTERS AND NETWORKING

• Using virtual machines: EC2
• Programming your infrastructure: The command-line, SDKs, and CloudFormation
• Automating deployment: CloudFormation, Elastic Beanstalk, and OpsWorks
• Securing your system: IAM, security groups, and VPC
• Automating operational tasks with Lambda

PART 3 - STORING DATA IN THE CLOUD

• Storing your objects: S3 and Glacier
• Storing data on hard drives: EBS and instance store
• Sharing data volumes between machines: EFS
• Using a relational database service: RDS
• Caching data in memory: Amazon ElastiCache
• Programming for the NoSQL database service: DynamoDB

PART 4 - ARCHITECTING ON AWS

• Achieving high availability: availability zones, auto-scaling, and CloudWatch
• Decoupling your infrastructure: Elastic Load Balancing and Simple Queue Service
• Designing for fault tolerance
• Scaling up and down: auto-scaling and CloudWatch

Part 1. Getting started

Have you watched a blockbuster on Netflix, bought a gadget on Amazon.com, or booked a room on Airbnb today? If so, you have used Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the background. Because Netflix, Amazon.com, and Airbnb all use Amazon Web Services for their business.

Amazon Web Services is the biggest player in the cloud computing markets. According to analysts, AWS maintains a market share of more than 30%.^[1] Another impressive number: AWS reported net sales of $4.1 billion USD for the quarter ending in June 2017.^[2] AWS data centers are distributed worldwide in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. But the cloud does not consist of hardware and computing power alone. Software is part of every cloud platform and makes the difference for you, as a customer who aims to provide a valuable experience to your services’s users. The research firm Gartner has yet again classified AWS as a leader in their Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service in 2017. Gartner’s Magic Quadrant groups vendors into four quadrants: niche players, challengers, visionaries, and leaders, and provides a quick overview of the cloud computing market.^[3] Being recognized as a leader attests AWS’s high speed and high quality of innovation.

¹

Synergy Research Group, “The Leading Cloud Providers Continue to Run Away with the Market,” http://mng.bz/qDYo.

²

Amazon, 10-Q for Quarter Ended June 30 (2017), http://mng.bz/1LAX.

³

AWS Blog, “AWS Named as a Leader in Gartner’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Magic Quadrant for 7th Consecutive Year,” http://mng.bz/0W1W.

The first part of this book will guide you through your initial steps with AWS. You will get an impression of how you can use AWS to improve your IT infrastructure.

Chapter 1 introduces cloud computing and AWS. This will get you familiar with the big-picture basics of how AWS is structured.

Chapter 2 brings Amazon Web Service into action. Here, you will spin up and dive into a complex cloud infrastructure with ease.

Chapter 1. What is Amazon Web Services?

This chapter covers

• Overview of Amazon Web Services
• The benefits of using Amazon Web Services
• What you can do with Amazon Web Services
• Creating and setting up an AWS account

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a platform of web services that offers solutions for computing, storing, and networking, at different layers of abstraction. For example, you can use block-level storage (a low level of abstraction) or a highly distributed object storage (a high level of abstraction) to store your data. You can use these services to host websites, run enterprise applications, and mine tremendous amounts of data. Web services are accessible via the internet by using typical web protocols (such as HTTP) and used by machines or by humans through a UI. The most prominent services provided by AWS are EC2, which offers virtual machines, and S3, which offers storage capacity. Services on AWS work well together: you can use them to replicate your existing local network setup, or you can design a new setup from scratch. The pricing model for services is pay-per-use.

As an AWS customer, you can choose among different data centers. AWS data centers are distributed worldwide. For example, you can start a virtual machine in Japan in exactly the same way as you would start one in Ireland. This enables you to serve customers worldwide with a global infrastructure.

The map in figure 1.1 shows AWS’s data centers. Access is limited to some of them: some data centers are accessible for U.S. government organizations only, and special conditions apply for the data centers in China. Additional data centers have been announced for Bahrain, Hong Kong, Sweden, and the U.S..

Figure 1.1. AWS data center locations

In more general terms, AWS is known as a cloud computing platform.

1.1. What is cloud computing?

Almost every IT solution is labeled with the term cloud computing or just cloud nowadays. Buzzwords like this may help sales, but they’re hard to work with in a book. So for the sake of clarity, let’s define some terms.

Cloud computing, or the cloud, is a metaphor for supply and consumption of IT resources. The IT resources in the cloud aren’t directly visible to the user; there are layers of abstraction in between. The level of abstraction offered by the cloud varies, from offering virtual machines (VMs) to providing software as a service (SaaS) based on complex distributed systems. Resources are available on demand in enormous quantities, and you pay for what you use.

The official definition from the National Institute of Standards and Technology:

Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (networks, virtual machines, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.

National Institute of Standards and Technology, The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing

Clouds are often divided into three types:

• Public—A cloud managed by an organization and open to use by the general public.
• Private—A cloud that virtualizes and distributes the IT infrastructure for a single organization.
• Hybrid—A mixture of a public and a private cloud.

AWS is a public cloud. Cloud computing services also have several classifications:

• Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)—Offers fundamental resources like computing, storage, and networking capabilities, using virtu...