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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
Leverage this step-by-step guide to build a highly secure, fault-tolerant, and scalable Cloud environment
Key Features
- Learn how to leverage various Amazon Web Services (AWS) components and services to build a secure, reliable, and robust environment to host your applications on.
- Delve into core AWS service offerings with hands-on tutorials, real-world use case scenarios, and best practices.
- A self-paced, systematic, and step-by-step guide to learning and implementing AWS in your own environment.
Book Description
Many businesses are moving from traditional data centers to AWS because of its reliability, vast service offerings, lower costs, and high rate of innovation. AWS can be used to accomplish a variety of both simple and tedious tasks. Whether you are a seasoned system admin or a rookie, this book will help you to learn all the skills you need to work with the AWS cloud.
This book guides you through some of the most popular AWS services, such as EC2, Elastic Beanstalk, EFS, CloudTrail, Redshift, EMR, Data Pipeline, and IoT using a simple, real-world, application-hosting example. This book will also enhance your application delivery skills with the latest AWS services, such as CodeCommit, CodeDeploy, and CodePipeline, to provide continuous delivery and deployment, while also securing and monitoring your environment's workflow. Each chapter is designed to provide you with maximal information about each AWS service, coupled with easy to follow, hands-on steps, best practices, tips, and recommendations.
By the end of the book, you will be able to create a highly secure, fault-tolerant, and scalable environment for your applications to run on.
What you will learn
- Take an in-depth look at what's new with AWS, along with how to effectively manage and automate your EC2 infrastructure with AWS Systems Manager
- Deploy and scale your applications with ease using AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Amazon Elastic File System
- Secure and govern your environments using AWS CloudTrail, AWS Config, and AWS Shield
- Learn the DevOps way using a combination of AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeDeploy, and AWS
- CodePipeline
- Run big data analytics and workloads using Amazon EMR and Amazon Redshift
- Learn to back up and safeguard your data using AWS Data Pipeline
- Get started with the Internet of Things using AWS IoT and AWS Greengrass
Who this book is for
This book is for those who want to learn and leverage the rich plethora of services provided by AWS. Although no prior experience with AWS is required, it is recommended that you have some hands-on experience of Linux, Web Services, and basic networking.
Yohan Wadia is a client-focused evangelist and technologist with more than 8 years of experience in the cloud industry, focused on helping customers succeed with cloud adoption. As a technical consultant, he provides guidance and implementation services to customers looking to leverage cloud computing through either Amazon Web Services, Windows Azure, or Google Cloud Platform by helping them come up with pragmatic solutions that make practical as well as business sense.Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 397
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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AWS Administration – The Definitive Guide Second Edition
Copyright © 2018 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing or its dealers and distributors, will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to have been caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
Commissioning Editor: Vijin BorichaAcquisition Editor: Heramb BhavsarContent Development Editor: Sharon RajTechnical Editor:Vishal Kamal MewadaCopy Editor: Safis EditingProject Coordinator: Virginia DiasProofreader: Safis EditingIndexer: Aishwarya GangawaneGraphics: Tom ScariaProduction Coordinator: Nilesh Mohite
First published: February 2016 Second edition: March 2018
Production reference: 1220318
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd. Livery Place 35 Livery Street Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.
ISBN 978-1-78847-879-3
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Contributors
About the author
Yohan Wadia is a client-focused evangelist and technologist with more than 8 years of experience in the cloud industry, focused on helping customers succeed with cloud adoption.
As a technical consultant, he provides guidance and implementation services to customers looking to leverage cloud computing through either Amazon Web Services, Windows Azure, or Google Cloud Platform by helping them come up with pragmatic solutions that make practical as well as business sense.
About the reviewer
Naveenkumar Vijayakumar (Naveen Vijay) is currently a cloud and automation architect at Digital Intelligence Systems, LLC (DISYS) and focuses on presales, solutions engineering, architecture, and delivery.
Naveen's portfolio includes experience in Azure, AWS, Serverless, containers, Robotic Process Automation, and chatbots (Alexa).
He earned his master's degree in IT from International Institute of Information Technology - Bangalore (IIIT-B) and currently lives in Dallas, Texas. He can be found on Twitter at @navcode.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
AWS Administration – The Definitive Guide Second Edition
Packt Upsell
Why subscribe?
PacktPub.com
Contributors
About the author
About the reviewer
Packt is searching for authors like you
Preface
Who this book is for
What this book covers
To get the most out of this book
Download the example code files
Conventions used
Get in touch
Reviews
What's New in AWS?
Improvements in existing services
Elastic Compute Cloud
Availability of FPGAs and GPUs
Simple Storage Service
Virtual Private Cloud
CloudWatch
Elastic Load Balancer
Introduction of newer services
Plan of attack!
Summary
Managing EC2 with Systems Manager
Introducing EC2 Systems Manager
Getting started with the SSM agent
Configuring IAM Roles and policies for SSM
Installing the SSM agent
Configuring the SSM agent to stream logs to CloudWatch
Introducing Run Command
Working with State Manager
Simplifying instance maintenance using System Manager Automation
Working with automation documents
Patching instances using automation
Triggering automation using CloudWatch schedules and events
Managing instance patches using patch baseline and compliance
Getting started with Inventory Management
Planning your next steps
Summary
Introducing Elastic Beanstalk and Elastic File System
Introducing Amazon Elastic Beanstalk
Concepts and terminologies
Getting started with Elastic Beanstalk
Creating the Dev environment
Working with the Elastic Beanstalk CLI
Understanding the environment dashboard
Cloning environments
Configuring the production environment
Introducing Amazon Elastic File System
How does it work?
Creating an Elastic File System
Extending EFS to Elastic Beanstalk
Planning your next steps
Summary
Securing Workloads Using AWS WAF
Introducing AWS Web Application Firewall
Concepts and terminologies
Getting started with WAF
Creating the web ACL
Creating the conditions
Creating rules
Assigning a WAF Web ACL to CloudFront distributions
Working with SQL injection and cross-site scripting conditions
Automating WAF Web ACL deployments using CloudFormation
Monitoring WAF using CloudWatch
Planning your next steps
Introduction to AWS Shield
Summary
Governing Your Environments Using AWS CloudTrail and AWS Config
Introducing AWS CloudTrail
Working with AWS CloudTrail
Creating your first CloudTrail Trail
Viewing and filtering captured CloudTrail Logs and Events
Modifying a CloudTrail Trail using the AWS CLI
Monitoring CloudTrail Logs using CloudWatch
Creating custom metric filters and alarms for monitoring CloudTrail Logs
Automating deployment of CloudWatch alarms for AWS CloudTrail
Analyzing CloudTrail Logs using Amazon Elasticsearch
Introducing AWS Config
Concepts and terminologies
Getting started with AWS Config
Creating custom config rules
Tips and best practices
Summary
Access Control Using AWS IAM and AWS Organizations
What's new with AWS IAM
Using the visual editor to create IAM policies
Testing IAM policies using the IAM Policy Simulator
Introducing AWS Organizations
Getting started with AWS Organizations
Planning your next steps
Summary
Transforming Application Development Using the AWS Code Suite
Understanding the AWS Code Suite
Getting Started with AWS CodeCommit
Working with branches, commits, and triggers
Introducing AWS CodeDeploy
Concepts and terminologies
Installing and configuring the CodeDeploy agent
Setting up the AppSpec file
Creating a CodeDeploy application and deployment group
Introducing AWS CodePipeline
Creating your own continuous delivery pipeline
Putting it all together
Planning your next steps
Summary
Messaging in the Cloud Using Amazon SNS and Amazon SQS
Understanding the AWS messaging services
Getting started with Amazon Simple Notification Service
Sending text messages using SNS
Using Amazon SNS as triggers
Monitoring Amazon SNS using Amazon CloudWatch metrics
Introducing Amazon Simple Queue Service
Creating your first queue
Creating a FIFO queue using the AWS CLI
Integrating Amazon SNS and Amazon SQS
Planning your next steps
Summary
Powering Analytics Using Amazon EMR and Amazon Redshift
Understanding the AWS analytics suite of services
Introducing Amazon EMR
Concepts and terminologies
Getting started with Amazon EMR
Connecting to your EMR cluster
Running a job on the cluster
Monitoring EMR clusters
Introducing Amazon Redshift
Getting started with Amazon Redshift
Connecting to your Redshift cluster
Working with Redshift databases and tables
Planning your next steps
Summary
Orchestrating Data using AWS Data Pipeline
Introducing AWS Data Pipeline
Getting started with AWS Data Pipeline
Working with data pipeline definition Files
Executing remote commands using AWS Data Pipeline
Backing up data using AWS Data Pipeline
Planning your next steps
Summary
Connecting the World with AWS IoT and AWS Greengrass
IoT – what is it?
Introducing the AWS IoT suite of services
Getting started with AWS IoT Core
Connecting a device to AWS IoT Core
Getting started with AWS IoT Device SDK
Working with IoT rules
Introducing AWS Greengrass
Connecting a device to Greengrass Core
Running Lambda functions on AWS Greengrass
Monitoring AWS IoT devices and services
Summary
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Leave a review - let other readers know what you think
Preface
Amazon Web Services has been the go-to cloud for customers and enterprises for a long time now. The cloud provider has evolved from just an Infrastructure as a Service provider to everything and anything as a service that helps in the development of applications, game development, IoT, big data analysis, customer engagement services, AR-VR, and much more! However, with so many services and products coming up each year, it tends to get difficult for beginners to know where and how exactly to start using these services.
This book is a one-stop shop where you can find all there is to getting started with AWS services, which includes EC2 Systems Manager, Elastic Beanstalk, EFS, CloudTrail, EMR, IoT, and a whole lot more! If you are a sysadmin or an architect or someone who just wants to learn and explore various aspects of administering AWS services, then this book is the right choice for you! Each chapter of this book is designed to help you understand the individual services' concepts and gain hands-on experience by practicing simple and easy-to-follow steps. The book also highlights some key best practices and recommendations that you ought to keep in mind when working with AWS.
Who this book is for
This book is intended for any and all IT professionals who wish to learn and implement AWS for their own environment and application hosting. Although no prior experience or knowledge is required, it will be beneficial for you to have basic Linux knowledge and some understanding of networking concepts and server virtualization.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, What's New in AWS?, contains a brief introduction to some of the key enhancements and announcements made to the existing line of AWS services and products.
Chapter 2, Managing EC2 with Systems Manager, provides a brief introduction to using EC2 Systems Manager to manage your fleet of EC2 instances. It also covers an in-depth look at how to work with SSM agents, Run Command, as well as other systems manager features, such as automation, patching, and inventory management.
Chapter 3, Introducing Elastic Beanstalk and Elastic File System, explains how to leverage both Elastic Beanstalk and the Elastic File Systems services to build and scale out web applications and deploy them with absolute ease.
Chapter 4, Securing Workloads Using AWS WAF, discusses some of the key aspects that you can leverage to provide added security for your web applications using AWS WAF and AWS Shield. The chapter also provides some keen insights into how you can protect your web applications against commonly occurring attacks such as cross-site scripting and SQL injections.
Chapter 5, Governing Your Environments Using AWS CloudTrail and AWS Config, introduces you to the concept and benefits provided by leveraging AWS CloudTrail and AWS Config. The chapter covers in-depth scenarios using which you can standardize governance and security for your AWS environments.
Chapter 6, Access Control Using AWS IAM and AWS Organizations, takes a look at some of the latest enhancements made to the AWS IAM service. It also walks you through how you can manage your AWS accounts with better efficiency and control using AWS organizations as a Service.
Chapter 7, Transforming Application Development Using the AWS Code Suite, covers an in-depth look at how you can leverage CodeCommit, CodeDeploy, and CodePipeline to design and build complete CICD pipelines for your applications.
Chapter 8, Messaging in the Cloud Using Amazon SNS and Amazon SQS, provides an in-depth look at how you can effectively develop modern cloud-ready, decoupled applications, and perform general housekeeping of your AWS accounts.
Chapter 9, Powering Analytics Using Amazon EMR and Amazon Redshift, provides practical knowledge and hands-on approach to process and a run large-scale analytics and data warehousing in the AWS Cloud.
Chapter 10, Orchestrating Data Using AWS Data Pipeline, covers how you can effectively orchestrate the movement of data from one AWS service to another using simple, reusable pipeline definitions.
Chapter 11, Connecting the World with AWS IoT and AWS Greengrass, provides a quick introduction to the AWS IoT Suite of services, along with hands-on guides on how you can connect, test, and monitor IoT devices with utmost ease.
To get the most out of this book
To start using this book, you will need the following software installed on your local desktop:
An SSH client such as PuTTY, a key generator such as PuTTYgen, and a file transferring tool such as WinSCP
Any modern web browser, preferably Mozilla Firefox
Download the example code files
You can download the example code files for this book from your account at www.packtpub.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit www.packtpub.com/support and register to have the files emailed directly to you.
You can download the code files by following these steps:
Log in or register at
www.packtpub.com
.
Select the
SUPPORT
tab.
Click on
Code Downloads & Errata
.
Enter the name of the book in the
Search
box and follow the onscreen instructions.
Once the file is downloaded, please make sure that you unzip or extract the folder using the latest version of:
WinRAR/7-Zip for Windows
Zipeg/iZip/UnRarX for Mac
7-Zip/PeaZip for Linux
The code bundle for the book is also hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/AWS-Administration-The-Definitive-Guide-Second-Edition. In case there's an update to the code, it will be updated on the existing GitHub repository.
We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!
Conventions used
There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.
CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "The document comprises of two primary sections: a Parameters section, which contains a list of actions to be performed by the document, followed by a mainSteps section that specifies the action, which in this case is the aws:configurePackage to be performed by the document. In this case, the document when invoked will ask the user to select either apache2, mysql-server, or php from the dropdown list followed by an optional version number of the software you select."
A block of code is set as follows:
{ "Effect": "Allow", "Action": [ "ec2messages:AcknowledgeMessage", "ec2messages:DeleteMessage", "ec2messages:FailMessage", "ec2messages:GetEndpoint", "ec2messages:GetMessages", "ec2messages:SendReply" ], "Resource": "*" },
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": [ "ec2messages:AcknowledgeMessage", "ec2messages:DeleteMessage", "ec2messages:FailMessage", "ec2messages:GetEndpoint", "ec2messages:GetMessages", "ec2messages:SendReply" ],
"Resource": "*"
},
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
# wget https://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads-windows/SSMAgent/latest/debian_amd64/amazon-ssm-agent.deb
Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "In the Create Role wizard, select the EC2 option from the AWS service role type, as shown in the following screenshot. Next, select the EC2 option as the use case for this activity and click on Next: Permissions button to continue."
Get in touch
Feedback from our readers is always welcome.
General feedback: Email [email protected] and mention the book title in the subject of your message. If you have questions about any aspect of this book, please email us at [email protected].
Errata: Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you have found a mistake in this book, we would be grateful if you would report this to us. Please visit www.packtpub.com/submit-errata, selecting your book, clicking on the Errata Submission Form link, and entering the details.
Piracy: If you come across any illegal copies of our works in any form on the Internet, we would be grateful if you would provide us with the location address or website name. Please contact us at [email protected] with a link to the material.
If you are interested in becoming an author: If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, please visit authors.packtpub.com.
Reviews
Please leave a review. Once you have read and used this book, why not leave a review on the site that you purchased it from? Potential readers can then see and use your unbiased opinion to make purchase decisions, we at Packt can understand what you think about our products, and our authors can see your feedback on their book. Thank you!
For more information about Packt, please visit packtpub.com.
What's New in AWS?
Having spent many years in the IT industry, you get to see a lot of new technologies, products, and platforms that start to evolve, gradually mature, and eventually be replaced by something that's faster and better! I guess in some ways, this concept applies to this book as well. When I first started out writing the first edition of this series in 2016, I felt that this would be the pinnacle of technology and nothing could be created to replace it! And now, here I am doing precisely the opposite! Writing this second edition is a just small testament that everything evolves with time! Just look at AWS, and you will see how much the platform has changed and grown, especially in the last couple of years!
I still remember the time when I first started exploring AWS way back in 2009, when it was the early days for the likes of EC2 and CloudFront, still adding new features to them, SimpleDB and VPC just starting to take shape, and so on; the thing that really amazes me is how far the platform has come today! With more than 50 different solutions and service offerings ranging from big data analytics, to serverless computing, to data warehousing and ETL solutions, digital workspaces and code development services, AWS has got it all! Which is one of the reasons why I have always been a huge fan of it! It's not only about revenue and the number of customers, but how well do you adapt and evolve to changing times and demands.
So here we are, back at it again! A new book with a lot of new things to learn and explore! But before we begin with the deep dives into some really interesting and powerful services, let's take this time to traverse a little way back in time and understand what has been happening in AWS over this past year, and how the services that we explored in the first edition are shaping up today!
In this chapter, we will be covering the following topics:
Improvements in existing AWS services.
A brief introduction to newer AWS services and what they are used for.
Plan of attack! How we will progress through the book.
Improvements in existing services
There have been quite a few improvements in the services that were covered back in the first edition of AWS Administration - The Definitive Guide. In this section, we will highlight a few of these essential improvements and understand their uses. To start off, let's look at some of the key enhancements made in EC2 over the past year or two.
Elastic Compute Cloud
Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is by far one of the oldest running services in AWS, and yet it still continues to evolve and add new features as the years progress. Some of the notable feature improvements and additions are mentioned here:
Introduction of the t2.xlarge and t2.2xlarge instances
: The
t2
workloads are a special type of workload, as they offer a low-cost burstable compute that is ideal for running general purpose applications that don't require the use of CPU all the time, such as web servers, application servers, LOB applications, development, to name a few. The
t2.xlarge
and
t2.2xlarge
instance types provide 16 GB of memory and 4 vCPU, and 32 GB of memory and 8 vCPU respectively.
Introduction of the I3 instance family
: Although EC2 provides a comprehensive set of instance families, there was a growing demand for a specialized storage-optimized instance family that was ideal for running workloads such as relational or NoSQL databases, analytical workloads, data warehousing, Elasticsearch applications, and so on. Enter I3 instances! I3 instances are run using non-volatile memory express (NVMe) based SSDs that are suited to provide extremely optimized high I/O operations. The maximum resource capacity provided is up to 64 vCPUs with 488 GB of memory, and 15.2 TB of locally attached SSD storage.
Availability of FPGAs and GPUs
One of the key use cases for customers adopting the public cloud has been the availability of high-end processing units that are required to run HPC applications. One such new instance type added last year was the F1 instance, which comes equipped with field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) that you can program to create custom hardware accelerations for your applications. Another awesome feature to be added to the EC2 instance family was the introduction of the Elastic GPUs concept. This allows you to easily provide graphics acceleration support to your applications at significantly lower costs but with greater performance levels. Elastic GPUs are ideal if you need a small amount of GPU for graphics acceleration, or have applications that could benefit from some GPU, but also require high amounts of compute, memory, or storage.
Simple Storage Service
Similar to EC2, Simple Storage Service (S3) has had its own share of new features and support added to it. Some of these are explained here:
S3 Object Tagging
: S3 Object Tagging is like any other tagging mechanism provided by AWS, used commonly for managing and controlling access to your S3 resources. The tags are simple key-value pairs that you can use for creating and associating IAM policies for your S3 resources, to set up S3 life cycle policies, and to
manage
transitions of objects between various storage classes.
S3 Inventory
: S3 Inventory was a special feature provided with the sole purpose of cataloging the various objects and providing that as a useable CSV file for further analysis and inventorying. Using S3 Inventory, you can now extract a list of all objects present in your bucket, along with its metadata, on a daily or weekly basis.
S3 Analytics
: A lot of work and effort has been put into S3 so that it is not only used just as another infinitely scalable storage. S3 Analytics provides end users with a medium for analyzing storage access patterns and defines the right set of storage class based on these analytical results. You can enable this feature by simply setting a storage class analysis policy, either on an object, prefix, or the entire bucket as well. Once enabled, the policy monitors the storage access patterns and provides daily visualizations of your storage usage in the AWS Management Console. You can even export these results to an S3 bucket for analyzing them using other business intelligence tools of your choice, such as Amazon QuickSight.
S3 CloudWatch metrics
: It has been a long time coming, but it is finally here! You can now leverage 13 new CloudWatch metrics specifically designed to work with your S3 buckets objects. You can receive one minute CloudWatch metrics, set CloudWatch alarms, and access CloudWatch dashboards to view real-time operations and the performance of your S3 resources, such as total bytes downloaded, number of 4xx HTTP response counts, and so on.
Brand new
dashboard
: Although the dashboards and structures of the AWS Management Console change from time to time, it is the new S3 dashboard that I'm really fond of. The object tagging and the storage analysis policy features are all now provided using the new S3 dashboard, along with other impressive and long-awaited features, such as searching for buckets using keywords and the ability to copy bucket properties from an existing bucket while creating new buckets, as depicted in the following screenshot:
Amazon S3 transfer acceleration
: This feature allows you to move large workloads across geographies into S3 at really fast speeds. It leverages Amazon CloudFront endpoints in conjunction with S3 to enable up to 300 times faster data uploads without having to worry about any firewall rules or upfront fees to pay.
Virtual Private Cloud
Similar to other services, Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) has seen quite a few functionalities added to it over the past years; a few important ones are highlighted here:
Support for IPv6
: With the exponential growth of the IT industry as well as the internet, it was only a matter of time before VPC too started support for IPv6. Today, IPv6 is extended and available across all AWS regions. It even works with services such as EC2 and S3. Enabling IPv6 for your applications and instances is an extremely easy process. All you need to do is enable the
IPv6 CIDR block
option, as depicted in the VPC creation wizard:
Each IPv6 enabled VPC comes with its own /56 address prefix, whereas the individual subnets created in this VPC support a /64 CIDR block.
DNS resolution for VPC Peering
: With DNS resolution enabled for your VPC peering, you can now resolve public DNS hostnames to private IP addresses when queried from any of your peered VPCs. This actually simplifies the DNS setup for your VPCs and enables the seamless extension of your network environments to the cloud.
VPC endpoints for DynamoDB
: Yet another amazing feature to be provided for VPCs later this year is the support for endpoints for your DynamoDB tables. Why is this so important all of a sudden? Well, for starters, you don't require internet gateways or NAT instances attached to your VPCs if you are leveraging the endpoints for DynamoDB. This essentially saves costs and makes the traffic between your application to the DB stay local to the AWS internal network, unlike previously where the traffic from your app would have to bypass the internet in order to reach your DynamoDB instance. Secondly, endpoints for DynamoDB virtually eliminate the need for maintaining complex firewall rules to secure your VPC. And thirdly, and most importantly, it's free!
CloudWatch
CloudWatch has undergone a lot of new and exciting changes and feature additions compared to what it originally provided as a service a few years back. Here's a quick look at some of its latest announcements:
CloudWatch events
: One of the most anticipated and useful features added to CloudWatch is CloudWatch events! Events are a way for you to respond to changes in your AWS environment in near real time. This is made possible with the use of event rules that you need to configure, along with a corresponding set of actionable steps that must be performed when that particular event is triggered. For example, designing a simple back-up or clean-up script to be invoked when an instance is powered off at the end of the day, and so on. You can, alternatively, schedule your event rules to be triggered at a particular interval of time during the day, week, month, or even year! Now that's really awesome!
High-resolution custom metrics
: We have all felt the need to monitor our applications and resources running on AWS at near real time, however, with the least amount of configurable monitoring interval set at 10 seconds, this was always going to be a challenge. But not now! With the introduction of the high-resolution custom metrics, you can now monitor your applications down to a 1-second resolution! The best part of all this is that there is no special difference between the configuration or use of a standard alarm and that of a high resolution one. Both alarms can perform the exact same functions, however, the latter is much faster than the other.
CloudWatch dashboard widgets
: A lot of users have had trouble adopting CloudWatch as their centralized monitoring solution due to its inability to create custom dashboards. But all that has now changed as CloudWatch today supports the creation of highly-customizable dashboards based on your application's needs. It also supports out-of-the box widgets in the form of the
number
widget, which provides a view of the latest data point of the monitored metric, such as the number of EC2 instances being monitored, or the
stacked graph
, which provides a handy visualization of individual metrics and their impact in totality.
Elastic Load Balancer
One of the most significant and useful additions to ELB over the past year has been the introduction of the Application Load Balancer. Unlike its predecessor, the ELB, the Application Load Balancer is a strict Layer 7 (application) load balancer designed to support content-based routing and applications that run on containers as well. The ALB is also designed to provide additional visibility of the health of the target EC2 instances as well as the containers. Ideally, such ALBs would be used to dynamically balance loads across a fleet of containers running scalable web and mobile applications.
This is just the tip of the iceberg compared to the vast plethora of services and functionality that AWS has added to its services in just a span of one year! Let's quickly glance through the various services that we will be covering in this book.
Introduction of newer services
The first edition of AWS Administration - The Definitive Guide covered a lot of the core AWS services, such as EC2, EBS, Auto Scaling, ELB, RDS, S3, and so on. In this edition, we will be exploring and learning things a bit differently by exploring a lot of the services and functionalities that work in conjunction with the core services:
EC2 Systems Manager
: EC2 Systems Manager is a service that basically provides a lot of add-on features for managing your compute infrastructure. Each compute entity that's managed by EC2 Systems Manager is called a
managed instance
and this can be either an EC2 instance or an on-premise machine! EC2 Systems Manager provides out-of-the-box capabilities to create and baseline patches for operating systems, automate the creation of AMIs, run configuration scripts, and much more!
Elastic Beanstalk
: Beanstalk is a powerful yet simple service designed for developers to easily deploy and scale their web applications. At the moment, Beanstalk supports web applications developed using Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, and Go. Developers simply design and upload their code to Beanstalk ,which automatically takes care of the application's load balancing, auto-scaling, monitoring, and so on. At the time of writing, Elastic Beanstalk supports the deployment of your apps using either Docker containers or even directly over EC2 instances, and the best part of using this service is that it's completely free! You only need to pay for the underlying AWS resources that you consume.
Elastic File System
: The simplest way to define
Elastic File System
, or
EFS
, is an NFS share on steroids! EFS provides simple and highly scalable file storage as a service designed to be used with your EC2 instances. You can have multiple EC2 instances attach themselves to a single EFS mount point which can provide a common data store for your applications and workloads.
WAF and Shield
: In this book, we will be exploring quite a few security and compliance providing services that provide an additional layer of security besides your standard VPC. Two such services we will learn about are WAF and Shield.
WAF
, or
Web Application Firewall
, is designed to safeguard your applications against web exploits that could potentially impact their availability and security maliciously. Using WAF you can create custom rules that safeguard your web applications against common attack patterns, such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and so on.
Similar to WAF, Shield is also a managed service that provides security against DDoS attacks that target your website or web application:
CloudTrail and Config
: CloudTrail is yet another service that we will learn about in the coming chapters. It is designed to log and monitor your AWS account and infrastructure activities. This service comes in really handy when you need to govern your AWS accounts against compliances, audits, and standards, and take necessary action to mitigate against them. Config, on the other hand, provides a very similar set of features, however, it specializes in assessing and auditing the configurations of your AWS resources. Both services are used synonymously to provide compliance and governance, which help in operational analysis, troubleshooting issues, and meeting security demands.
Cognito
: Cognito is an awesome service which simplifies the build and creation of sign-up pages for your web and even mobile applications. You also get options to integrate social identity providers, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon, using SAML identity solutions.
CodeCommit, CodeBuild, and CodeDeploy
: AWS provides a really rich set of tools and services for developers, which are designed to deliver software rapidly and securely. At the core of this are three services that we will be learning and exploring in this book, namely CodeCommit, CodeBuild, and CodeDeploy. As the names suggest, the services provide you with the ability to securely store and version control your application's source code, as well as to automatically build, test, and deploy your application to AWS or your on-premises environment.
SQS and SNS
:
SQS
, or
Simple Queue Service
, is a fully-managed queuing service provided by AWS, designed to decouple your microservices-based or distributed applications. You can even use SQS to send, store, and receive messages between different applications at high volumes without any infrastructure management as well.
SNS
is a
Simple Notification Service
used primarily as a pub/ sub messaging service or as a notification service. You can additionally use SNS to trigger custom events for other AWS services, such as EC2, S3, and CloudWatch.
EMR
:
Elastic MapReduce
is a managed
Hadoop as a Service
that provides a clustered platform on EC2 instances for running Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark frameworks. EMR is highly useful for crunching massive amounts of data as well as to transform and move large quantities of data from one AWS data source to another. EMR also provides a lot of flexibility and scalability to your workloads with the ability to resize your cluster depending on the amount of data being processed at a given point in time. It is also designed to integrate effortlessly with other AWS services, such as S3 for storing the data, CloudWatch for monitoring your cluster, CloudTrail to audit the requests made to your cluster, and so on.
Redshift:
Redshift is a petabyte scale, managed data warehousing service in the cloud. Similar to its counterpart, EMR, Redshift also works on the concept of clustered EC2 instances on which you upload large datasets and run your analytical queries.
Data Pipeline
: Data Pipeline is a managed service that provides end users with an ability to process and move datasets from one AWS service to another as well as from on-premise datastores into AWS storage services, such as RDS, S3, DynamoDB, and even EMR! You can schedule data migration jobs, track dependencies and errors, and even write and create preconditions and activities that define what actions Data Pipeline has to take against the data, such as run it through an EMR cluster, perform a SQL query over it, and so on.
IoT and Greengrass:
AWS IoT and Greengrass are two really amazing services that are designed to collect and aggregate various device sensor data and stream that data into the AWS cloud for processing and analysis. AWS IoT provides a scalable and secure platform, using which you can connect billions of sensor devices to the cloud or other AWS services and leverage the same for gathering, processing, and analyzing the data without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure or scalability needs. Greengrass is an extension of the AWS IoT platform and essentially provides a mechanism that allows you to run and manage executions of data pre-processing jobs directly on the sensor devices.
With these services out of the way, let's quickly look at how we plan to move forward with the rest of the chapters in this book!
Plan of attack!
Just as in the previous edition, we will be leveraging a simple plan of attack even for this book! By plan of attack, I just mean how I've planned to structure the contents of the chapters and tie them all together! For the most part of the book, we will be focusing on a simple use case, such as hosting a WordPress application on AWS with the use of some really cool services in the form of Elastic Beanstalk, Elastic File System, WAF and Shield, EMR, and Redshift, and much more! Here's a simple depiction of what we will aim to achieve by the end of the book:
Here is the brief outline of how the next few chapters are spread out:
We will begin the setup of our WordPress by first hosting it manually over an EC2 instance as a standalone installation and then learning how to manage those instances with the help of the EC2 Systems Manager utility.
With this completed, we shall then use a combination of Elastic Beanstalk and Elastic File System to host the same WordPress with some more control over high availability and scalability, all the while learning the internals of both these services and use cases as we go along.
Now that the site is hosted, we will create an added layer of security over it by leveraging both WAF and Shield as well as enabling governance in the form of CloudTrail and Config.
Later we will also see how to leverage the code development services provided by AWS, namely CodeCommit, CodeBuild, and CodeDeploy, to create an effective CICD pipeline to push updates to our site.
Finally, we will also be executing some essential log analysis over the site using Elastic MapReduce and Redshift, and learn how to back up our site's data using Data Pipeline.
But that's not all! As mentioned earlier, we will also be learning about a few additional services in the form of IAM and AWS Cognito services for authentication and security, as well as AWS IoT and AWS Greengrass.
Summary
Let's quickly summarize what we have learned so far in this chapter! We started off by quickly recapping some of the key features and additions included in the core AWS services over the past few years. Remember, however, that this is in no way a complete list! There's a lot more to cover and learn, but for the sake of simplicity, I'll leave that part for self-reading. Later, we also glanced through and understood the services that are going to be included in this particular series of AWS Administration - The Definitive Guide. Finally, we topped it all off with a look at how we are going to structure the rest of the chapters by leveraging a simple WordPress application as a focal point for our deployments and use cases!
In the next chapter, we will kick things off by first deploying our simple WordPress application on an EC2 instance and then leverage EC2 Systems Manager along with its peripheral services for managing and tracking an EC2 instance's system configurations, so stick around! We are just getting started!
Managing EC2 with Systems Manager
EC2 instances have long been a core service provided by AWS and EC2 still continues to evolve with newer sets of features and instance types added every year. One such really awesome service added during AWS re:Invent 2016 was the EC2 Systems Manager!
In this chapter, we will be learning a lot about the EC2 Systems Manager and its associated sub-services; namely:
Run Command
: Service that allows you to execute commands directly on an EC2 Systems Manager enabled EC2 instance
State Manager
: Allows you to specify a desired state for an EC2 Systems Manager enabled EC2 instance
Patch management
: Provides administrators with the ability to manage the deployment of patches over EC2 instances
Automations
: Allows administrators to automate the deployment of certain tasks
Inventory
: Service that collects and manages a list of software inventory from your managed EC2 instances
Sound exciting? Then what are we waiting for? Let's get started!
Introducing EC2 Systems Manager
As the name suggests, EC2 Systems Manager is a management service that provides administrators and end users with the ability to perform a rich set of tasks on their EC2 instance fleet such as periodically patching the instances with a predefined set of baseline patches, tracking the instances' configurational state, and ensuring that the instance stays compliant with a state template, runs scripts and commands over your instance fleet with a single utility, and much, much more! The EC2 Systems Manager is also specifically designed to help administrators manage hybrid computing environments, all from the comfort and ease of the EC2 Systems Manager dashboard. This makes it super efficient and cost effective as it doesn't require a specialized set of software or third-party services, which cost a fortune, to manage your hybrid environments!
But how does AWS achieve all of this in the first place? Well, it all begins with the concept of managed instances. A managed instance is a special EC2 instance that is governed and managed by the EC2 Systems Manager service. Each managed instance contains a Systems Manager (SSM) agent that is responsible for communicating and configuring the instance state back to the Systems Manager utility. Windows Server 2003–2012 R2 AMIs, Windows Server 2003–2012 R2 AMIs will automatically have the SSM agent installed. For Linux instances, however, the SSM agent is not installed by default. Let's quickly look at how to install this agent and set up our first Dev instance in AWS as a managed instance.
Getting started with the SSM agent
In this section, we are going to install and configure an SSM agent on a new Linux instance, which we shall call as a Dev instance, and then verify it's working by streaming the agent's log files to Amazon CloudWatch Logs. So let's get busy!
Configuring IAM Roles and policies for SSM
First, we need to create and configure IAM Roles for our EC2 Systems Manager to process and execute commands over our EC2 instances. You can either use the Systems Manager's managed policies or alternatively create your own custom roles with specific permissions. For this part, we will be creating a custom role and policy.
To get started, we first create a custom IAM policy for Systems Manager managed instances:
Log in to your AWS account and select the
IAM
option from the main dashboard, or alternatively, open the IAM console at
https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam/
.
Next, from the navigation pane, select
Policies
. This will bring up a list of existing policies currently provided and supported by AWS out of the box.
Type
SSM
in the
Policy Filter
to view the list of policies currently provided for SSM.
Select the
AmazonEC2RoleforSSM
policy and copy its contents to form a new policy document. Here is a snippet of the policy document for your reference:
{ "Version": "2012-10-17", "Statement": [ { "Effect": "Allow", "Action": [ "ssm:DescribeAssociation", ..... SSM actions list ], "Resource": "*" }, { "Effect": "Allow", "Action": [ "ec2messages:AcknowledgeMessage", "ec2messages:DeleteMessage", "ec2messages:FailMessage", "ec2messages:GetEndpoint", "ec2messages:GetMessages", "ec2messages:SendReply" ], "Resource": "*" }, { "Effect": "Allow", "Action": [ "cloudwatch:PutMetricData" ], "Resource": "*" }, { "Effect": "Allow", "Action": [ "ec2:DescribeInstanceStatus" ], "Resource": "*" }, { "Effect": "Allow", "Action": [ "ds:CreateComputer", "ds:DescribeDirectories" ], "Resource": "*" }, { "Effect": "Allow", "Action": [ "logs:CreateLogGroup", "logs:CreateLogStream", ..... CloudWatch Log actions ], "Resource": "*" }, { "Effect": "Allow", "Action": [ "s3:PutObject", "s3:GetObject", "s3:AbortMultipartUpload", "s3:ListMultipartUploadParts", "s3:ListBucketMultipartUploads" ], "Resource": "*" }, { "Effect": "Allow", "Action": [ "s3:ListBucket" ], "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::amazon-ssm-packages-*" } ] }
Once the policy is copied, go back to the
Policies
dashboard and click on the
Create policy
option. In the
Create policy
wizard, select the
Create Your Own Policy
option.
Provide a suitable
Policy Name
and paste the copied contents of the
AmazonEC2RoleforSSM
policy into the
Policy Document
section. You can now tweak the policy as per your requirements, but once completed, remember to select the
Validate Policy
option to ensure the policy is semantically correct.
Once completed, select
Create Policy
to complete the process.
With this step completed, you now have a custom IAM policy for System Manager managed instances.
The next important policy that we need to create is the custom IAM user policy for our Systems Manager. This policy will essentially scope out which particular user can view the System Manager documents as well as perform actions on the selected managed instances using the System Manager's APIs:
Once again, log in to your AWS IAM dashboard and select the
Policies
option as performed in the earlier steps.
Type
SSM
again in the
Policy Filter
and select the
AmazonSSMFullAccess
policy. Copy its contents and create a custom SSM access policy by pasting the following snippet in the new policy's
Policy Document
section:
{ "Version": "2012-10-17", "Statement": [ { "Effect": "Allow", "Action": [ "cloudwatch:PutMetricData", "ds:CreateComputer", "ds:DescribeDirectories", "ec2:DescribeInstanceStatus", "logs:*", "ssm:*", "ec2messages:*" ], "Resource": "*" } ] }
Remember to
validate
