Simplifying Hybrid Cloud Adoption with AWS E-Book

Frankie Costa Negro

• Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 245

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

The hybrid edge specialty is often misunderstood because it began with an on-premises-focused view encompassing everything not running inside the traditional data center. If you too have workloads that need to live on premises and need a solution to bridge the gap between both worlds, this book will show you how AWS Outposts allows workloads to leverage the benefits of the cloud running on top of AWS technology.
In this book, you’ll learn what the Edge space is, the capabilities to look for when selecting a solution to operate in this realm, and how AWS Outposts delivers. The use cases for Outposts are thoroughly explained and the physical characteristics are detailed alongside the service logical constructs and facility requirements. You’ll gain a comprehensive understanding of the sales process—from order placement to rack delivery to your location. As you advance, you’ll explore how AWS Outposts works in real life with step-by-step examples using AWS CLI and AWS Console before concluding your journey with an extensive overview of security and business continuity for maximizing the value delivered by the product.
By the end of this book, you’ll be able to create compelling hybrid architectures, solve complex use cases for hybrid scenarios, and get ready for your way forward with the help of expert guidance.

Leseprobe

Simplifying Hybrid Cloud Adoption with AWS

Realize edge computing and build compelling hybrid solutions on premises with AWS Outposts

Frankie Costa Negro

BIRMINGHAM—MUMBAI

Simplifying Hybrid Cloud Adoption with AWS

Copyright © 2022 Packt Publishing

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To all AWS friends and the inspiring leaders Andy Jassy, Werner Vogels, James Hamilton, Jeff Barr, Peter DeSantis, and Anthony Liguori.

Contributors

About the author

Frankie Costa Negro is a technology wanderer. He began in IT as a FoxPro / dBase developer in 1994. Quite a lot has happened since then: heroic days learning Microsoft Office Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). Creating macros with Microsoft Excel 5.0, and transitioning to Visual Basic 3.0. His developer career ended with Visual Basic 6.0 when he was invited to be a sysadmin in 1997. A lot of water has gone under the bridge and his on-premises stint ended in 2018 with an invitation to join AWS as a Cloud Support Engineer. Since then, it has all been hard work while having fun and making history. He came full circle by joining the AWS Outposts team to flex his on-premises muscles once again. When he is not working for AWS, he is working accompanied by music.

I want to thank my wonderful wife and soulmate, Claudia, for the relentless cheering-on and support that fueled my will to persevere throughout this journey. Heartfelt gratitude to the whole Packt editing team for being the North Star for this first-time book author. I want to acknowledge my beloved daughter, Giovanna, my inspiration for fulfilling the famous quote that tells us three things every human being should do during their time on Earth: “Plant a tree, have a child, and write a book.” Finally, I acknowledge each and every person that meets me with a smile and affection: you make me believe there is meaning and hope in this life so that it is worth living.

About the reviewer

Harsha Sanku is a Senior Partner Solutions Architect with AWS specializing in VMware Cloud on AWS, AWS Outposts, and AWS Networking. He has worked with customers and strategic partners, helping them design and build secure, resilient, and scalable environments using hybrid cloud services that deliver a consistent experience from the cloud to on-premises and at the edge. He also works with various partner engineering and service teams to build roadmaps and drive service enhancements. He has been working in the IT industry in multiple roles since 2006.

Table of Contents

Contributorsiv

Prefacexi

Part 1: Understanding AWS Outposts – What It Is, Its Components, and How It Works

1

An Introduction to AWS Outposts3

Defining hybrid, edge, and rugged edge IT spaces3

What is AWS Outposts?7

Hybrid architecture tenets11

Use cases for AWS Outposts17

Customer problems18

Customer opportunities21

Summary24

2

AWS Outposts Anatomy25

Structural elements – rack and power25

Rack27

Power30

Communications elements – networking33

Networking resources36

Capabilities – services and features46

Compute and storage47

Containers49

Databases51

S353

Connectivity elements – cables and connectors56

Summary59

3

Pricing, Ordering, and Installation61

AWS Outposts pricing options61

Pricing for services running on Outposts68

Placing an order71

Order fulfillment and installation process90

Pre-sales91

Sizing and pricing92

Order submission92

Site validation92

Order approval93

Delivery and installation93

Activation93

Summary94

Part 2: Security, Monitoring, and Maintenance

4

Operations and Working with Outposts Resources97

Working with instances97

Outposts networking design example101

Outposts instance launch example121

Working with local gateways133

Local gateway structure134

Local gateway route table135

Working with shared resources142

Summary148

5

Security Aspects in Outposts149

Data protection149

IAM in Outposts153

Using service-linked roles155

The physical security of Outposts162

Outposts resilience165

Compliance and certifications169

Summary170

6

Monitoring Outposts171

Monitoring with CloudWatch171

CloudWatch in action – alarms172

CloudWatch in action – dashboards176

CloudWatch visualizations on the AWS Outposts service page181

Logging with CloudTrail189

Query CloudTrail logs with Amazon Athena194

Summary204

Part 3: Maintenance, Architecture References, and Additional Information

7

Outposts Maintenance207

Hardware and software maintenance207

Network troubleshooting210

Instability or failure of your customer’s device211

Instability of your link aggregation (LAG)211

Misconfiguration of your customer’s device211

Faulty cables or transceivers212

Problems with ISPs and WAN providers212

Summary213

8

Architecture References215

How to find resources on the Outposts product page215

How to find resources in the AWS Architecture Center217

Relevant blogs and white papers on AWS websites219

Summary221

Index223

Other Books You May Enjoy232

Preface

AWS Outposts is the next wave in technology, bringing cloud infrastructure to customer premises. Understanding how to leverage this product to address hybrid scenarios is key to unleashing the full potential of the service and paving the way for your cloud journey. This book provides extensive coverage of everything Outposts, from zero to hero. You will begin your journey learning about the concepts of Hybrid Edge, transitioning to understand what AWS Outposts is and how it fits in this space alongside its common use cases. Next, you will have a tour that unveils its components, connections, and capabilities. With this in-depth knowledge, you will discover the processes and steps involved in having Outposts delivered and ready to use. Then, it is finally time to see your Outposts rack in action and leverage AWS services running in the rack. Security is a fundamental discipline and you will get detailed explanations about the security features in Outposts and thoroughly understand how to monitor and maintain Outposts. Your journey will conclude with a roadmap to raise your Outposts knowledge to a professional level, becoming a true Outposts hero!

Who this book is for

This book is intended for data center architects interested in understanding, designing, architecting, and building solutions with AWS Outposts, leveraging the product’s capabilities and best practices. DevOps professionals will understand how to build compelling hybrid solutions and applications using the same tools and technologies available in AWS regions. Business and project managers working on projects with AWS Outposts will also benefit from this book at a higher level, without the need to get into very technical details.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Introduction to AWS Outposts, opens with an elaboration of the section or area called the Edge in the IT realm because that is typically where Outposts lives, then transitions to cover what Outposts is, exploring some of its key concepts and terminology, wrapping up with some valid use cases this product is best suited for.

Chapter 2, AWS Outposts Anatomy, pops the hood to show Outposts components, how they interact with each other as well as with the environment and hooks within the facility where Outposts lives, how it operates with the underlying networks, and how it exposes its resources. Subsequently, we talk about the AWS services that can be leveraged in Outposts and how it connects to an AWS Region.

Chapter 3, Pricing, Ordering, and Installation, walks you through the ordering process step by step and talks about configuration options, pricing, and what happens after an order is completed so you can finally get your Outposts rack delivered to your facility.

Chapter 4, Operations and Working with Outposts Resources, talks about the setup procedure and some requirements. Finally, let’s start the Outposts engine and shows how to effectively use the product and begin to use the building blocks and the capabilities of AWS services it is capable of running to craft your hybrid application or use case.

Chapter 5, Security Aspects in Outposts, leverages the breadth and depth of AWS security services and capabilities to meet the most stringent security requirements. As it takes AWS technology outside the confines of AWS regions, controls and safeguards were added to the product and the Shared Security Model was changed a bit to assign an extra layer of responsibility to the customer.

Chapter 6, Monitoring Outposts, focuses on the metrics and visibility you can get from Outposts. To understand what is going on inside your system you need to translate collected data into information so you can take actions to control undesired events and behaviors. Furthermore, you can use that information to improve your architecture and operations.

Chapter 7, Outposts Maintenance, describes the shared responsibility model, a security and compliance framework that outlines the responsibilities of AWS and the customer. AWS is responsible for the hardware and software that runs AWS services and that includes maintenance tasks on AWS Outposts. These activities are highlighted alongside useful hints on how to troubleshoot connectivity issues.

Chapter 8, Architecture References, concludes our journey with cornerstone information about how to best leverage the product architecture to enable you to create compelling hybrid solutions using AWS Outposts.

To get the most out of this book

This book assumes that technical professionals possess strong foundations in data center technologies, servers, networking, and storage architectures and concepts and knowledge at the AWS Architect Associate Certification level. As for business professionals, a high-level understanding of technical terms and the building blocks of an IT infrastructure is assumed.

Software/hardware covered in the book

Operating system requirements

AWS CLI

Linux

AWS CloudShell

Windows

If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or access the code from the book’s GitHub repository (a link is available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.

Check the GitHub repository to find a collection of URLs to take your knowledge about Outposts to the professional level.

Download the example code files

You can download the example code files for this book from GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Simplifying-Hybrid-Cloud-Adoption-with-AWS. If there’s an update to the code, it will be updated in the 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!

Download the color images

We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots and diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://packt.link/amQG4.

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

Code in text: 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: “To create the remaining two subnets for this CIDR block, repeat the command adjusting the --availability-zone-id parameter accordingly, and also make note of the new subnet IDs.”

A block of code is set as follows:

{ “LocalGateways”: [ { “LocalGatewayId”: “lgw-0cdc67d1ae6c75ff8”, “OutpostArn”: “arn:aws:outposts:us-west-2:123456789012:outpost/op-8b286039iedad23e0”, “OwnerId”: “123456789012”, “State”: “available”, “Tags”: [] } ] }

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

aws ec2 describe-local-gateway-virtual-interface-groups \ --local-gateway-virtual-interface-group-ids “lgw-vif-grp-033d2b33464749f3a” \ --region “us-west-2”;

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see on screen. For instance, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in bold. Here is an example: “Select System info from the Administration panel.”

Tips or important notes

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Preface

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Part 1: Understanding AWS Outposts – What It Is, Its Components, and How It Works

This part sets the stage for the next parts of the book. You will understand what AWS Outposts is, the tenets that drive the product design and engineering, and valid product use cases. Furthermore, it dives deep into the innards of the product and its interactions with the infrastructure it is built upon, closing with the price perspective, how to order an Outposts rack, and what happens before it is finally activated at the operating site.

This part has the following chapters:

Chapter 1, An Introduction to AWS OutpostsChapter 2, AWS Outposts AnatomyChapter 3, Pricing, Ordering, and Installation

1

An Introduction to AWS Outposts

After prevailing over the initial hype cycle, the cloud has truly evolved as the de facto platform of choice to run IT services, by overcoming what seemed to be an insurmountable gap between customer premises and the cloud. There have been several attempts to bridge both these worlds.

The term hybrid was initially coined as a reference to solutions that purported to operate as a cloud would in the customer data center. Ever since then, several of these kinds of denominations in the Information Technology realm have evolved and consolidated into what is now referred to as the edge. Amazon Web Services (AWS) now delivers managed cloud infrastructure in the form of AWS Outposts, which lives in the very same edge.

This chapter explores the concept of the edge and then transitions into exploring the key concepts and terminology of AWS Outposts. Finally, we will wrap up with the use cases for this product.

In this chapter, you will cover the following:

Identifying the edge space in the Information Technology domainUnderstanding the purpose of AWS OutpostsIdentifying how Outposts fits into the edge spaceUnderstanding what business problems Outposts solves

Defining hybrid, edge, and rugged edge IT spaces

Amazon as an enterprise has rapidly evolved from the challenges it endured that could neither have been addressed technically nor economically at the time when running large-scale applications. This fact may have led us to conclude that AWS was unlikely to develop a product that would resemble a traditional server rack you could find in any regular data center.

As with any market or industry, things change. New technologies arise, paradigms shift, and new trends pose new challenges and require new solutions. It was no different from the way enterprises consume corporate IT services. In the past couple of years, the hybrid phenomenon gained a lot of momentum to become one of the preferred ways for enterprises to run their business.

This is not strange by any means. You have the start-up sector, which is cloud-native and certainly does not see any reason to have a physical infrastructure of its own. Start-up companies only need a solid connection to the internet and personal equipment to carry out the development work and the administrative work with cloud providers.

At the other end of the spectrum, we had companies over the past few decades doing IT the traditional way, operating fully on-premises. But in recent years, the market has developed the perception that it does not need to be one way or the other.

Back then, your option to run IT infrastructure outside your own local data center relied on offerings from third-party specialized data center providers. Offerings such as hosting, location, and co-location were extremely popular at the time, and are still available today. If you could order a good leased line to connect your site(s) with the provider’s site, any of the options would be available to you.

At best, you could have one of these providers supplying and managing all the necessary equipment to run your business while leveraging the OPEX financial model. Your IT team would take care of services and Line-Of-Business (LOB) applications and you would be in business. For some companies, the CAPEX model made sense as purchased equipment became assets for the company and added value to the balance sheets.

Times change and the advent of the cloud challenged the constraints and limitations of traditional data centers. Andrew Jassy, currently the president and CEO of Amazon, in an interview for the site TechCrunch (https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/02/andy-jassys-brief-history-of-the-genesis-of-aws/), described how AWS was conceived to be the Operating System for the internet at its inception, designed to reliably run applications and services at massive scale.

When AWS came to life in 2006, it wasn’t too clear that it would become what it is today. From humble beginnings with no clear ambition and marketing to turning into a cloud behemoth just 15 years later, AWS and the cloud were just yet another technology trend that remained to prove reliable and solid. The early adopters pioneered the new cloud paradigm and got their feet wet with infrastructure and services that existed beyond their reach when they could not even schedule a visit to the data center.

Adopting cloud services was an exercise of a dual IT landscape design. Either one given service lived on-premises or lived in the cloud. The connection between the two was basically to exchange data for migration or backup and, eventually, very simple interaction between systems with multiple components. It was difficult to consider a three-tier architecture where one of the tiers would sit in the cloud with the other on-premises. Internet bandwidth was scarce, connections were not strongly reliable, and you often had to resort to VPNs for security because it was challenging to procure dedicated links to directly connect with cloud providers at the time.

As the cloud trend reached critical mass and established itself as a valid path, businesses faced a new reality: the cloud had to be considered within their technology plans and a thorough assessment of the IT landscape was necessary to devise a strategy that could somehow encompass cloud offerings and to a serious extent. A vague statement about the cloud just being hype was no longer acceptable to business owners – it was here to stay.

This new way of consuming corporate IT services was dubbed hybrid cloud and described as a combination of cloud services running alongside the traditional on-premises data center solutions. Not surprisingly, the point of view of this model was oriented from the data center out into the outside world, stretching toward the cloud, because it was primarily articulated by on-premises infrastructure providers whose vision centered around the traditional model.

The possibility of a business going all in with the cloud while shutting down all traditional data centers was somewhat far-fetched, but it was delineated as a real alternative. While it is clear that not all workloads will be a fit for the cloud and some may remain on-premises, a significant shift of IT infrastructure to the cloud can realistically be envisioned.

Further developments in this trend revealed that one piece of the puzzle was missing. If considered as a binary choice, an on-premises data center versus the cloud, any move could be a significant risk because there was no middle ground. IT teams were facing an all-or-nothing situation where systems with multiple components would have to be moved as a whole, likely in one go.

Evaluating how a system would perform when running on the cloud was complex because tests had to be carried out in terms of production size and capacity without close contact with all other surrounding systems and services. Even with extensible tests, a cutover date was an event of high significance, full of anxiety, and likely to have a long maintenance window. Clearly, an intermediary infrastructure bridging both worlds would be beneficial.

Initial attempts to fill this gap were made by traditional software providers, offering solutions to be run on-premises that used the type of technologies and solutions offered by cloud providers. This was the private cloud – one attempt to bring the cloud operational model to customer on-premises data centers. Running on their own infrastructure at their data centers or co-location sites, the promise was to leverage cloud-like services and technologies at your facility or closer to you.

It was a good approach and makes good sense. IT teams can become familiar with cloud technologies and how system operations are carried out in the cloud while relatively comfortable at home with their own equipment, learning at their own pace. As IT professionals became familiar with the cloud model, the transition to a cloud provider could be facilitated as the value and challenges became clearer.

Even with a good portion of the market leveraging the private cloud offering, there was still the inescapable fact that on-premises, you could not leverage the cloud-specific services and technologies. Moreover, you would never benefit from the scalability and economies of scale offered by cloud providers. It was you running cloud-like services and still managing the necessary infrastructure.

Cloud adoption has gained significant momentum in recent years and we can see now how start-up companies are said to be born in the cloud or cloud natives. These businesses would have never considered creating their products and applications using the on-premises infrastructure. Such offerings would not be possible if they were conceived within the limitations and paradigms of traditional technologies.

Systems have become increasingly complex, made up of many moving parts as opposed to the monolithic approach of yesterday. Technologies favored distributed systems and highly specialized and smaller microservices. This movement highly favored the appeal of the cloud, built on top of pay-per-use, faster innovation, elasticity, and scale. For more information, refer to this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMJ75k9X5_8), The Six Main Benefits of Cloud Computing.

Fast forward to today and considering the latest world developments, the cloud has completely solidified its position and, to be fair, has exploded in adoption, which was significantly accelerated because of the challenges imposed by recent events such as the pandemic. The cloud model was battle-tested and made it through, to the point that it became the de facto standard model to be considered the foundation of technology.

While the future of the cloud seems to be clear skies, there is another fact that still holds: the vast majority of IT spending is still on traditional infrastructure and data centers. While this seems to be a wonderful opportunity to thrive in a market where the largest chunk of business is yet to be conquered, it also means that the missing key piece to act as the catalyst for the widespread adoption of the cloud is more crucial than ever.

As the next step toward blurring the boundaries between the cloud and the so-called physical world, the concept of a hybrid has been redefined. Hybrid is considered to be this enabler, the indistinguishable middle ground where on-premises and the cloud live together in a harmonic symbiosis where both parties benefit from each other. To amplify that notion, the term edge was added to the vernacular.

What we are now seeing is the original hybrid concept in reverse. Now, it originates in the cloud and branches out to the world in the form of edge nodes, where any given data center is considered to be one of these nodes. Effectively, the cloud aims to be everywhere, encompassing all kinds of businesses and places, powered by the recent advancements in high-speed wireless connectivity through 5G networks and IoT devices and sensors.

To make it clearer, an edge node is considered to be anywhere you could run some form of computing, be it large, small, or tiny. Naturally, a family house, a hospital, a restaurant, a crop field, an underground mine, and a cargo ship are significantly different places in nature. Suitability to accommodate electronic components and connectivity conditions change radically and the mileage of the IT equipment running will vary.

To describe these components better when deployed in harmful and aggressive environments, this space is conceptualized as the rugged edge, where equipment must withstand harsh usage conditions and must incorporate design characteristics and features that allow prolonged, normal operation under those circumstances. Equipment built for this purpose boasts specs that allow for severe thermal, mechanical, and environmental conditions.

Today, cloud companies are challenging themselves to create technologies that will propel the ultra-connected world where technology is pervasive, data is collected massively everywhere, and information is nearly real-time. Hybrid solutions play a fundamental role in this game, paving the way for cloud providers to extend all over the world and become the infrastructure, not one infrastructure.

What is AWS Outposts?

For years, AWS was clear on its messaging that customers should stop spending money on undifferentiated heavy lifting. This is AWS verbatim, as can be seen in the design principles for the Cost Optimization pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/framework/cost-dp.html). As it says, racking, stacking, and powering servers fall into this category, with customers advised to explore managed services to focus on business objectives rather than IT infrastructure.

From that statement, it would be reasonable to conclude that AWS would hardly give customers an offering that could resemble the dreaded kind of equipment that needs power, racking, and stacking. The early strides of AWS bringing physical equipment to customers were in the form of the AWS Snow family: AWS Snowball Edge devices and their variants (computing, data transfer, and storage).

It does sport the title of being the first product that could run AWS compute technology on customer premises, being able to deliver compute using specific Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance types and the AWS Lambda function, locally powered by AWS IoT Greengrass functions. Despite this fact, it was advertised as a migration device that enabled customers to move large local datasets to and from the cloud, supporting independent local workloads in remote locations.

In addition, Snowball Edge devices can be clustered together and locally grow or shrink storage and compute jobs on demand. AWS Snowball Edge supports a subset of Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) APIs for data transfer. Being able to create users and generate AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) keys locally, it can run in disconnected environments and has Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) options.

Launched in 2015, the first generation was called AWS Snowball and did not have compute capabilities, which would appear in 2016 when the product was rebranded as Snowball Edge. Today, AWS Snowball refers to the name of the overall service. The specs are impressive, with 100 GB network options and the ability to cluster up to 400 TB of S3 compatible storage. SBE-C instances are no less impressive, featuring 52 vCPUs and 208 GB of memory.

AWS invested a great deal to make the cloud not only appealing but also accessible. Remove that scary thought of having to change something drastically and radically, that awful sensation of having to rebuild the IT infrastructure on top of a completely different platform. AWS even gave various customers a soft landing and easy path to AWS when they announced (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-vmware-cloud-on-aws/) their joint work with VMware in 2016 to bring its capabilities to the cloud, which debuted in 2017 (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/vmware-cloud-on-aws-now-available/).

With these capabilities and Edge