A Brief Overview of AWS

Amazon Web Services provides on-demand cloud computing platforms for individuals and companies. Here is a basic overview of some of the possible services and terms involved with AWS:

Elastic IPs

  • Work well for emergencies
  • Instead of a different IP for each different server, there’s an IP for the account that can be rerouted for servers

Elastic Load Balancing

  • Component for balancing network traffic
  • Scales request handling to meet traffic demands
  • Supports HTTP, HTTPS, and TCP traffic
  • Supports health checks
  • Automatically scales based on demands placed on it
  • Single CNAME for DNS configuration

CloudWatch

  • Allows to monitor resources automatically
  • Watches resources, SPU, Disk i/o
  • Network traffic, alarms, custom metrics

Optional Detailed Monitoring

  • Higher frequency intervals of data capturing
  • More pre-defined metrics
  • Monitor aggregate metrics across similar resources

Elastic Block Storage

  • Volumes up to 1TB
  • Attach multiple volumes to a single instance
  • Specify I/O performance
  • Format with a file system, use like any other block device
  • EBS snapshots
  • Lazy loading of data to new volumes

Relational Database Service

  • Specify performance size
  • Can monitor the health with CloudWatch
  • Updates applied for you
  • Automatic backups
  • High availability/scalability/fault tolerance

Bootstrapping

  • The process to get an application up and running on an EC2 instance, or other AWS services
  • Bootstrapping tools – running custom scripts to configure settings, start services, apply updates
  • AWS give access to the instance metadata
  • Bootstrapping tools: Cloud-Init (Linux), EC2Config (Windows)

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