Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud and is often the starting point for your first week using AWS. This session will introduce these concepts, along with the fundamentals of EC2, by employing an agile approach that is made possible by the cloud. Attendees will experience the reality of what a first week on EC2 looks like from the perspective of someone deploying an actual application on EC2. You will follow them as they progress from deploying their entire application from an EC2 AMI on day 1 to more advanced features and patterns available in EC2 by day 5. Throughout the process we will identify cloud best practices that can be applied to your first week on EC2 and beyond.

1. Your First Week on Amazon EC2
Dhruv Parpia
Solution Architect ASEAN, AWS
July18, 2013

2. Questions for Your First Week on Amazon EC2
• What is Amazon EC2?
• Where do I start with EC2?
– What are the components of EC2?
– What are the big picture architecture cloud patterns?
– What other Amazon Web Services should I use?
• How do I map my existing infrastructure architecture to EC2?
– How do I configure my environment for high availability?
– How do manage my environment in the cloud?
– How do I monitor my environment in the cloud?

3. An Approach to Your First Week on Amazon EC2
• Leverage what you already know about web architectures
• Understand enough to get started with EC2
• Take an iterative approach
– Refactor and evolve
– Pay for what you use
• Understand and apply cloud best practices
– Capacity on demand
– Elasticity
– Design for failure
– Infrastructure automation

4. Day 1 – Identify and Deploy Application on EC2
Region
Availability Zone
Linux
Apache
Ruby
MySQL
Source Protocol Port
0.0.0.0/0 HTTP 80
148.20.57.0/24 SSH 22

5. Day 1 – Launching Your First EC2 Instance
1. Login to the AWS Management Console and go to the Amazon EC2 console
2. Choose an Amazon Machine Image (AMI)
3. Choose an instance size
4. Create a key pair for SSH access
5. Create port-based security rules
6. Launch instance
7. Upload code

6. Day 1 – Choose AMI

7. Day 1 – Instance Details

8. Day 1 – Instance user-data

9. Day 1 – Tags

10. Day 1 – Create Key Pair

11. Day 1 – Configure Firewall

12. Day 1 – Instance Launched

13. Day 1 – Application Tasks
[laptop]$ ssh -i ~/ec2.pem ec2-user@ec2-54-254-126-114.ap-southeast-1.compute.amazonaws.com
__| __|_ )
_| ( / Amazon Linux AMI
___|___|___|
https://aws.amazon.com/amazon-linux-ami/2013.03-release-notes/
There are 13 security update(s) out of 24 total update(s) available
Run "sudo yum update" to apply all updates.
[ec2-user@ip-10-40-203-29 ~]$ sudo yum -y -q update
[ec2-user@ip-10-40-203-29 ~]$ sudo yum -y -q install httpd mysql-server ruby19 git
[ec2-user@ip-10-40-203-29 ~]$ sudo service mysqld start
[ec2-user@ip-10-40-203-29 ~]$ sudo /etc/init.d/httpd start

14. Day 1  Day 2
Day 1 Recap Day 2 Considerations
1. Created an AWS account
2. Identified an application for cloud
deployment
3. Logged into the Web Console
4. Chose an AMI
5. Launched an EC2 instance
6. Setup application
• How can we capture our work efforts
to make them repeatable or recover
from failure?
• What options do we have for setting
up a tiered architecture?
• How can we apply security to our
instances?

15. Day 2 – Create a tiered architecture
Region
Availability Zone
Snapshot Amazon S3
Internet
User
HTTP (80)
Source Protocol Port
0.0.0.0/0 HTTP 80
148.20.57.0/2
4
SSH 22
Connection Type Details
EC2 Security
Group
web-tier-sg

16. Day 2 – Launching a Tiered Web Application
1. Snapshot EC2 Instance
– Stop MySQL
– Bundle New AMI
2. Create a Relational Database (RDS) Instance
– We’ll use MySQL
– Other options: Oracle, SQL Server
3. Configure App to Use RDS MySQL Database

17. Day 2 – Create a snapshot of our AMI

18. Day 2 – New AMI

19. Day 2 – Launch RDS DB Instance

20. Day 2 – RDS DB Instance Details

21. Day 2 – RDS Management Options

22. Day 2 – Granting EC2 App Access to RDS

23. Day 2 – Connect to RDS Database
[ec2-user@ip-10-40-203-29 ~]$ mysql -uroot –p –D devdb
–h nonprod.ctjsifycx3sq.ap-southeast-1.rds.amazonaws.com
Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or g.
Your MySQL connection id is 268
Server version: 5.5.27-log Source distribution
Copyright (c) 2000, 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Type 'help;' or 'h' for help. Type 'c' to clear the current input statement.
mysql>

24. Day 2  Day 3
Day 2 Recap Day 3 Considerations
1. Took a snapshot of AMI as a backup
2. Created an RDS MySQL Database
3. Created and validated security groups
• What tools does AWS provide to
monitor EC2 and RDS?
• How can we better monitor the our
environment (proactive vs. reactive)?
• How can we be notified when our
servers hits certain thresholds?

25. Day 3 – Monitor Environment
Region
Availability Zone
Internet User
Amazon
CloudWatch
Users
Alarm
Administrator
Email Notification

26. Day 3 – Create CloudWatch Alarm
1. Select metric to monitor
– Database write latency is an accurate indicator of our application’s health
2. Define a threshold
– Write latency that exceeds 500ms typically requires some intervention on our part
3. Create a topic for our alarm and subscribe to the topic via email

27. Day 3 – Create Alarm

28. Day 3 – Create Alarm

29. Day 3  Day 4
Day 3 Recap Day 4 Considerations
1. Identified CloudWatch metrics
available for EC2 and RDS
2. Created a CloudWatch alarm
3. Set up alarm to email on failure
4. Reviewed CloudWatch dashboard
• What happens if our EC2 instance
fails?
• What happens if an entire AZ is
unavailable?
• How can we elastically scale based
on increased/decreased traffic?
• What happens if our primary RDS
instance fails?

30. Day 4 – Designing for High Availability
Region
Availability Zone
Internet
Amazon
CloudWatch
Users
Alarm
Availability Zone
RDS DB Standby
Auto scaling Group

31. Day 4 – Steps to High Availability
1. Create an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB)
– Balances traffic across multiple EC2 instances
– Enables running instances in multiple Availability Zones (AZ’s)
2. Configure Auto Scaling
– Automatically scale up if demand increases
– And scale down to save money
3. Setup RDS Multi-AZ
– Synchronous replication to standby in another AZ
– Automatically fails over if needed
– Also minimizes backup window (slave is used)

32. Day 4 – Define Load Balancer

33. Day 4 – Configure Health Check

34. Day 4 – Add EC2 Instance(s)

35. Day 4 – Elastic Load Balancer is Active

36. Day 4 – Configure Auto Scaling
1. Use the Amazon Machine Image (AMI) we created
2. Leverage multiple Availability Zones
– Distribute instances across two AZ’s
– Ensure at least two instances are up
3. Create an Auto Scaling trigger
– Same concept as CloudWatch alarm from earlier
– Just now we’re proactively taking action

37. Day 4 – Find That AMI We Created

38. Day 4 – Set Up Auto Scaling
[laptop]$ as-create-launch-configuration webcfg
--image-id ami-08dc4461 --instance-type m1.small
--region ap-southeast-1
[laptop]$ as-create-auto-scaling-group webscg
--launch-configuration-name webcfg
--availability-zones ap-southeast-1a ap-southeast-1b
--min-size 2 --max-size 10 --load-balancer-names frontlb

39. Day 4 – Setup Auto Scaling continued
[laptop]$ as-put-scaling-policy WebScaleUpPolicy
--auto-scaling group webscg
--adjustment=1 --type ChangeInCapacity --cooldown 300
[laptop]$ mon-put-metric-alarm WebHighCPUAlarm
--comparison-operator Greater ThanThreshold
--evaluation-periods 1 --metric-name CPUUtilization
--namespace "AWS/EC2" --period 600
--statistic Average --threshold 80
--alarm-actions POLICY-ARN_from_previous_step
--dimensions "AutoScalingGroup Name=webscg"

40. Day 4 – Check on Our Instances

41. Day 4 – Set Up RDS Multi-AZ
[laptop]$ aws rds modify-db-instance
--db-instance-identifier nonprod
--multi-az --region ap-southeast-1
Yep, that’s it.
No mouse required. :)

42. Day 4  Day 5
Day 4 Recap Day 5 Considerations
1. Spread our application across
Availability Zones.
2. Automated scaling across availability
zone leveraging Auto Scaling.
3. Implemented load balancing via AWS
Elastic Load Balancing.
4. Implemented a highly available
database by applying RDS multi-AZ.
• How do we make use of a custom
DNS domain for our load balancer?
• How can we configure accounts for
other AWS users?
• How can we template and replicate
our server environment?

43. Day 5 – DNS, Identity & Access Management, Deployment Automation
Region
Availability Zone
Internet
S3 Bucket
Amazon
CloudWatch
Users
Alarm
Availability Zone
RDS DB Standby
AWS IAM
www.example.com
AWS Management
Console
AWS
CloudFormation
TemplateStack
images.example.com

44. Day 5 – Route 53 (DNS)

45. Day 5 – Identity & Access Management

46. Day 5 – Deployment Automation

47. First Week on Amazon EC2
• Evolution from Day 1  Day 5
– Single AMI  Tiered Monitored HA DNS, IAM, Automation
• Cloud architecture best practices implemented in week 1 on EC2
– Proactive scaling – Auto scaling triggers
– Elasticity – EC2
– Design for failure – ELB, Auto scaling groups, Availability Zones
– Decouple your components – EC2, RDS
– Infrastructure automation – CloudFormation

48. …and Beyond
• Moving beyond week 1 on EC2
– AWS Management Console is great but you have other options
• Command Line Interface
• API
– Other AWS Services
• VPC, Elasticache, OpsWorks, Beanstalk, DynamoDB, SQS
– Operational Checklist
• http://media.amazonwebservices.com/AWS_Operational_Checklists.pdf
– Deployment Automation
• http://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/aws-cloudformation-articles-and-tutorials/
– Links to whitepapers and architectures
• http://aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/
• http://aws.amazon.com/architecture/

49. Technical Track