Slides for the second AWS Bath UG meeting on 14 Sept 2016

1. AWS Bath User Group
BATH, UK
@AWSBathUG
#awsbath

2. BATH, UK
Agenda
• Welcome
• What’s new in AWS – Andy Powell
• Serverless app development on AWS – Chris
Paton
• Food & drink
• Three Lambda examples/ideas – Andy
Powell
• Discussion & prize draw

3. BATH, UK
What’s new in AWS
• How to keep up to date with AWS
• 5 recent(ish) announcements that have
caught my eye

4. BATH, UK
Keeping up to date
• Twitter
• https://twitter.com/awscloud/lists/aws-twitter-handles/members?lang=en-gb
• Blog posts… Google ‘AWS blog’
• Note Jeff Barr’s ‘AWS Week in Review’ posts,
e.g. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-week-in-review-september-5-2016/
• AWS webinars
• https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/events/monthlywebinarseries/
• https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-webinars-september-2016/
• Email alerts
• Sent to all AWS account holders I think

5. BATH, UK
1) Reader End Point for
Amazon Aurora
• Connect to all the read replicas on your
Amazon Aurora cluster through a single
reader end point
• Provide high availability for your read-only
queries from your DB cluster by placing
multiple Aurora Replicas in different
Availability Zones
• Load-balances connections to the Aurora
Replicas in a DB cluster

6. BATH, UK
2) Amazon CloudFront now
supports HTTP/2
• HTTP/2 is
• is binary, instead of textual
• is fully multiplexed, instead of ordered and
blocking
• can therefore use one connection for parallelism
• uses header compression to reduce overhead
• allows servers to “push” responses proactively
into client caches
• For background info see
• http://kamranahmed.info/blog/2016/08/13/http-in-depth/

7. BATH, UK
3) KMS import key feature
• Import keys from your key management
infrastructure into KMS
• Gives you greater control over the
generation, lifecycle management, and
durability of your keys
• May help to meet your compliance
requirements to generate and store copies of
keys outside of your cloud provider

8. BATH, UK
4) RDS support for the OEM
Cloud Control
• Use the Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) Cloud
Control to manage multiple Amazon RDS for
Oracle database instances
• The OEM Cloud Control offers a solution that
allows you to monitor and manage the
complete Oracle IT infrastructure from a single
console
• Installs the Oracle Management Agent (OMA)
into your RDS instance which communicates
with your Oracle Management Service (OMS)

9. BATH, UK
5) Various CloudFormation
updates
• Provision the following AWS resources using
CloudFormation:
• AWS Certificate Manager: easily provision,
manage, and deploy Secure Sockets
Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS)
certificates for use with AWS services
• Application Auto Scaling: a general purpose
Auto Scaling service for supported elastic AWS
resources. Use it to enable Service Auto Scaling
in Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) or spot
fleets

10. BATH, UK
3 Lambda examples/ideas
• All essentially using Lambda as a
replacement for a Linux ‘management’
instance running cron
• All experimental or work in progress
1. Auto-power down/up of instances
2. Pingdom server whitelisting
3. Failsafe snapshot copies

11. BATH, UK
Auto-power down/up of
instances
• Requirement
• Reduce AWS costs by only powering on
instances when they are needed
• Lambda function uses ECS instance tags to
indicate ownership and scheduling
• Hard enforcement of those tags to
encourage good practice, i.e. if you forget to
add the tags, your instance gets powered off

12. BATH, UK
Pingdom server whitelisting
• Pingdom is a website monitoring service
available on a SaaS basis
• Typically used to monitor public websites
• Requirement
• Allow use of Pingdom on ‘private’ websites
• Lambda function automates regular updates
to Security Group(s) to allow HTTP access by
global Pingdom servers
https://github.com/andypowe11/AWS-Lambda-Pingdom-SG

13. BATH, UK
Failsafe snapshot copies
• DR often thought of in terms of massive failures
of infrastructure
• Can also be caused by intentional or inadvertent
deletion of resources by staff
• Requirement
• Store backup copies of RDS snapshots in a second
account to which there is limited access
• Lambda function automates sharing of RDS
snapshot to the second account, using SNS to
send notifications that a copy can be taken
https://github.com/andypowe11/AWS-RDS-Snapshot-Copy