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AWS Essentials
Student Guide
Version 2.5

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
© 2013 Amazon Web Services, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved.

1

Copyright © 2013 Amazon Web Services, Inc. and its affiliates.
All rights reserved.
This work may not be reproduced or redistributed, in whole or in part,
without prior written permission from Amazon Web Services, Inc.
Commercial copying, lending, or selling is prohibited.
Corrections or feedback on the course? Email aws-course-feedback@amazon.com.
Other questions? Email us at aws-training-info@amazon.com.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
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AWS Essentials Student Guide
Welcome to AWS Essentials! This guide will walk you through the training
including the hands-on lab portions of this course. If you have any questions,
please don’t hesitate to ask your instructor for assistance.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
AWS Essentials Student Guide ........................................................................... 4
AWS History ...................................................................................................... 7
Cloud Computing Paradigm ............................................................................ 12
Elastic Capacity .............................................................................................. 18
Security ........................................................................................................... 25
Global Infrastructure ........................................................................................ 41
AWS Services .................................................................................................. 46
Compute Services ........................................................................................... 66
Programmable Infrastructure ........................................................................... 89
Managed Services .......................................................................................... 95
Resources ...................................................................................................... 99
Appendix .......................................................................................................... 106
qwikLAB Guide .............................................................................................. 106
S3 Exercise ................................................................................................... 107
Elastic Load Balancing Exercise ................................................................... 114

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
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AWS Essentials
This training introduces AWS products and services with exercises and hands-on
activities. It helps learners who do not come with a background on Amazon Web
Services to gain proficiency in AWS services and empowers them to make
informed decisions about IT solutions based on business requirements.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
© 2013 Amazon Web Services, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved.

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Course Overview
This is the high level agenda for our 1-day training.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
© 2013 Amazon Web Services, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved.

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Course Learning Objectives
High level learning objectives for this 1-day training.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
© 2013 Amazon Web Services, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved.

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Background on AWS
A little history on Amazon Web Services and Amazon as a company.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
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AWS History
This is the high level agenda for this section.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
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About Amazon
Amazon.com, Inc. is an American multinational electronic commerce company
with headquarters in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest
online retailer. Amazon.com started as an online bookstore, but soon diversified,
selling DVDs, CDs, MP3 downloads, software, video games, electronics, apparel,
furniture, food, toys, and jewelry. The company also produces consumer
electronics—notably the Amazon Kindle e-book reader and the Kindle Fire tablet
computer—and is a major provider of cloud computing services.

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Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services offers a complete set of infrastructure and application
services that enable you to run virtually everything in the cloud: from enterprise
applications and big data projects to social games and mobile apps.
One of the key benefits of cloud computing is the opportunity to replace up-front
capital infrastructure expenses with low variable costs that scale with
your business.

More Information
Learn more about Amazon Web Services (AWS):
http://aws.amazon.com

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
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History of AWS
AWS Mission: Enable businesses and developers to use web services* to build
scalable, sophisticated applications.
*What people now call “the cloud”

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
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Cloud Computing: is the use of computing resources (hardware
and software) that are delivered as a service over a network
(typically the Internet). The name comes from the use of a cloudshaped symbol as an abstraction for the complex infrastructure it
contains in system diagrams. Cloud computing entrusts remote
services with a user's data, software and computation.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): also known as cloud
computing is the most basic cloud-service model. Providers of IaaS
offer computers - physical or (more often) virtual machines - and
other resources. IaaS clouds often offer additional resources such
as a virtual-machine disk image library, raw (block) and file-based
storage, firewalls, load balancers, IP addresses, virtual local area
networks (VLANs), and software bundles. IaaS-cloud providers like
AWS supply these resources on-demand from their large pools
installed in data centers.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
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AWS Cloud Services Paradigm
AWS is a collection of Infrastructure Services. It is the customer’s responsibility
to combine individual IaaS building blocks to meet their business requirements.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
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AWS Utility Model
What are the benefits of utility based services?

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
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AWS Utility Model
Economy of scale and how to leverage AWS expertise.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
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AWS Utility Model
Since 2006, Amazon Web Services have been providing on demand, pay-asyou-go infrastructure to businesses of all sizes.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
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On-Premise vs. Cloud Computing
Some benefits of cloud computing are zero capital expenditure and no longterm contracts.
Instead of paying for and organizing all of the physical requirements of an onpremise data center you can launch instances and resources in and ondemand nature.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
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Elastic Capacity
One of the paradigms of Cloud computing is Elastic capacity.
Virtual environments afford the ability to operate in an elastic way. The nature of
Amazons cloud, having on-demand, uniform and accessible components, allows
you dynamically scale your computing resources to meet your business needs.
The major difference between this and traditional IT virtualization is the scale and
speed at which AWS Operates.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
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Elastic Capacity
In Traditional IT you do capacity planning to predict IT spending. Customer
needs are variable and hard to predict. End result is that IT departments end up
provisioning hardware resources with very little accuracy and large lead times in
changing levels of resources.

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Elastic Capacity
1. [On and Off] Batch Processing (transcoding, genomic research, simulations)
2. [Fast Growth] New Product Launch
3. [Variable Peaks] Social networking site with peaks at lunch and in the evening
4. [Predictable Peaks] Backup Jobs, Ticket Sales Website

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Elastic Capacity
AWS component services empower you to control how and when you scale up or
down. This concept can be boiled down into “Just-In-Time” provisioning, which
essentially means that resources are there when you need them and not there
when you don’t.
AWS offers on-demand provisioning and very fast boot times. Customers can
leverage these features to reduce costs and increase operating efficiency by not
running computing resources that are unused and by adding more resources
when they would be better utilized.
The first example of “on/off” is a use case that would be like a gene processing
job that would need to calculate a result set. While there is no work to be done
the system could be off saving money and resources.
Another great example of leveraging elasticity is when you are running a website
with variable peaks of utilization. In traditional IT, you have to estimate the level
of resources that you need to provision to be able to have a starting point. This
can translate over provisioning or under provisioning, which could lead to
customer dissatisfaction because of poor performance or worse unfulfilled
requests. Elasticity allows you to scale up to meet this demand and scale back
down to make the best use of your resources.
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© 2013 Amazon Web Services, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
© 2013 Amazon Web Services, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved.

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Animoto and Amazon EC2
In April of 2008, one of our customers, Animoto, saw a monster spike in traffic.
Animoto has a product that helps you create web videos with music and
graphics. They launched a Facebook app that lets people tell their friends when
they’ve uploaded a video that includes that friend. You can see the spike in traffic
that this new app caused. The X-axis represents time elapsed and the Y-axis
represents the EC2 instances launched. Because they were using AWS,
Animoto didn’t have to do a thing—AWS took care of everything. Animoto used
EC2 or processing the videos with music, SQS for queuing pictures and S3
for storage.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2): is a web service that
provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to
make web-scale computing easier for developers.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
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Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS): offers a reliable, highly
scalable, hosted queue for storing messages as they travel
between computers. By using Amazon SQS, developers can simply
move data between distributed components of their applications
that perform different tasks, without losing messages or requiring
each component to be always available. Amazon SQS makes it
easy to build an automated workflow, working in close conjunction
with the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and the
other AWS infrastructure web services.
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3): is storage for the Internet.
It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

More Information
 Learn more about EC2: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/
 Learn more about SQS: http://aws.amazon.com/sqs/
 Learn more about S3: http://aws.amazon.com/s3/
 Customer success story video on Animoto:
http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/animoto/

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
© 2013 Amazon Web Services, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved.

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Security
Amazon Web Services (AWS) delivers a highly scalable cloud computing
platform with high availability and reliability, and the flexibility to enable
customers to build a wide range of applications. In order to provide end-to-end
security and end-to-end privacy, AWS builds services in accordance with security
best practices, provides appropriate security features in those services, and
documents how to use those features. AWS customers must use those features
and best practices to architect an appropriately secure application environment.
Enabling customers to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of their
data is of the utmost importance to AWS, as is maintaining trust and confidence.
AWS provides a wide range of information regarding its IT control environment to
customers through white papers, reports, certifications, and other third-party
attestations. This information assists customers in understanding the controls in
place relevant to the AWS services they use and how those controls have been
validated by independent auditors. This information also assists customers in
their efforts to account for and to validate that controls are operating effectively in
their extended IT environment.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
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Quadrants of Security
Four quadrants of security built for Enterprise and Government standards.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
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Physical Security
Physical (supplemental):
 Must pass two-factor authentication at least twice for floor access

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
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Certification & Accreditations
Certifications (supplemental):
 Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS) Level 1
 Your applications do not automatically have this credentials
 Your applications also have to be compliant

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
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Hardware, Software & Network
Hardware, Software
& Network (supplemental):
• Advanced network
protection systems
• Manage our data standard
to exacting standards

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
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Security & Compliance Resources
Security and Compliance (supplemental):
 Enterprise customers under NDA can get support from our security
team in certifying their applications
More Information
 Security and Compliance Center: http://aws.amazon.com/security

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
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AWS Security: Shared Responsibility
AWS:
• Obtaining industry certifications and independent third party attestations
described in this document
• Publishing information about the AWS security and control practices in
whitepapers and web site content
• Providing certificates, reports, and other documentation directly to AWS
customers under NDA (as required)
Customer:
• Everything from the hypervisor up
• We provide security tools that you configure properly to meet your needs
and maintain a strong security posture
• Can Amazon perform Windows Updates for your Instances? No. Because
we have zero visibility into the Operating System layer

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
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AWS Security: Isolation Models
AWS security posture is divided in two major places. Everything that isn’t the
customer responsibility through the shared security model is covered by the
isolation/deny by default model.
We provide a number of security controls to allow customers to define virtual
network configurations and high-level firewall rules. Additionally, we have other
techniques and features that you can use to control how data flows between
components such as VPC and direct connect.
Lastly, all of our services are API and CLI accessible and access control policies
can be written to restrict access where necessary. Policies follow a deny by
default model, so specific access must be granted.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
© 2013 Amazon Web Services, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved.

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Virtual Private Cloud (VPC): is Amazon Virtual Private Cloud
(Amazon VPC) lets you provision a logically isolated section of the
Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud where you can launch AWS
resources in a virtual network that you define. You have complete
control over your virtual networking environment, including
selection of your own IP address range, creation of subnets, and
configuration of route tables and network gateways.
More Information
 Learn more about VPC: http://aws.amazon.com/vpc/

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
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AWS Security: Multi-tier Security Groups
The diagram above is an example of a security group configuration for a simple
web application.
The Web Tier security group can accept traffic on port 80/443 from any where on
the Internet if you select source 0.0.0.0/0. Alternatively, it might make more
sense to only accept traffic from a load balancer so that individual clients cannot
hammer a single server and the load balancer can perform its job.
Similarly the App tier can only accept traffic from the Web tier, and the DB tier
can only accept traffic from the app tier.
Lastly, we have also added a set of rules to allow remote administration over
SSH port 22. We have restricted remote access by funneling all traffic through
the app tier and allowing access only from a specific IP. Once you have SSHed
into an App tier server you can then connect to machines in the Web and DB
security groups.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
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AWS Security: Account Control
• Logging in as the master account is akin to using Administrator or
root account
• Master accounts have an implicit “ALLOW ALL” IAM policy applied to
them. This cannot be changed or restricted.
• Master accounts shouldn’t be used for production systems because there
is no way to restrict access to the EC2 Instance terminate command and if
an account is revoked all services will be terminated. Instead we
recommend using IAM users with policies and permissions that can be
individually revoked.
• Consider using an MFA device on your master account
• Gemalto, Open Source authentication standard, and Google Authenticator
• There are use cases for companies to have multiple accounts, to facilitate
this process we have consolidated billing and invoice billing
• Should everybody log in with the master account? Or would it be better if
there was a way to delegate access?

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
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AWS Security: IAM
IAM provides service level access control and limited identity management
related to service level access. It should not be used for application level security
and does not provide resource level access control.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM): enables you to
securely control access to AWS services and resources for your
users. Using IAM you can create and manage AWS users and
groups and use permissions to allow and deny their permissions to
AWS resources.
More Information
Learn more about IAM: http://aws.amazon.com/iam/

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
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AWS Security: IAM
The AWS IAM service allows customers to create Users, Groups, and Roles and
associate IAM access control policies against them. You can also assign uses to
groups as a means of easing user management. If multiple polices apply to a
single end user, AWS IAM aggregates those permissions in a least privileged
model, which means that we have a deny bias.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
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AWS API Authentication
AWS IAM Users are created without any credentials associated with them by
default. In order for an IAM user to be of any use you must provision access
credentials. There are three major types of access credentials.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
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AWS Security: IAM
There is a hard limit of 5000 IAM users that can be created for any single
account. Even at that scale, user management can become problematic and
cumbersome.
To allow IAM to scale to tens of thousands of users we created a Secure Token
Service that will allow you to generate secure tokens that can then be used to
authenticate with AWS service APIs or even the console. Token can be
configured to have valid duration of between 15 minutes and 36 hours.
AWS maintains sample boilerplate code to help get you started in creating a
session proxy that will authenticate your users with your own Identity store and
then go through the process of generating tokens. We sometimes call this a
token vending machine or a session proxy that will handle authentication and
authorization, potentially in a single sign-on fashion.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
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IAM Demo
1. How to create an IAM user
2. Assign the user a policy
3. Generate a password
4. Download the CSV

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Global Infrastructure
Amazon Web Services serves hundreds of thousands of customers in more than
190 countries. We are going to explain more in this section.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
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Global Infrastructure
We are steadily expanding global infrastructure to help our customers achieve
lower latency and higher throughput, and to ensure that their data resides only in
the Region they specify. As our customers grow their businesses, AWS will
continue to provide infrastructure that meets their global requirements.

Regions: are used to run applications and workloads to reduce
latency to end-users while avoiding the up-front expenses, longterm commitments, and scaling challenges associated with
maintaining and operating a global infrastructure.
Edge Locations: helps lower latency and improves performance
for end users. Two of our services run in out edge locations. Those
services are Route 53 and CloudFront.
More Information
Global Infrastructure locations: http://aws.amazon.com/aboutaws/globalinfrastructure/

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
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AWS Regions & Availability Zones
All regions have at least two availability zones. Many of our regions have more
than two. Availability zones are given account relative names to help distinguish
between AZs. It is important to note that these names differ from account
to account.

Availability Zones: are physically distinct groups of data centers. A
region is made of multiple availability zones so as to allow our
customers the ability to spread their computing resource across
multiple tier 1 ISPs and power providers. Where natural disasters
are a serious consideration we do our best to isolate AZs from each
other. For example, where earthquakes are a problem we would
not build two AZs on the same fault line.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
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Capacity Provisioning
AWS highly recommends provisioning your resources across multiple availability
zones. If you have more than one server, it costs nothing extra to run them
across more than one AZ and doing so will get you added redundancy. Should a
single AZ have a problem, all assets in your second AZ will be unaffected.

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1. ___________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________
2. ___________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________
3. ___________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________
4. ___________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________

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AWS Services
In this section we will begin covering specific services.

More Information
AWS products and services: http://aws.amazon.com/products/

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
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AWS Core Infrastructure & Services
Many of our services have analogs in the Traditional IT space and terminology.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
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AWS Platform
We will be covering the following deployment management and services in this
training:
• CloudFormation
• IAM
• CloudWatch
• EC2
• S3
• EBS
• Glacier
• VPC
• RDS

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Storage Services
AWS offers many storage services and features that are a significant paradigm
shift from the traditional IT storage space. In traditional IT, most storage exists as
some form of hard drive space. In AWS, storage services have a varying mix of
durability, availability, and cost.

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AWS Storage Products and Services
In this section we are going to cover three of our more popular storage services,
specifically, high-level features, costs, and best practices.

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AWS Simple Storage Service: S3
S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier
for developers. Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be
used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the
web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, secure,
fast, inexpensive infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of
web sites.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3): is storage for the Internet.
It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

More Information
 Learn more about S3: http://aws.amazon.com/s3/

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S3: Pricing
S3 pricing is based on capacity and bandwidth actually used. Since S3 is an
Internet scale service that runs natively across an entire region, it can handle
significant request throughput and bandwidth output. All bandwidth into S3 is
free, but we charge a rate on bandwidth out.
Most importantly, since S3 can handle any amount of data it is important to
distinguish that you only pay for the amount of space you use. Space is priced in
a prorated GB per month.

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S3: Best Practices
Here are some important best practices to take into consideration when utilizing
Amazon S3.
Bucket names directly translate into publicly addressable DNS names. As such
they are global to a region and must be unique. Because of this, there is a hard
limit of 100 buckets per account. This is to avoid bucket name squatting. It also
means that you should take care when deciding what requires a bucket. Some
customer chose to use one bucket per application. Others choose to use one
bucket per customer.

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1. ___________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________
2. ___________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________
3. ___________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________
4. ___________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5
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Amazon Glacier
Amazon Glacier is an extremely low-cost storage service that provides secure
and durable storage for data archiving and backup. Amazon Glacier is optimized
for data that is infrequently accessed and for which retrieval times of several
hours are suitable. You store data in Amazon Glacier as archives. An archive can
represent a single file or you may choose to combine several files to be uploaded
as a single archive. Retrieving archives from Amazon Glacier requires the
initiation of a job. Jobs typically complete in 3 to 5 hours.

Amazon Glacier: is an extremely low-cost storage service that
provides secure and durable storage for data archiving and backup.

More Information
 Glacier: http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/

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Glacier: Pricing
Glacier is designed with the expectation that retrievals are infrequent and
unusual, and data will be stored for extended periods of time. You can retrieve up
to 5% of your average monthly storage (pro-rated daily) for free each month. If
you choose to retrieve more than this amount of data in a month, you are
charged a retrieval fee starting at $0.01 per gigabyte. Learn more. In addition,
there is a pro-rated charge of $0.03 per gigabyte for items deleted prior to
90 days.

More Information
 Glacier Pricing: http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/pricing/

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Glacier: Best Practice
Amazon Glacier is an extremely low-cost storage service that provides secure
and durable storage for data archiving and backup. In order to keep costs low,
Amazon Glacier is optimized for data that is infrequently accessed and for which
retrieval times of several hours are suitable. With Amazon Glacier, customers
can reliably store large or small amounts of data for as little as $0.01 per
gigabyte per month, a significant savings compared to on-premises solutions.

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AWS Elastic Block Store (EBS)
EBS provides block level storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances.
Amazon EBS volumes are off-instance storage that persists independently from
the life of an instance. Amazon EBS provides highly available, highly reliable,
predictable storage volumes that can be attached to a running Amazon EC2
instance and exposed as a device within the instance. Amazon EBS is
particularly suited for applications that require a database, file system, or access
to raw block level storage. We will talk more about EC2 later.

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EBS: Pricing
Volume storage for Standard volumes is charged by the amount you provision in
GB per month until you release it. Volume I/O for Standard volumes is charged
by the number of requests you make to your volume. Programs like IOSTAT can
be used to measure the exact I/O usage of your system at any time. However,
due to varying levels of caching of applications and operating systems, you may
see a lower number of I/O requests on your bill for Standard volumes than is
seen by your application unless you sync all of your I/Os to disk.
As with Standard volumes, volume storage for Provisioned IOPS volumes is
charged by the amount you provision in GB per month. With Provisioned IOPS
volumes, you are also charged by the amount you provision in IOPS (input/output
operations per second) X the percentage of days you provision for the month.
For example, if you provision a volume with 1000 IOPS, and keep this volume for
15 days in a 30 day month, then in the Virginia Region, you would be charged
$50 for the IOPS that you provision ($0.10 per provisioned IOPS-Month * 1000
IOPS Provisioned * 15 days/30).
Snapshot storage is based on the amount of space your data consumes in
Amazon S3. Because data is compressed before being saved to Amazon S3,
and Amazon EBS does not save empty blocks, it is likely that the size of a
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snapshot will be considerably less than the size of your volume. For the first
snapshot of a volume, Amazon EBS will save a full copy of your data to Amazon
S3. However for each incremental snapshot, only the part of your Amazon EBS
volume that has been changed will be saved to Amazon S3.

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EBS : Best Practices
Amazon EBS volumes are created in a particular Availability Zone and can be
from 1 GB to 1 TB in size. Once a volume is created, it can be attached to any
Amazon EC2 instance in the same Availability Zone. Once attached, it will
appear as a mounted device similar to any hard drive or other block device. At
that point, the instance can interact with the volume just as it would with a local
drive, formatting it with a file system or installing applications on it directly.
A volume can only be attached to one instance at a time, but many volumes can
be attached to a single instance. This means that you can attach multiple
volumes and stripe your data across them for increased I/O and throughput
performance. This is particularly helpful for database style applications that
frequently encounter many random reads and writes across the dataset. If an
instance fails or is detached from an Amazon EBS volume, the volume can be
attached to any other instance in that Availability Zone.
Amazon EBS volumes can also be used as boot partitions for Amazon EC2
instances, which allows you to increase the size of your boot partition up to 1 TB,
preserve your boot partition data beyond the life of your instance, and bundle
your AMI in one-click. You can also stop and restart instances that boot from
Amazon EBS volumes while preserving state, with very fast start-up times.
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S3 & EBS
The most significant differences between S3 and EBS are nature in which they
are written two and accessed. EBS volumes are simply network attached hard
drives that can be written to or read from at a block level.
S3 is an object level storage medium. This means that you must write whole
objects at a time. If you change one small part of a file, you must still rewrite the
entire file in order to commit the change to S3. This can be very expensive if you
have frequent writes to the same object. S3 is optimized for write one read many
use cases.
Lastly, the other major difference is in how the services are priced. With S3 you
pay for what you use, and with EBS you pay for what you provision.

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Snapshots
Amazon EBS provides the ability to back up point-in-time snapshots of your data
to Amazon S3 for durable recovery. Amazon EBS snapshots are incremental
backups, meaning that only the blocks on the device that have changed since
your last snapshot will be saved. If you have a device with 100 GBs of data, but
only 5 GBs of data has changed since your last snapshot, only the 5 additional
GBs of snapshot data will be stored back to Amazon S3. Even though the
snapshots are saved incrementally, when you delete a snapshot, only the data
not needed for any other snapshot is removed. So regardless of which prior
snapshots have been deleted, all active snapshots will contain all the information
needed to restore the volume. In addition, the time to restore the volume is the
same for all snapshots, offering the restore time of full backups with the space
savings of incremental.
New volumes created from existing Amazon S3 snapshots load lazily in the
background. This means that once a volume is created from a snapshot, there is
no need to wait for all of the data to transfer from Amazon S3 to your Amazon
EBS volume before your attached instance can start accessing the volume and
all of its data. If your instance accesses a piece of data which hasn’t yet been
loaded, the volume will immediately download the requested data from Amazon
S3, and then will continue loading the rest of the volume’s data in
the background.
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S3 Exercise #1
1. Create a bucket in S3.
2. Add an object to the bucket.
3. View the object.
4. Move the object.
5. Delete the object and the bucket in S3.

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More Information
There are step-by-step directions at the end of this guide.

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Computer Services
AWS Compute Services are at the core of all the products and services that
make up the Amazon Cloud.

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Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud: EC2
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides
resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale
computing easier for developers. Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface
allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you
with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s
proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain
and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity,
both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2
changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity
that you actually use. Amazon EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure
resilient applications and isolate themselves from common failure scenarios.

Tags: AWS resources can be tagged to simplify management.
Tags are key, value pair that you define. E.g. you can define
NAME=PRODSERVER1 for an EC2 instance or
DEPARTMENT=FINANCE to later run a report against
DEPARTMENT tags for each resource to be used for cost
allocation to different departments.
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Amazon Machine Image (AMI): is an abbreviation for Amazon
Machine Image. An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is an encrypted
machine image stored in Amazon S3. It contains all the information
necessary to boot instances of your software. Instance is a result of
running a system. After you launch an Amazon Machine Image
(AMI), the resulting running system is referred to as an instance.
Compute: The compute feature allows you to take advantage of
thousand of networked servers for virtually unlimited
compute power.

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EC2: Best Practices
Amazon EC2 presents a true virtual computing environment, allowing you to use
web service interfaces to launch instances with a variety of operating systems,
load them with your custom application environment, manage your network’s
access permissions, and run your image using as many or few systems as you
desire.

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AWS EC2 Instances
AWS EC2 provides the flexibility to choose from a number of different instance
types to meet your computing needs. Each instance provides a predictable
amount of dedicated compute capacity and is charged per instance-hour
consumed.
First generation (M1) Standard instances provide customers with a balanced set
of resources and a low cost platform that is well suited for a wide variety of
applications.
Second generation (M3) Standard instances provide a balanced set of resources
and a higher level of processing performance compared to M1 instances. These
are ideal for applications that require higher absolute CPU and memory
performance. Encoding and high traffic content management systems are
examples of applications that will benefit from the performance of M3 instances.
High-Memory Instances offer large memory sizes for high throughput
applications, including database and memory caching applications. High-CPU
Instances have proportionally more CPU resources than memory (RAM) and are
well suited for compute-intensive applications. There are also various high
storage and cluster computer instance types available.
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EC2: Instances
There are a variety of billing constructs that you can use to make sure your
application runs in the most cost effective way possible.
AWS Free Usage Tier:
To help new AWS customers get started in the cloud
New AWS customers will be able to run a free Amazon EC2 Micro Instance and
a free Amazon RDS Micro Instance for a year, while also leveraging a free usage
tier for Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic Load
Balancing, and AWS data transfer.
AWS’s free usage tier can be used for anything you want to run in the cloud:
launch new applications, test existing applications in the cloud, or simply gain
hands-on experience with AWS
More Information
For more information on the AWS Free Usage Tier:
http://aws.amazon.com/free/

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Reserved Instances
 Pay up-front fee to receive significant hourly discount
 Cost / Predictability
 Get priority compute capacity when needed
Use Cases: Applications with steady state or predictable usage; Applications that
require reserved capacity, including disaster recovery; Users are able to make
upfront payments to reduce overall computing

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Leverage all Three Models
In this example, we have a variable usage curve. Computer resource below the
3000 mark is an example the applications steady state. For this level of
computing resource the customer might consider utilizing Reserved Instance to
reduce their expected costs because they know they will use at least that many
resources.
For variable elevated usage periods the customer would then perhaps make use
of On-Demand or Spot market instances to supplement their always-on fleet.

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Using EC2
1. Select a pre-configured, Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to get up and
running immediately. Or create an AMI containing your applications,
libraries, data, and associated configuration settings. Amazon EC2
provides templates known as Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) that
contains a software configuration (for example, an operating system, an
application server, and applications.) You use these templates to launch
an instance, which is a copy of the AMI running as a virtual server in
the cloud.
2. You can launch different types of instances from a single AMI. An instance
type essentially determines the hardware of the host computer used for
your instance. Each instance type offers different compute and memory
capabilities. Select an instance type based on the amount of memory and
computing power that you need for the application or software that you
plan to run on the instance. You can launch multiple instances from
an AMI.
3. Your instance keeps running until you stop or terminate it, or until it fails. If
an instance fails, you can launch a new one from the AMI.
4. Configure security and network access on your Amazon EC2 instance.
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5. Choose which instance type(s) you want, then start, terminate, and
monitor as many instances of your AMI as needed, using the web service
APIs or the variety of management tools provided.
6. Determine whether you want to run in multiple locations, utilize static IP
endpoints, or attach persistent block storage to your instances.
7. Pay only for the resources that you actually consume, like instance-hours
or data transfer.

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Amazon Machine Images (AMI)
Amazon Machine Images are the basic building block for launching virtual
machine in EC2. They can be either S3 or EBS backed and they contain the
operating system and various other metadata that is required for initial boot.

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EC2 Terminology
When launching an EC2 instance, you will initially begin by selecting an AMI and
an Instance type (optionally an availability zone). You will then have to select
various configuration options for your EC2 instance such as the networking
typology (EC2 Classic or VPC), what sort of storage devices you would like
attached (number and sizes of EBS volumes, ephemeral drives), and whether or
not you will be creating the storage devices from any S3 snapshots.

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AWS EC2 Security Groups
Security Groups and network ACLs allow you to control inbound and outbound
network access to and from your instances. If you do not have a default VPC you
must create a VPC and launch instances into that VPC to leverage advanced
networking features such as private subnets, outbound security group filtering,
network ACLs, Dedicated Instances, and VPN connections.

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Virtual Private Cloud: VPC
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) lets you provision a logically
isolated section of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud where you can
launch AWS resources in a virtual network that you define. You have complete
control over your virtual networking environment, including selection of your own
IP address range, creation of subnets, and configuration of route tables and
network gateways.
You can easily customize the network configuration for your Amazon VPC. For
example, you can create a public-facing subnet for your webservers that has
access to the Internet, and place your backend systems such as databases or
application servers in a private-facing subnet with no Internet access. You can
leverage multiple layers of security, including security groups and network
access control lists, to help control access to Amazon EC2 instances in
each subnet.
Additionally, you can create a Hardware Virtual Private Network (VPN)
connection between your corporate datacenter and your VPC and leverage the
AWS cloud as an extension of your corporate datacenter.

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Infrastructure and Applications
Amazon and Oracle have worked together to offer customers convenient options
for deploying enterprise applications on the cloud. Customers can not only build
enterprise-grade solutions hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS) using
database and middleware software by Oracle, but they can also launch entire
enterprise software stacks from Oracle on EC2.
New and existing SAP customers can deploy their SAP solutions on SAP
certified Amazon EC2 instances in production environments knowing that SAP
and AWS have tested the performance of the underlying AWS resources, verified
their performance, and certified them against the same standards that apply to
servers and virtual platforms.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides infrastructure services that allow
customers to easily run Microsoft Windows Server applications in the cloud,
without the cost and complexity of having to purchase or manage servers or data
centers. AWS provides pre-configured virtual machines, which enable customers
to start running fully supported Windows Server virtual machine instances in
minutes. Customers may also rely on the global infrastructure of AWS to power
everything from custom .NET applications to enterprise deployments of Microsoft
Exchange Server, SQL Server or SharePoint Server.
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Elastic & Scalability
Auto Scaling allows you to scale your Amazon EC2 capacity up or down
automatically according to conditions you define. With Auto Scaling, you can
ensure that the number of Amazon EC2 instances you’re using increases
seamlessly during demand spikes to maintain performance, and decreases
automatically during demand lulls to minimize costs. Auto Scaling is particularly
well suited for applications that experience hourly, daily, or weekly variability in
usage. Auto Scaling is enabled by Amazon CloudWatch and available at no
additional charge beyond Amazon CloudWatch fees.

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Amazon Auto Scaling
Auto Scaling works as a trinity of services working in concert. Elastic Load
Balancers and EC2 instances feed metrics to CloudWatch. Auto Scaling defines
a group with Launch Configurations and Auto Scaling Policies. Cloud Watch
Alarms execute Auto Scaling policies to affect the size of your fleet.

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3 Services
All of these services work well individually, but together they become more
powerful and increase the control and flexibility our customers demand.

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Amazon Auto Scaling
Let’s say that you want to make sure that the number of healthy Amazon EC2
instances behind an Elastic Load Balancer is never fewer than two. You can use
Auto Scaling to set this condition, and when Auto Scaling detects that this
condition has been met, it automatically adds the requisite amount of Amazon
EC2 instances to your Auto Scaling Group. Or, if you want to make sure that you
add Amazon EC2 instances when latency of any one of your Amazon EC2
instances exceeds 4 seconds over any 15 minute period, you can set that
condition, and Auto Scaling will take the appropriate action on your Amazon EC2
instances — even when running behind an Elastic Load Balancer. Auto Scaling
works equally well for scaling Amazon EC2 instances whether you’re using
Elastic Load Balancing or not.

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Metadata Service
Q: How can I obtain information about myself from a running instance?

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Elastic Load Balancing Exercise #2
1. Security groups
2. Launch an instance.
3. Instance bootstrapping.
4. Machine images and elastic IPs.

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More Information
There are step-by-step directions at the end of this guide.

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1. ___________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________
2. ___________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________

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Programmable Infrastructure
When you bring together all the tools and benefits of the Amazon Cloud, new
strategies, paradigms, and processes become possible that simply were not
possible with Traditional IT. One of the most significant among these is the idea
of programmable infrastructure.

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AWS CloudFormation
AWS CloudFormation gives developers and systems administrators an easy way
to create a collection of related AWS resources and provision them in an orderly
and predictable fashion. The AWS CloudFormation samples package contains a
collection of templates that illustrate various usage cases. Stacks can be created
from the templates via the AWS Management Console, through the AWS
CloudFormation command line tools or via the AWS CloudFormation APIs.
(Demo CloudFormation in the AWS Management Console.)

More Information
Sample templates for CloudFormation:
http://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/aws-cloudformationtemplates/

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AWS CloudFormation: Best Practices
Where previously, engineers would have diagrams of network layouts, and
documents specifying firewall rules, with AWS all of that can be programed into
code and then checked into your favorite source control tool. This enables clear
versioning and change tracking.

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Deployment & Management
AWS CloudFormation gives developers and systems administrators an easy way
to create a collection of related AWS resources and provision them in an orderly
and predictable fashion.

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AWS Web Service API
AWS has created an API that is wrapped into software development kits that
come is a variety of languages and structures. All the SDKs are based on the
same API and expose native interfaces that allow you to leverage the expertise
you already have.

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AWS Web Service API
Most of the time, whatever API wrapper you use will dictate the interface.

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Managed Services
AWS offers many services that shift burden of undifferentiated heavy lifting off
the customer by leveraging Amazon engineering and automation expertise.
For example, Amazon S3 is automatically run across every availability zone in
the region. We do that for you so that you don’t have to worry about it. As a result
you get eleven nines of durability.
Although we have many managed services we are only going to dive into
RDS today.

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Amazon Relational Database Service: RDS
Amazon RDS is a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a
relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity
while managing time-consuming database administration tasks, freeing you up to
focus on your applications and business. Amazon RDS gives you access to the
full capabilities of a familiar MySQL database. This means the code, applications,
and tools you already use today with your existing MySQL databases work
seamlessly with Amazon RDS. Amazon RDS automatically patches the database
software and backs up your database, storing the backups for a user-defined
retention period. You also benefit from the flexibility of being able to scale the
compute resources or storage capacity associated with your relational database
instance via a single API call.

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Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS): is a web service
that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational
database in the cloud.

More Information
 RDS: http://aws.amazon.com/rds/

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Database Services Demo
1. Launch Multi-AZ cloud formation script form the cloud formation console
(Word Press or Drupal)
2. Test drive the console
3. Answer questions
4. Be sure to hit the launch RDS dialog, talk about the different options

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Resources
This section is a brief look at some of the resources available to you.

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•
•

•

•

More Information
Service Documentation http://aws.amazon.com/documentation
The Articles and Tutorials section features in-depth documents
designed to give practical help to developers working with AWS.
They have been created by members of the AWS developer
community or the Amazon Team and give structured examples,
analysis, tips, tricks and guidelines based on real usage of AWS
services.
White Papers http://aws.amazon.com/whitepapers: There are
whitepapers authored by Amazon Team or AWS Community
features a comprehensive list of technical AWS whitepapers,
covering topics such as architecture, security and economics. This
page will be regularly updated with new and updated whitepapers.
Check back regularly or subscribe to the RSS feed for new content.
Solutions Case Studies http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/casestudies:The Sample Code & Libraries Catalog provides a listing of
code, SDKs, sample applications, and other tools available to for
use by the AWS developer community.

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• Marketing Overview Materials http://aws.amazon.com: AWS Case
Studies and customer success stories.
• Videos & Webinars http://www.youtube.com/AmazonWebServices:
View previously recorded webinars and videos about products,
architecture, security and more. Check back regularly for new
content from AWS, our customers and partners. There are also
AWS Videos on YouTube.
• AWS Blog http://aws.typepad.com/

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AWS User Groups
With the rapid growth of AWS among individual developers, start-ups, and
enterprises around the world, people are asking for AWS user groups. User
groups allow existing and new AWS users to join a growing, dynamic community,
and interact with other users to answer questions, share ideas, and learn about
new services and best practices.

More Information
• If you are a passionate AWS user and are interested in joining or
starting your own AWS User Group, see the list of existing groups
online or review the tips on starting your own group:
http://aws.amazon.com/usergroups/

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Summary
In summary here is what we covered in todays training.

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Next Steps
Your learning doesn’t stop here. Continue your AWS education with additional
courses or start the path to being certified.

More Information
• AWS Training: http://aws.amazon.com/aws-training/

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Thank You
This concludes our training. Please take a moment to fill out our evaluation form
so we can continue to enhance and revise out training to meet your needs. Your
feedback is important to us and we really appreciate your comments.

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qwikLAB
For our exercises we will be using qwikLAB. qwikLAB will provide you an IAM
User and Login Profile with which to access the AWS Management Console.
1. Navigate to https://aws.qwiklab.com
2. Register a new qwikLAB account if you don't have an existing qwikLAB
account.
3. Login.
Note: If you forgot your password, retrieve it using the mechanism provided to
send a reset link to your email.
4. Navigate to the class title "AWS Essentials" by clicking on it's title under "My
Classes"
5. Click the button "Start Lab" next to the class lab title and number.
Note: Wait a moment after clicking "Start Lab" while the lab is starting and until
you see the running lab details.
6. Click the 'Download PEM' button and save it to your Downloads directory or
folder.
7. Select the contents of the 'Password' field and click the button "Enter AWS
Console".
8. Enter 'awsstudent' into 'User Name" and paste the password you copied into
'Password' and click on the button "Sign in using our secure server".
Congratulations! You now have access to an AWS account and are logged into
the AWS Management Console.

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S3 Exercise #1
Getting Started with Amazon S3
1. Create a bucket in S3.
2. Add an object to the bucket.
3. View the object.
4. Move the object.
5. Delete the object and the bucket in S3.
Create a Bucket in S3
Every object in Amazon S3 is stored in a bucket. Before you can store data in
Amazon S3 you must create a bucket.

Note: You are not charged for creating a bucket; you are only charged for storing
objects in the bucket and for transferring objects in and out of the bucket.

1. Sign into the AWS Management Console and open the Amazon S3 console at
https://console.aws.amazon.com/s3.
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2. Click Create Bucket. The Create a
Bucket dialog box appears.

3. Enter a bucket name in the Bucket
Name field. The bucket name you
choose must be unique across all
existing bucket names in Amazon
S3. One way to do that is to prefix
your bucket names with your
company's name.
Bucket names must comply with the following requirements.
Bucket names:
 Can contain lowercase letters, numbers, periods (.) and dashes (-)
 Must start with a number or letter
 Must be between 3 and 255 characters long
 Must not be formatted as an IP address (e.g., 265.255.5.4)
Note: There might be additional restrictions on bucket names based on the
region your bucket is in or how you intend to access the object. Once you create
a bucket, you cannot change its name. In addition, the bucket name is visible in
the URL that points to the objects stored in the bucket. Make sure the bucket
name you choose is appropriate.
4. In the Region drop-down list box, select a region.
Ask the Instructor what region to select.
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5. Click Create. When
Amazon S3 successfully
creates your bucket, the
console displays your
empty bucket in the
Buckets panel.

Great Job: You've created a bucket in Amazon S3!!!

Add and Object to a Bucket:
Now that you've created a bucket, you're ready to add an object to it. An object
can be any kind of file: a text file, a photo, a video and so forth. When you add a
file to Amazon S3, you have the option of including metadata with the file and
setting permissions to control access to the file.

6. In the Amazon S3 console click the bucket you want to upload an object into
and then click
Upload in the
Objects and
Folders panel.
The Upload Select Files
wizard opens
(appearance may
differ slightly in
different

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browsers):

7. If you want to upload a folder you must click Enable Enhanced Uploader for
the Java applet. After you download the Java applet, the Enable Enhanced
Uploader link disappears from the wizard. You only need to do this once per
console session and you can transfer entire folders.
Note: If you are behind any corporate firewall you will need to install your
corporate supported proxy client for the Java applet to work.
8. Click Add Files to select the file to upload from your computer. A file selection
dialog box opens.
If you enabled advanced uploader in step 2, you see a Java file selection
dialog box. If not, you see an operating system specific dialog box.

9. The following image
shows a sample Java file
selection dialog box.
10. Select a sample graphic
that came with your
computer to upload and
click Open. The Upload
- Select Files wizard
shows the files and
folders you've selected
to upload.

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11. Click Start Upload. You can watch the progress of the upload using the
Transfer panel. The Transfer panel appears on the bottom of the screen as
soon as a you begin the upload.
If you want to toggle between hiding and viewing the Transfer panel, click
the Transfers button in the top right of the Objects and Folders panel.
After the object uploads successfully to Amazon S3, it appears in the
object listing.
Great Job: You've added a file to your bucket!!!

View an Object:
12. Now that you've added an object to a bucket, you can open and view it in a
browser. In the Amazon S3 console, right-click the objects you want to open.
13. Click Properties to browse the URL for
the item you added.

Note: By default your Amazon S3 buckets
and objects are private. To view object
using a URL, for example,
https://s3.amazonaws.com/Bucket/Object
the object must be publicly readable.
Otherwise, you will need to create signed
URL that includes a signature with
authentication information. You can
optionally save the object locally.
Great Job: You've opened your object!!!
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Move an Object:
Now that you've added an object to a bucket and viewed it, you might like to
move the object to a different bucket or folder.

14. In the Amazon S3 console, right-click the object you want to move. Tip You
can use the SHIFT and CRTL keys to select multiple objects and perform the
same action on them simultaneously.
15. Click Cut.
16. Navigate to the bucket (and folder) you
want to move the object to, and rightclick the folder or bucket you want to
move the object to.

17. Click Paste Into. Amazon S3 moves your files to the new location.
You can monitor the progress of the move on the Transfers panel. To hide
or show the Transfer panel, click the Transfers button at the top right of the
console page.
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Great Job: Your file has been moved!!!
Delete an Object and Bucket:
You've viewed the object. Now, you can delete it and the bucket it's in.
If you no longer need to store the objects you uploaded and moved while going
through this guide, you should delete them so you do not incur further charges on
those objects.
18. In the Amazon S3 console, right-click on the object you want to delete. A
dialog box shows the actions you can take on the selected object(s).

You can use the SHIFT and CRTL keys to select multiple objects and perform
the same action on them simultaneously.

19. Click Delete.
20. Confirm the deletion when the
console prompts you to.
21. Right-click the bucket you want to
delete. A dialog box shows the
actions you can take on the selected
bucket.
22. Click Delete. Confirm the deletion
when the console prompts you to.

To delete a bucket, you must first delete all of the objects in it. If you haven't
deleted all of the objects in your bucket, do that now.

Great Job: Your bucket is deleted!!!
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Elastic Load Balancing Exercise #2
1. Create an ELB across several EC2 instances
2. Deploy a simple application on EC2
3. Then distribute load by viewing the application
This lab will walk you through the process of creating an Elastic Load Balancer
(ELB) to load balance traffic across several EC2 instances in a single Availability
Zone. You will deploy a simple application on EC2 instances over which you will
distribute load by viewing the application in your browser.

During this lab you will achieve the following:


Launch a multiple server web server farm on EC2 using bootstrapping
techniques to configure a Linux server with Apache, PHP and a simple
PHP application downloaded from S3



Create an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) using the console to front your
created EC2 instances

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

Configure the ELB to front the web servers and distributed load



Explore Cloud Watch metrics for the ELB and also the instances behind
the ELB.

Launch Web Servers
In this lab we will launch a 2 server Amazon Linux farm with an Apache PHP web
server and basic application installed on initialization. This lab introduces you to
a very basic example of bootstrapping your instances using the meta-data
service to get you thinking about more complicated patterns that you might want
to implement to configure instances as they are started.

1. To start your instances
navigate to the EC2 page
in the AWS Console.

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Please ensure your region is set to US East (N. Virginia). In the upper right
corner of the page, you can choose the region using the selector in the
console shown below:

1.
2. Now click on Launch Instance.
3. Next select Launch Classic Wizard and click Continue. It is possible to start
your instances using the QuickLaunch wizard, but for the purposes of this lab
we want to see all the settings step by step, which is the way the Classic
Wizard captures instance information.

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4. Now select the Basic 64-bit Amazon Linux AMI. This is a machine image
from which our instances will be created. In this case this is an Amazon
maintained Linux distribution with access to all the software repositories we
require to install software for this lab (such as Apache and PHP).

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5. We want to start more than one instance for this lab, so change the number of
instances to 2 and click Continue.

6. In the next screen we will use the User Data field to bootstrap our instance,
running a custom script to install the necessary packages (Apache and PHP)
and sample code (PHP scripts) that we will use in this lab. User data
provides a mechanism to pass information to the Amazon metadata service,
which instances request information from at launch time. One property of the
metadata service is that shell scripts passed in will be executed. In our case
we will bootstrap using the script shown in the box below.
7. To do this, copy & paste the following initialization script (you can use ShiftEnter to get to a new line in the text box) into the User Data field and click
Continue:
#!/bin/sh
curl -L http://bootstrapping-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/bootstrap-elb.sh | sh

8. As an FYI - the shell script at the url above downloads from S3 and then
executes the following command:
yum -y install httpd php
chkconfig httpd on
/etc/init.d/httpd start
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cd /var/www/html
wget http://bootstrappingassets.s3.amazonaws.com/examplefiles-elb.zip
unzip examplefiles-elb.zip
This downloads and installs various components, starts them, and installs our
sample application.

9. Next you can click continue on this screen, but you will notice that should
you require, you are able to edit the size of the root volume, plus add aditional
disks to the instance at boot time.

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10. Give your new web servers a nice name like Essentials Lab Servers and
click Continue.

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11. For this lab, we will reuse the key pair we created in the earlier lab. You also
have the option of creating a new key pair.

12. Create a security group, which will be your firewall rules. As we are building
out a Web server, we can name this “Essentials Lab Web Tier”, and shown
below you need to open ports 22 and 80. You need to add a rule for both
ports. This enables SSH and HTTP traffic.

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13. Review your choices, and then click Launch. Your instances will now start.

Great Job!!!

Independently Connect to Each Web Server
14. First check the instances we started have finished their creation cycle by
monitoring them to make certain they are running. You’ll notice that the
instances will be in a ‘running’ state with ‘2/2 checks passed’.

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15. Now we can grab the public DNS entry allocated to each server so that we
can use this to hit the server in our web browser. Click on the first Web
Server, locate the server’s DNS name, select and copy the server’s name.

16. Paste the DNS name of each instance into another browser window or tab
and you should see something like the following images:

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17. This is the web page returned by the PHP script that was installed when the
instance when it started. It is a simple script that interrogates the metadata
service and returns the instance ID and where it is running. This will be
information that will help you see which instance you are hitting when we put
an Elastic Load Balancer in front of them.

Create an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB)
You now have two web servers, but you need a load balancer in front of these
servers to give your users a single location for accessing both servers and to
balance user requests across your simple web server farm.

18. In the EC2 console, click on the Load Balancers link, and click on Create
Load Balancer button.

19. For this lab we will be creating a simple HTTP load balancer, so give your
ELB a new name like LabELB, accept the default listener, and
click Continue.
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20. On the next screen change Ping Path to / (delete index.html) and change
the Healthy Threshold to 3. The ping path is the location on our web
servers the ELB will check is returning a healthy response to keep instances
in service or not. In our example / will return the default page – our PHP
generated page seen earlier. The Healthy Threshold is the number of
successful checks the ELB expects to see in a row before bringing an
instance into service behind the ELB. We are lowering this to speed things up
for our lab.

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21. Click continue to accept the advanced options. Note that these options can
be changed in the future, and configure how the ELB Health Check will be
performed including the health check protocol, port, and path as well as the
health check interval, timeout, and heath thresholds.
22. Select your Web Servers to add them to your ELB and click Continue.

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23. Review your ELB settings and click Create (followed by Close).
24. AWS is now creating your ELB. It will take a couple of minutes to spin up
your load balancers, attach your web servers, and pass the health checks.

Click on your load balancer, select the Instances tab, and wait until the
instances status changes from Out of Service to In Service. Also note that
the overall ‘Healthy?’ column turns from N0 to Yes. Your ELB is ready when
this happens.

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25. Once your ELB is healthy, click on the Description tab, select and copy the
ELB’s DNS name.

ELBs work across availability zones and they also scale elastically as
demand dictates. They therefore do not have IP addresses but rather a URL
to hit.

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26. Open the ELB URL in
another browser tab. Hit
the browser refresh button
a few times and you
should cycle through your
web servers such as the
following images.

The URL in these
browsers is the ELB
address, not the
instance addresses.

Great Job you created an ELB!!!

View ELB CloudWatch Metrics
ELB automatically reports load
balancer metrics to CloudWatch.
You can view these metrics by
clicking on the CloudWatch tab in
the console.

In CloudWatch, click on the ELB link
on the left, and select the metric you
would like to view. ELB reports
request latency, request count,
healthy & unhealthy host counts,
and a number of additional metrics.
The metrics are reported as they are
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encountered and can take several minutes to show up in CloudWatch. The
following screenshot shows CloudWatch graphing the HealthyHostCount, which
transitioned from zero healthy hosts to two shortly after the ELB was created for
this lab.

Great Job!!! You have now been able to create an Elastic Load Balancer backed
by multiple EC2 servers. In normal operation we would advise that these servers
be located in separate availability zones to enable your application to be fault
tolerant. You have also briefly seen how you can monitor the ELB metrics in
Cloud Watch.

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