AWS_Essentials_Student_Guide_2.5x AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



1



 



AWS Essentials

Student Guide

Version 2.5

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



2

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



3

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



4



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



5



Course Overview

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





AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



6



Course Learning Objectives

High level learning objectives for this 1-day training.



AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



7

Background on AWS

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



AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



8

AWS History

This is the high level agenda for this section.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



9

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



10

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



11



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



12

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 cloud-

shaped 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



13



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



14

AWS Utility Model

What are the benefits of utility based services?



AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



15

AWS Utility Model

Economy of scale and how to leverage AWS expertise. 

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



16



AWS Utility Model

Since 2006, Amazon Web Services have been providing on demand, pay-as-

you-go infrastructure to businesses of all sizes.



AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



17



On-Premise vs. Cloud Computing

Some benefits of cloud computing are zero capital expenditure and no long-

term contracts.

Instead of paying for and organizing all of the physical requirements of an on-

premise data center you can launch instances and resources in and on-

demand nature.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



18



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



19



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.





AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



20



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





AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



21



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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



22

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



23



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



24

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



25

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



26

Quadrants of Security

Four quadrants of security built for Enterprise and Government standards.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



27

Physical Security

Physical (supplemental):

 Must pass two-factor authentication at least twice for floor access

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



28

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



29

Hardware, Software & Network

Hardware, Software

& Network (supplemental):

• Advanced network

protection systems

• Manage our data standard

to exacting standards

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



30

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



31

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



32

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



33

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



34

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



35

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



36

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



37

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



38

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



39

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



40

IAM Demo

1. How to create an IAM user

2. Assign the user a policy

3. Generate a password

4. Download the CSV

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



41

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



42

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, long-

term 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/about-

aws/globalinfrastructure/

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



43

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



44

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



45

1. ___________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________

2. ___________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________

3. ___________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________

4. ___________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



46

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



47

AWS Core Infrastructure & Services

Many of our services have analogs in the Traditional IT space and terminology.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



48

AWS Platform

We will be covering the following deployment management and services in this

training:

• CloudFormation

• IAM

• CloudWatch

• EC2

• S3

• EBS

• Glacier

• VPC

• RDS

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



49

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



50

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



51

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/

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



52

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



53

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



54

1. ___________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________

2. ___________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________

3. ___________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________

4. ___________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



55

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/

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



56

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/

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



57

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



58

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



59

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

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



60

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



61

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



62

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



63

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



64

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



65



More Information

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

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



66

Computer Services

AWS Compute Services are at the core of all the products and services that

make up the Amazon Cloud.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



67

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



68

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



69

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



70

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



71

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/

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



72

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

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



73

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



74

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



75

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



76

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



77

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



78

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



79

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



80

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



81

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



82

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



83

3 Services

All of these services work well individually, but together they become more

powerful and increase the control and flexibility our customers demand.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



84

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



85

Metadata Service

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

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



86

Elastic Load Balancing Exercise #2

1. Security groups

2. Launch an instance.

3. Instance bootstrapping.

4. Machine images and elastic IPs.



AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



87



More Information

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

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



88

1. ___________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________

2. ___________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



89

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



90

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-cloudformation-

templates/

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



91

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



92

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



93

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



94

AWS Web Service API

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

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



95

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



96

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



97

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/

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



98

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

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



99

Resources

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

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



100

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/case-

studies: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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



101

• 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/

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



102

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/

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



103

Summary

In summary here is what we covered in todays training.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



104

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/

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



105

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



106

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



107

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



108

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



109

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

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



110

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



111

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!!!

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



112

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 right-

click 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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



113

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!!!

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



114

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

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



115

 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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



116

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



117

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).



AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



118

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 Shift-

Enter 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

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



119

cd /var/www/html

wget http://bootstrapping-

assets.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.



AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



120



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

click Continue.



AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



121

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



122

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’.



AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



123

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:

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



124



AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



125

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



126



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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



127

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



128



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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



129

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



130

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

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



131

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.

AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5



132

THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.





AWS_Essentials_Student_Guide_2.5x AWS Essentials Student Guide 2.5

AWS_Essentials_Student_Guide_2.5

Navigation menu

Versions of this User Manual:

Views

Navigation