This document summarizes a presentation about modernizing older AWS deployments. It discusses characteristics of older AWS services like EC2 Classic, first generation instance types, and magnetic storage. It recommends replacing these with newer services that offer features like static IP addresses, SSD storage, and hardware virtualization. The presentation also suggests assessing automation, high availability, security, and operations practices to identify services that could enhance scalability, reliability, security, and lower costs. It provides examples like CloudFormation, Auto Scaling, IAM, and CloudWatch. The goal is to periodically review environments for new AWS services and features.

1. Modernizing Your AWS Deployment
Throwback Thursday
Presented by Patrick Hannah
VP of Engineering, CloudHesive

2. Introduction
• Who am I?
• What’s my background?

3. What are we going to talk about?
• Overview
• Characteristics of older AWS deployments
• Enhancements to existing AWS services
• New AWS services
• Commonly overlooked AWS services
• Conclusion

4. EC2 Classic
• EC2-Classic
– Original Network configuration available on AWS
– Has since been augmented by VPC
• With VPC you get the ability to:
– Assign static private IP addresses to your instances that persist across starts and
stops
– Assign multiple IP addresses to your instances
– Define network interfaces, and attach one or more network interfaces to your
instances
– Change security group membership for your instances while they're running
– Control the outbound traffic from your instances (egress filtering) in addition to
controlling the inbound traffic to them (ingress filtering)
– Add an additional layer of access control to your instances in the form of network
access control lists (ACL)
– Run your instances on single-tenant hardware
– Launch newer instance types
– Better integrate with Abstracted/Managed services (RDS, for example)
– More performant network capabilities

5. First Generation Instance Types
• First Generation Instance Types
– Original Instance Types offered on AWS
– Have since been augmented by Newer Generation Instance
Types
• With newer generation instances you get:
– Support in all AWS Regions
– Lower price point (cost per CPU, cost per GB RAM)
– Specific, known processor families (and direct access to their
features)
– More performant network capabilities

6. Magnetic Storage
• Magnetic Storage
– Original persistent Block Storage offered on AWS
– Has since been augmented by General Purpose SSD or
Provisioned IOPS SSD
– Variable IOPS (40-200) at half the cost – good for cheap but
slow block storage
– Consider replacing in favor of General Purpose SSD – good for
all around block storage

7. Para-Virtualized, Instance-Store and 32 Bit Instances
• Para-virtualized Instances
– Original virtualization option offered on AWS
– Has since been augmented by Hardware Virtualized Instances
– Not supported in all AWS Regions
– Does not offer SR-IOV (network performance) capabilities
• Instance-Store Instances
– Source is S3, runs from local instance (ephemeral) storage
• 32 Bit AMIs
– Newer AWS Regions no longer offer support for 32 Bit AMIs

8. What are you doing for automation?
• CloudFormation
– Automation of AWS components
– Reference Architectures/Marketplace are a great place to start
• Elastic Beanstalk
– Automation of application deployments
• OpsWorks
– Automation of AWS components and Configuration Management
on the OS layer and above

9. What are you doing for high availability/disaster recovery?
• Consider how people and things connect to you?
– IP Address
• Is it an Elastic IP?
– DNS
• Pointing towards an instance?
• Pointing (incorrectly) towards an IP Address of an ELB?
• Using Route53?
• What happens if an instance dies?
– Prevent user error: enable termination protection
– Recover from the failure of host hardware with CloudWatch
Actions
– Auto Scaling Group + ELB

10. What are you doing for security?
• IAM
– By now you are using IAM (right?)
– What about instance roles?
– Problems with a policy? Use the Policy Simulator
– Is someone over permissioned? Use Access Advisor
– Is someone actually using the user/role? Use the Credential Report
• CloudTrail
– Previously you had to enable one region at a time – now you can enable all regions at once
– Probably want to check this
• Workspaces
– Easy Bastion (if you are a Windows shop)
• Active Directory
– Directory service comes in three flavors now
• AD Connector
• Lightweight Directory Service
• Full Active Directory
• Tenancy options have expanded
– Dedicated instances
– Dedicated hosts
• WAF + Shield
– WAF now supports ALB in addition to CloudFront
– Shield, DDoS protection that AWS has already provided, now with a premium flavor

11. What are you doing for Operations?
• Account/Billing Management
– Alerts – alerts when a predefined threshold has been met
– Reports – granular reporting + forecasting
– Contacts – granular contacts for security, operations and billing
• Tagging
– Manage your tags from one place using the Tag Editor
– Billing Tags for cross charging
• Trusted Advisor
• CloudWatch
– In addition to metrics and alarms now supports logs, dashboards, events and actions
• VPC
– Peering between VPCs (in the same region) without deploying an EC2 based solution
– NAT Gateway without deploying an EC2 based solution
– Multiple CGWs with the same Peer IP Address + NAT + Stronger Encryption/Hashing
– VPC Logs
– IPv6
– ALB
• SSM
– Builds on EC2 Run Command
• X-Ray
– Application Performance Monitoring
• PHD
– Single pane of glass for notifications directly impacting account

12. Conclusion and Some Advice
• Assess your environment
– Legacy?
– New Services?
– Underused Services?
– Enhanced Services?
– Roll your own versus managed/abstracted?
• Prioritize your findings
– Improve Scalability?
– Improve Reliability?
– Enhance Security?
– Lower Costs?
• Implement them
– Model in a sandbox, implement in production
• Review your environment on a periodic basis
– New services and features come out weekly!

13. Further Learning
• Getting Started: https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started
• General Reference: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr
• Global Infrastructure: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-
infrastructure/
• FAQs: https://aws.amazon.com/faqs
• Documentation: https://aws.amazon.com/documentation/
• Architecture: https://aws.amazon.com/architecture
• Whitepapers: https://aws.amazon.com/whitepapers
• Security: https://aws.amazon.com/security
• Blog: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs
• Service Specific Pages: https://aws.amazon.com/service
• SlideShare: http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices
• Github: https://github.com/aws and https://github.com/awslabs

14. Florida Meetups
• http://www.meetup.com/aws-user-group-miami/
• http://www.meetup.com/Miami-AWS-Users-Group/
• http://www.meetup.com/South-Florida-Amazon-
Web-Services-Meetup/
• http://www.meetup.com/awsflorida/
• http://www.meetup.com/AWS-User-Groups-of-
Florida-Jacksonville/

15. Q&A
• Questions?

16. THANK YOU!
Interested?
sales@cloudhesive.com
http://www.cloudhesive.com