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

1. Your First Week on Amazon EC2
Don Southard
Solutions Architect
April 18, 2013
A hands on approach to understanding
Amazon EC2 and the cloud

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

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

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

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

6. Day 1 – Choose AMI

7. Day 1 – Instance Details

8. Day 1 – Instance user-data

9. Day 1 – Tags

10. Day 1 – Create Key Pair

11. Day 1- Configure Firewall

12. Day 1 – Instance Launched

13. Day 1 – Application Tasks
[laptop]$ ssh -i ~/ec2.pem ec2-user@ec2-54-242-253-200.compute-1.amazonaws.com
__| __|_ )
_| ( / Amazon Linux AMI
___|___|___|
https://aws.amazon.com/amazon-linux-ami/2012.09-release-notes/
There are 13 security update(s) out of 24 total update(s) available
Run "sudo yum update" to apply all updates.
[ec2-user@ip-10-40-203-29 ~]$ sudo yum -y -q update
[ec2-user@ip-10-40-203-29 ~]$ sudo yum -y -q install httpd mysql-server ruby19 git
[ec2-user@ip-10-40-203-29 ~]$ sudo service mysqld start
[ec2-user@ip-10-40-203-29 ~]$ sudo /etc/init.d/httpd start

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

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

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

17. Day 2 – Create a snapshot of our AMI

18. Day 2 – New AMI

19. Day 2 – Launch RDS DB Instance

20. Day 2 – RDS DB Instance Details

21. Day 2 – RDS Management Options

22. Day 2 – Granting EC2 App Access to RDS

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

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

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

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

27. Day 3 – Create Alarm

28. Day 3 – Create Alarm

29. Day 3 – Create Alarm

30. Day 3 – Create Alarm

31. Day 3 – Alarm Created

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

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

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

35. Day 4 – Define Load Balancer

36. Day 4 – Configure Health Check

37. Day 4 – Add EC2 Instance(s)

38. Day 4 – Elastic Load Balancer is Active

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

40. Day 4 – Find That AMI We Created

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

42. Day 5 – Setup Auto Scaling continued
[laptop]$ as-put-scaling-policy WebScaleUpPolicy
--auto-scaling group webscg
--adjustment=1 --type ChangeInCapacity --cooldown 300
[laptop]$ mon-put-metric-alarm WebHighCPUAlarm
--comparison-operator Greater ThanThreshold
--evaluation-periods 1 --metric-name CPUUtilization
--namespace "AWS/EC2" --period 600
--statistic Average --threshold 80
--alarm-actions POLICY-ARN_from_previous_step
--dimensions "AutoScalingGroup Name=webscg"

43. Day 4 – Check on Our Instances

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

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

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

47. Day 5 – Route 53 (DNS)

48. Day 5 – Identity & Access Management

49. Day 5 – Deployment Automation

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

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

52. Your First Week on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
A hands on approach to understanding Amazon EC2