Amazon – Technology Geek

AWS EDGE Services

Posted on November 13, 2023 by Osama Mustafa in AWS, Cloud

AWS edge computing services provide infrastructure and software that move data processing and analysis as close to the endpoint as necessary. This includes deploying AWS managed hardware and software to locations outside AWS data centers, and even onto customer-owned devices.

You can extend the cloud for a consistent hybrid experience using these AWS edge services related to locations:

AWS edge locations – Edge locations are connected to the AWS Regions through the AWS network backbone. Amazon CloudFront, AWS WAF, and AWS Shield are services you use here.
AWS Local Zones – Local Zones are an extension of the AWS Cloud located close to large population and industry centers. You learned about Local Zones in Module 1: Architecting Fundamentals.
AWS Outposts – With AWS Outposts, you can run some AWS services on premises or at your own data center.
AWS Snow Family – The Snow Family of products provides offline storage at the edge, which is used to deliver data back to AWS Regions.

Edge services architecture

Review the edge services architecture. A user sends a request to an application partly hosted on premises. The user’s request interacts with Amazon Route 53, AWS WAF, Amazon CloudFront and AWS Outposts. The AWS services hosted in the cloud are protected with AWS Shield.

Amazon Route 53

Amazon Route 53 provides a DNS, domain name registration, and health-checks. Route 53 was designed to give developers and businesses a reliable and cost-effective way to route end users to internet applications. It translates names like example.com into the numeric IP addresses that computers use to connect to each other.

Route 53 effectively connects user requests to infrastructure running in AWS—such as EC2 instances, ELB load balancers, or Amazon S3 buckets—and can also be used to route users to infrastructure outside of AWS.

You can configure a Amazon CloudWatch alarm to check on the state of your endpoints. Combine your DNS with Health Check Metrics to monitor and route traffic to healthy endpoints.

Amazon Route 53 public and private DNS

A hosted zone is a container for records. Records contain information about how you want to route traffic for a specific domain, such as example.com, and its subdomains such as dev.example.com or mail.example.com. A hosted zone and the corresponding domain have the same name.

PUBLIC HOSTED ZONE

Public hosted zones contain records that specify how you want to route traffic on the internet.

For internet name resolution
Delegation set – for authoritative name servers to be provided to the registrar or parent domain
Route to internet-facing resources
Resolve from the internet
Global routing policies

PRIVATE HOSTED ZONE

Private hosted zones contain records that specify how you want to route traffic in your Amazon VPC.

For name resolution inside a VPC
Can be associated with multiple VPCs and across accounts
Route to VPC resources
Resolve from inside the VPC
Integrate with on-premises private zones using forwarding rules and endpoints

Routing policies

When you create a record, you choose a routing policy, which determines how Amazon Route 53 responds to queries.

Failover routing

Amazon Route 53 health checks monitor the health and performance of your web applications, web servers, and other resources.

Each health check that you create can monitor one of the following:

The health of a specified resource, such as a web server
The status of other health checks
The status of an Amazon CloudWatch alarm

After you create a health check, you can get the status of the health check, get notifications when the status changes, and configure DNS failover.

Geolocation routing

Geolocation routing lets you choose the resources that serve your traffic based on the geographic location of your users, meaning the location that DNS queries originate from. For example, you might want all queries from Europe to be routed to an ELB load balancer in the Frankfurt Region.

Geoproximity routing

Geoproximity routing lets Amazon Route 53 route traffic to your resources based on the geographic location of your users and your resources. You can also optionally choose to route more traffic or less to a given resource by specifying a value, known as a bias. A bias expands or shrinks the size of the geographic Region from which traffic is routed to a resource.

Latency-based routing

If your application is hosted in multiple AWS Regions, you can improve performance for your users by serving their requests from the AWS Region that provides the lowest latency.

Data about the latency between users and your resources is based entirely on traffic between users and AWS data centers. If you aren’t using resources in an AWS Region, the actual latency between your users and your resources can vary significantly from AWS latency data. This is true even if your resources are located in the same city as an AWS Region.

Multivalue answer routing

Multivalue answer routing lets you configure Route 53 to return multiple values, such as IP addresses for your web servers, in response to DNS queries. You can specify multiple values for almost any record, but multivalue answer routing also lets you check the health of each resource. Route 53 returns only values for healthy resources.

The ability to return multiple health-checkable IP addresses is a way for you to use DNS to improve availability and load balancing. However, it is not a substitute for a load balancer.

Weighted routing

Weighted routing enables you to assign weights to a resource record set to specify the frequency with which different responses are served.

In this example of a blue/green deployment, a weighted routing policy is used to send a small amount of traffic to a new production environment. If the new environment is operating as intended, the amount of weighted traffic can be increased to confirm it can handle the increased load. If the test is successful, all traffic can be sent to the new environment.

Amazon CloudFront

Content delivery networks

It’s not always possible to replicate your entire infrastructure across the globe when your web traffic is geo-dispersed. It is also not cost effective. With a content delivery network (CDN), you can use its global network of edge locations to deliver a cached copy of your web content to your customers.

To reduce response time, the CDN uses the nearest edge location to the customer or the originating request location. Using the nearest edge location dramatically increases throughput because the web assets are delivered from cache. For dynamic data, you can configure many CDNs to retrieve data from the origin servers.

Use Regional edge caches when you have content that is not accessed frequently enough to remain in an edge location. Regional edge caches absorb this content and provide an alternative to having to retrieve that content from the origin server.

Edge caching

Edge caching helps applications perform dramatically faster and cost significantly less at scale. Review the content below to learn the benefits of edge caching.

WITHOUT EDGE CACHING

As an example, let’s say you are serving an image from a traditional web server, not from Amazon CloudFront. You might serve an image named sunsetphoto.png using the URL:

http://example.com/sunsetphoto.png

Your users can easily navigate to this URL and see the image. They don’t realize that their request was routed from one network to another (through the complex collection of interconnected networks that comprise the internet) until the image was found.

WITH EDGE CACHING

Amazon CloudFront speeds up the distribution of your content by routing each user request through the AWS backbone network to the edge location that can best serve your content. Typically, this is a CloudFront edge server that provides the fastest delivery to the viewer.

Using the AWS network can dramatically reduce the number of networks your users’ requests must pass through, which improves performance. Users get lower latency (the time it takes to load the first byte of the file) and higher data transfer rates.

You also get increased reliability and availability because copies of your files (also called objects) are now held (or cached) in multiple edge locations around the world.

Amazon CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront is a global CDN service that accelerates delivery of your websites, APIs, video content, or other web assets. It integrates with other AWS products to give developers and businesses a straightforward way to accelerate content to end users. There are no minimum usage commitments.

Amazon CloudFront provides extensive flexibility for optimizing cache behavior, coupled with network-layer optimizations for latency and throughput. The CDN offers a multi-tier cache by default, with regional edge caches that improve latency and lower the load on your origin servers when the object is not already cached at the edge.

Amazon CloudFront supports real-time, bidirectional communication over the WebSocket protocol. This persistent connection permits clients and servers to send real-time data to one another without the overhead of repeatedly opening connections. This is especially useful for communications applications such as chat, collaboration, gaming, and financial trading.

Support for WebSockets in Amazon CloudFront makes it possible for customers to manage WebSocket traffic through the same avenues as any other dynamic and static content. With CloudFront, customers can take advantage of distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection using the built-in CloudFront integrations with Shield and AWS WAF.

Amazon CloudFront caching

When a user requests content that you are serving with Amazon CloudFront, the user is routed to the edge location that provides the lowest latency. Content is delivered with the best possible performance. To review the steps for CloudFront caching, select each hotspot in the image below.

Improving CloudFront performance

WHAT AWS DOES

AWS provides features that improve the performance of your content delivery:

TCP optimization – CloudFront uses TCP optimization to observe how fast a network is already delivering your traffic and the latency of your current round trips. It then uses that data as input to automatically improve performance.
TLS 1.3 support – CloudFront supports TLS 1.3, which provides better performance with a simpler handshake process that requires fewer round trips. It also adds improved security features.
Dynamic content placement – Serve dynamic content, such as web applications or APIs from ELB load balancers or Amazon EC2 instances, by using CloudFront. You can improve the performance, availability, and security of your content.

You can also adjust the configuration of your CloudFront distribution to accommodate for better performance:

Define your caching strategy – Choosing an appropriate TTL is important. In addition, consider caching based on things like query string parameters, cookies, or request headers.
Improve your cache hit ratio – You can view the percentage of viewer requests that are hits, misses, and errors in the CloudFront console. Make changes to your distribution based on statistics collected in the CloudFront cache statistics report.
Use Origin Shield – Get an additional layer of caching between the regional edge caches and your origin. It is not always a best fit for your use case, but it can be beneficial for viewers that are spread across geographic regions or on-premises origins with capacity or bandwidth constraints.

DDoS Protection

A DDoS attack is an attack in which multiple compromised systems attempt to flood a target, such as a network or web application, with traffic. A DDoS attack can prevent legitimate users from accessing a service and can cause the system to crash due to the overwhelming traffic volume.

OSI layer attacks

In general, DDoS attacks can be segregated by which layer of the OSI model they attack. They are most common at the Network (layer 3), Transport (Layer 4), Presentation (Layer 6) and Application (Layer 7) Layers.

Infrastructure Layer Attacks – Attacks at Layer 3 and 4, are typically categorized as Infrastructure layer attacks. These are also the most common type of DDoS attack and include vectors like synchronized (SYN) floods and other reflection attacks like User Datagram Packet (UDP) floods. These attacks are usually large in volume and aim to overload the capacity of the network or the application servers. But fortunately, these are also the type of attacks that have clear signatures and are easier to detect.

Application Layer Attacks – An attacker may target the application itself by using a layer 7 or application layer attack. In these attacks, similar to SYN flood infrastructure attacks, the attacker attempts to overload specific functions of an application to make the application unavailable or extremely unresponsive to legitimate users.

AWS Solutions

AWS Shield Standard, AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF), and AWS Firewall Manager are AWS services that protect architectures against web-based attacks. Review the section below to learn more about each of these AWS services.

AWS Shield

AWS Shield is a managed DDoS protection service that safeguards your applications running on AWS. It provides you with dynamic detection and automatic inline mitigations that minimize application downtime and latency. There are two tiers of AWS Shield: Shield Standard and Shield Advanced.

AWS Shield Standard provides you protection against some of the most common and frequently occurring infrastructure (Layer 3 and 4) attacks. This includes SYN/UDP floods and reflection attacks. Shield Standard improves availability of your applications on AWS. The service applies a combination of traffic signatures, anomaly algorithms, and other analysis techniques. Shield Standard detects malicious traffic and it provides real-time issue mitigation. You are protected by Shield Standard at no additional charge.

If you need even more protection from DDoS attacks on your applications, consider using Shield Advanced. You get additional detection and mitigation against large and sophisticated DDoS attacks, near real-time visibility, and integration with AWS WAF, a web application firewall.

AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF)

AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps protect your web applications or APIs against common web exploits and bots. AWS WAF gives you control over how traffic reaches your applications. Create security rules that control bot traffic and block common attack patterns, such as SQL injection (SQLi) or cross-site scripting (XSS). You can also monitor HTTP(S) requests that are forwarded to your compatible AWS services.

AWS WAF: Components of access control

Before configuring AWS WAF, you should understand the components used to control access to your AWS resources.

Web ACLs – You use a web ACL to protect a set of AWS resources. You create a web ACL and define its protection strategy by adding rules.
Rules – Each rule contains a statement that defines the inspection criteria and an action to take if a web request meets the criteria.
Rules groups – You can use rules individually or in reusable rule groups.
Rule statements – This is the part of a rule that tells AWS WAF how to inspect a web request.
IP set – This is a collection of IP addresses and IP address ranges that you want to use together in a rule statement.
Regex pattern set – This is a collection of regular expressions that you want to use together in a rule statement.

AWS Firewall Manager

AWS Firewall Manager simplifies your AWS WAF and Amazon VPC security groups administration and maintenance tasks. Set up your AWS WAF firewall rules, Shield protections, and Amazon VPC security groups once.

The service automatically applies the rules and protections across your accounts and resources, even as you add new resources. Firewall Manager helps you to:

Simplify management of rules across accounts and application.
Automatically discover new accounts and remediate noncompliant events.
Deploy AWS WAF rules from AWS Marketplace.
Enable rapid response to attacks across all accounts.

As new applications are created, Firewall Manager also facilitates bringing new applications and resources into compliance with a common set of security rules from day one. Now you have a single service to build firewall rules, create security policies, and enforce them in a consistent, hierarchical manner across your entire AWS infrastructure.

AWS Outposts solutions

These applications might need to generate near-real-time responses to end-user applications, or they might need to communicate with other on-premises systems or control on-site equipment. Examples include workloads running on factory floors for automated operations in manufacturing, real-time patient diagnosis or medical imaging, and content and media streaming.

You need a solution to securely store and process customer data that must remain on premises or in countries outside an AWS Region. You need to run data-intensive workloads and process data locally, or when you want closer controls on data analysis, backup, and restore.

With Outposts, you can extend the AWS Cloud to an on-premises data center. Outposts come in different form factors, each with separate requirements. Verify that your site meets the requirements for the form factor that you’re ordering.

The AWS Outposts family is made up of two types of Outposts: Outposts racks and Outposts servers. Choose each tab to learn more about the Outposts family products.

OUTPOSTS RACKS

When you order an Outposts rack, you can choose from a variety of Outposts configurations. Each configuration provides a mix of EC2 instance types and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes.

The benefits of Outposts racks include the following:

Scale up to 96 42U–standard racks.
Pool compute and storage capacity between multiple Outposts racks.
Get more service options than Outposts servers.

To fulfill the Outposts rack order, AWS will schedule a date and time with you. You will also receive a checklist of items to verify or provide before the installation. The team will roll the rack to the identified position, and your electrician can power the rack. The team will establish network connectivity for the rack over the uplink that you provide, and they will configure the rack’s capacity.

The installation is complete when you confirm that the Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS capacity for your AWS Outpost is available from your AWS account.

OUTPOSTS SERVERS

With Outposts servers, you can order hardware at a smaller scale while still providing you AWS services on premises. You can choose from Arm-based or Intel-based options. Not all services available in Outposts racks are supported in Outposts servers.

Outposts servers are delivered directly to you and installed by either your own onsite personnel or a third-party vendor. Once connected to your network, AWS will remotely provision compute and storage resources.

Benefits of Outposts servers include the following:

Place in your own rack
Choose from:
- 1U Graviton-based processor
- 2U Intel Xeon Scalable processor

Outposts extend your VPC

A virtual private cloud (VPC) spans all Availability Zones in its AWS Region. You can extend any VPC in the Region to your Outpost by adding an Outpost subnet.

Outposts support multiple subnets. You choose the EC2 instance subnet when you launch the EC2 instance in your Outpost. You cannot choose the underlying hardware where the instance is deployed, because the Outpost is a pool of AWS compute and storage capacity.

Each Outpost can support multiple VPCs that can have one or more Outpost subnets.

You create Outpost subnets from the VPC CIDR range where you created the Outpost. You can use the Outpost address ranges for resources, such as EC2 instances that reside in the Outpost subnet. AWS does not directly advertise the VPC CIDR, or the Outpost subnet range to your on-premises location.

Regards

Osama

AWS Infrastructure

Posted on February 24, 2023February 24, 2023 by Osama Mustafa in AWS, Cloud

The AWS Global Cloud Infrastructure is the most secure, extensive, and reliable cloud platform, offering over 200 fully featured services from data centers globally.

AWS Data Center

AWS pioneered cloud computing in 2006 to provide rapid and secure infrastructure. AWS continuously innovates on the design and systems of data centers to protect them from man-made and natural risks. Today, AWS provides data centers at a large, global scale. AWS implements controls, builds automated systems, and conducts third-party audits to confirm security and compliance. As a result, the most highly-regulated organizations in the world trust AWS every day.

Availability Zone – AZ

An Availability Zone (AZ) is one or more discrete data centers with redundant power, networking, and connectivity in an AWS Region. Availability Zones are multiple, isolated areas within a particular geographic location. When you launch an instance, you can select an Availability Zone or let AWS choose one for you. If you distribute your instances across multiple Availability Zones and one instance fails, you can design your application so that an instance in another Availability Zone can handle requests.

Region

Each AWS Region consists of multiple, isolated, and physically separate Availability Zones within a geographic area. This achieves the greatest possible fault tolerance and stability. In your account, you determine which Regions you need. You can run applications and workloads from a Region to reduce latency to end users. You can do this while avoiding the upfront expenses, long-term commitments, and scaling challenges associated with maintaining and operating a global infrastructure.

AWS Local Zone

AWS Local Zones can be used for highly demanding applications that require single-digit millisecond latency to end users. Media and entertainment content creation, real-time multiplayer gaming, and Machine learning hosting and training are some use cases for AWS Local Zones.

CloudFront – Edge Location

An edge location is the nearest point to a requester of an AWS service. Edge locations are located in major cities around the world. They receive requests and cache copies of your content for faster delivery.

Regards

Osama

AWS Snow Family memberS

Posted on January 28, 2023 by Osama Mustafa in AWS, Cloud

The AWS Snow Family is a collection of physical devices that help to physically transport up to exabytes of data into and out of AWS.

AWS Snow Family is composed of AWS Snowcone, AWS Snowball, and AWS Snowmobile.

These devices offer different capacity points, and most include built-in computing capabilities. AWS owns and manages the Snow Family devices and integrates with AWS security, monitoring, storage management, and computing capabilities.

AWS Snowcone

AWS Snowcone is a small, rugged, and secure edge computing and data transfer device.

It features 2 CPUs, 4 GB of memory, and 8 TB of usable storage.

AWS Snowball

AWS Snowball offers two types of devices:

Snowball Edge Storage Optimized devices are well suited for large-scale data migrations and recurring transfer workflows, in addition to local computing with higher capacity needs.
- Storage: 80 TB of hard disk drive (HDD) capacity for block volumes and Amazon S3 compatible object storage, and 1 TB of SATA solid state drive (SSD) for block volumes.
- Compute: 40 vCPUs, and 80 GiB of memory to support Amazon EC2 sbe1 instances (equivalent to C5).
Snowball Edge Compute Optimized provides powerful computing resources for use cases such as machine learning, full motion video analysis, analytics, and local computing stacks.
- Storage: 42-TB usable HDD capacity for Amazon S3 compatible object storage or Amazon EBS compatible block volumes and 7.68 TB of usable NVMe SSD capacity for Amazon EBS compatible block volumes.
- Compute: 52 vCPUs, 208 GiB of memory, and an optional NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPU. Devices run Amazon EC2 sbe-c and sbe-g instances, which are equivalent to C5, M5a, G3, and P3 instances.

AWS Snowmobile

AWS Snowmobile is an exabyte-scale data transfer service used to move large amounts of data to AWS.

You can transfer up to 100 petabytes of data per Snowmobile, a 45-foot long ruggedized shipping container, pulled by a semi trailer truck.

Cheers

Osama

AWS Support

Posted on January 10, 2023 by Osama Mustafa in Uncategorized

AWS offers four different Support plans to help you troubleshoot issues, lower costs, and efficiently use AWS services.

You can choose from the following Support plans to meet your company’s needs:

Basic
Developer
Business
Enterprise

Basic Support

Basic Support is free for all AWS customers. It includes access to whitepapers, documentation, and support communities. With Basic Support, you can also contact AWS for billing questions and service limit increases.

With Basic Support, you have access to a limited selection of AWS Trusted Advisor checks. Additionally, you can use the AWS Personal Health Dashboard, a tool that provides alerts and remediation guidance when AWS is experiencing events that may affect you.

If your company needs support beyond the Basic level, you could consider purchasing Developer, Business, or Enterprise Support.

Developer, Business, and Enterprise Support

The Developer, Business, and Enterprise Support plans include all the benefits of Basic Support, in addition to the ability to open an unrestricted number of technical support cases. These three Support plans have pay-by-the-month pricing and require no long-term contracts.

The information in this course highlights only a selection of details for each Support plan. A complete overview of what is included in each Support plan, including pricing for each plan, is available on the AWS Support site.

In general, for pricing, the Developer plan has the lowest cost, the Business plan is in the middle, and the Enterprise plan has the highest cost.

Developer Support

Customers in the Developer Support plan have access to features such as:

Best practice guidance
Client-side diagnostic tools
Building-block architecture support, which consists of guidance for how to use AWS offerings, features, and services together

For example, suppose that your company is exploring AWS services. You’ve heard about a few different AWS services. However, you’re unsure of how to potentially use them together to build applications that can address your company’s needs. In this scenario, the building-block architecture support that is included with the Developer Support plan could help you to identify opportunities for combining specific services and features.

Business Support

Customers with a Business Support plan have access to additional features, including:

Use-case guidance to identify AWS offerings, features, and services that can best support your specific needs
All AWS Trusted Advisor checks
Limited support for third-party software, such as common operating systems and application stack components

Suppose that your company has the Business Support plan and wants to install a common third-party operating system onto your Amazon EC2 instances. You could contact AWS Support for assistance with installing, configuring, and troubleshooting the operating system. For advanced topics such as optimizing performance, using custom scripts, or resolving security issues, you may need to contact the third-party software provider directly.

Enterprise Support

In addition to all the features included in the Basic, Developer, and Business Support plans, customers with an Enterprise Support plan have access to features such as:

Application architecture guidance, which is a consultative relationship to support your company’s specific use cases and applications
Infrastructure event management: A short-term engagement with AWS Support that helps your company gain a better understanding of your use cases. This also provides your company with architectural and scaling guidance.
A Technical Account Manager

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)

Posted on December 23, 2022 by Osama Mustafa in Cloud

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is a service that provides object-level storage. Amazon S3 stores data as objects in buckets.

You can upload any type of file to Amazon S3, such as images, videos, text files, and so on. For example, you might use Amazon S3 to store backup files, media files for a website, or archived documents. Amazon S3 offers unlimited storage space. The maximum file size for an object in Amazon S3 is 5 TB.

Amazon S3 storage classes

With Amazon S3, you pay only for what you use. You can choose from a range of storage classes to select a fit for your business and cost needs. When selecting an Amazon S3 storage class, consider these two factors:

How often you plan to retrieve your data
How available you need your data to be

S3 Standard

Designed for frequently accessed data
Stores data in a minimum of three Availability Zones

S3 Standard provides high availability for objects. This makes it a good choice for a wide range of use cases, such as websites, content distribution, and data analytics. S3 Standard has a higher cost than other storage classes intended for infrequently accessed data and archival storage.

S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA)

Ideal for infrequently accessed data
Similar to S3 Standard but has a lower storage price and higher retrieval price

S3 Standard-IA is ideal for data infrequently accessed but requires high availability when needed. Both S3 Standard and S3 Standard-IA store data in a minimum of three Availability Zones. S3 Standard-IA provides the same level of availability as S3 Standard but with a lower storage price and a higher retrieval price.

S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (S3 One Zone-IA)

Stores data in a single Availability Zone
Has a lower storage price than S3 Standard-IA

Compared to S3 Standard and S3 Standard-IA, which store data in a minimum of three Availability Zones, S3 One Zone-IA stores data in a single Availability Zone. This makes it a good storage class to consider if the following conditions apply:

You want to save costs on storage.
You can easily reproduce your data in the event of an Availability Zone failure.

S3 Intelligent-Tiering

Ideal for data with unknown or changing access patterns
Requires a small monthly monitoring and automation fee per object

In the S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class, Amazon S3 monitors objects’ access patterns. If you haven’t accessed an object for 30 consecutive days, Amazon S3 automatically moves it to the infrequent access tier, S3 Standard-IA. If you access an object in the infrequent access tier, Amazon S3 automatically moves it to the frequent access tier, S3 Standard.

S3 Glacier

Low-cost storage designed for data archiving
Able to retrieve objects within a few minutes to hours

S3 Glacier is a low-cost storage class that is ideal for data archiving. For example, you might use this storage class to store archived customer records or older photos and video files.

S3 Glacier

Low-cost storage designed for data archiving
Able to retrieve objects within a few minutes to hours

S3 Glacier is a low-cost storage class that is ideal for data archiving. For example, you might use this storage class to store archived customer records or older photos and video files.

S3 Glacier Deep Archive

Lowest-cost object storage class ideal for archiving
Able to retrieve objects within 12 hours

When deciding between Amazon S3 Glacier and Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive, consider how quickly you need to retrieve archived objects. You can retrieve objects stored in the S3 Glacier storage class within a few minutes to a few hours. By comparison, you can retrieve objects stored in the S3 Glacier Deep Archive storage class within 12 hours.

Cheers

Osama

Amazon EC2 Options

Posted on November 24, 2022 by Osama Mustafa in Cloud

With Amazon EC2, you pay only for the compute time that you use. Amazon EC2 offers a variety of pricing options for different use cases. For example, if your use case can withstand interruptions, you can save with Spot Instances. You can also save by committing early and locking in a minimum level of use with Reserved Instances.

On-Demand

are ideal for short-term, irregular workloads that cannot be interrupted. No upfront costs or minimum contracts apply. The instances run continuously until you stop them, and you pay for only the compute time you use.

Sample use cases for On-Demand Instances include developing and testing applications and running applications that have unpredictable usage patterns. On-Demand Instances are not recommended for workloads that last a year or longer because these workloads can experience greater cost savings using Reserved Instances.

Amazon EC2 Savings Plans

AWS offers Savings Plans for several compute services, including Amazon EC2. Amazon EC2 Savings Plans enable you to reduce your compute costs by committing to a consistent amount of compute usage for a 1-year or 3-year term. This term commitment results in savings of up to 66% over On-Demand costs.

Any usage up to the commitment is charged at the discounted plan rate (for example, $10 an hour). Any usage beyond the commitment is charged at regular On-Demand rates.

Later in this course, you will review AWS Cost Explorer, a tool that enables you to visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time. If you are considering your options for Savings Plans, AWS Cost Explorer can analyze your Amazon EC2 usage over the past 7, 30, or 60 days. AWS Cost Explorer also provides customized recommendations for Savings Plans. These recommendations estimate how much you could save on your monthly Amazon EC2 costs, based on previous Amazon EC2 usage and the hourly commitment amount in a 1-year or 3-year plan.

Reserved Instances

are a billing discount applied to the use of On-Demand Instances in your account. You can purchase Standard Reserved and Convertible Reserved Instances for a 1-year or 3-year term, and Scheduled Reserved Instances for a 1-year term. You realize greater cost savings with the 3-year option.

At the end of a Reserved Instance term, you can continue using the Amazon EC2 instance without interruption. However, you are charged On-Demand rates until you do one of the following:

Terminate the instance.
Purchase a new Reserved Instance that matches the instance attributes (instance type, Region, tenancy, and platform).

Spot Instances

are ideal for workloads with flexible start and end times, or that can withstand interruptions. Spot Instances use unused Amazon EC2 computing capacity and offer you cost savings at up to 90% off of On-Demand prices.

Suppose that you have a background processing job that can start and stop as needed (such as the data processing job for a customer survey). You want to start and stop the processing job without affecting the overall operations of your business. If you make a Spot request and Amazon EC2 capacity is available, your Spot Instance launches. However, if you make a Spot request and Amazon EC2 capacity is unavailable, the request is not successful until capacity becomes available. The unavailable capacity might delay the launch of your background processing job.

After you have launched a Spot Instance, if capacity is no longer available or demand for Spot Instances increases, your instance may be interrupted. This might not pose any issues for your background processing job. However, in the earlier example of developing and testing applications, you would most likely want to avoid unexpected interruptions. Therefore, choose a different EC2 instance type that is ideal for those tasks.

Dedicated Hosts

are physical servers with Amazon EC2 instance capacity that is fully dedicated to your use.

You can use your existing per-socket, per-core, or per-VM software licenses to help maintain license compliance. You can purchase On-Demand Dedicated Hosts and Dedicated Hosts Reservations. Of all the Amazon EC2 options that were covered, Dedicated Hosts are the most expensive.

Cheers

Osama

Amazon EC2 instance types

Posted on November 16, 2022 by Osama Mustafa in Cloud

Amazon EC2 instance types are optimized for different tasks. When selecting an instance type, consider the specific needs of your workloads and applications. This might include requirements for compute, memory, or storage capabilities.

General purpose instances

provide a balance of compute, memory, and networking resources. You can use them for a variety of workloads, such as:

application servers
gaming servers
backend servers for enterprise applications
small and medium databases

Suppose that you have an application in which the resource needs for compute, memory, and networking are roughly equivalent. You might consider running it on a general purpose instance because the application does not require optimization in any single resource area.

Compute optimized instances

are ideal for compute-bound applications that benefit from high-performance processors. Like general purpose instances, you can use compute optimized instances for workloads such as web, application, and gaming servers.

However, the difference is compute optimized applications are ideal for high-performance web servers, compute-intensive applications servers, and dedicated gaming servers. You can also use compute optimized instances for batch processing workloads that require processing many transactions in a single group.

Memory optimized instances

are designed to deliver fast performance for workloads that process large datasets in memory. In computing, memory is a temporary storage area. It holds all the data and instructions that a central processing unit (CPU) needs to be able to complete actions. Before a computer program or application is able to run, it is loaded from storage into memory. This preloading process gives the CPU direct access to the computer program.

Suppose that you have a workload that requires large amounts of data to be preloaded before running an application. This scenario might be a high-performance database or a workload that involves performing real-time processing of a large amount of unstructured data. In these types of use cases, consider using a memory optimized instance. Memory optimized instances enable you to run workloads with high memory needs and receive great performance.

Accelerated computing instances

use hardware accelerators, or coprocessors, to perform some functions more efficiently than is possible in software running on CPUs. Examples of these functions include floating-point number calculations, graphics processing, and data pattern matching.

In computing, a hardware accelerator is a component that can expedite data processing. Accelerated computing instances are ideal for workloads such as graphics applications, game streaming, and application streaming.

Storage optimized instances

are designed for workloads that require high, sequential read and write access to large datasets on local storage. Examples of workloads suitable for storage optimized instances include distributed file systems, data warehousing applications, and high-frequency online transaction processing (OLTP) systems.

In computing, the term input/output operations per second (IOPS) is a metric that measures the performance of a storage device. It indicates how many different input or output operations a device can perform in one second. Storage optimized instances are designed to deliver tens of thousands of low-latency, random IOPS to applications.

You can think of input operations as data put into a system, such as records entered into a database. An output operation is data generated by a server. An example of output might be the analytics performed on the records in a database. If you have an application that has a high IOPS requirement, a storage optimized instance can provide better performance over other instance types not optimized for this kind of use case.

Cheers

Osama

Managing Container Storage with Kubernetes Volumes

Posted on September 25, 2022 by Osama Mustafa in DevOps Tools

Kubernetes volumes offer a simple way to mount external storage to containers. This lab will test your knowledge of volumes as you provide storage to some containers according to a provided specification. This will allow you to practice what you know about using Kubernetes volumes.

Create a Pod That Outputs Data to the Host Using a Volume

Create a Pod that will interact with the host file system by using vi maintenance-pod.yml.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
    name: maintenance-pod
spec:
    containers:
    - name: busybox
      image: busybox
      command: ['sh', '-c', 'while true; do echo Success! >> /output/output.txt; sleep 5; done']

Under the basic YAML, begin creating volumes, which should be level with the containers spec:

volumes:
- name: output-vol
  hostPath:
      path: /var/data

In the containers spec of the basic YAML, add a line for volume mounts:

volumeMounts:
- name: output-vol
  mountPath: /output

The complete YAML will be

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
    name: maintenance-pod
spec:
  containers:
    - name: busybox
      image: busybox
      command: ['sh', '-c', 'while true; do echo Success! >> /output/output.txt; sleep 5; done']
      volumeMounts:
      - name: output-vol
        mountPath: /output
  volumes:
   - name: output-vol
     hostPath:
      path: /var/data

Create a Multi-Container Pod That Shares Data Between Containers Using a Volume

Create another YAML file for a shared-data multi-container Pod by using vi shared-data-pod.yml
Start with the basic Pod definition and add multiple containers, where the first container will write the output.txt file and the second container will read the output.txt file:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
    name: shared-data-pod
spec:
    containers:
    - name: busybox1
      image: busybox
      command: ['sh', '-c', 'while true; do echo Success! >> /output/output.txt; sleep 5; done']
    - name: busybox2
      image: busybox
      command: ['sh', '-c', 'while true; do cat /input/output.txt; sleep 5; done']

Set up the volumes, again at the same level as containers with an emptyDir volume that only exists to share data between two containers in a simple way:

volumes:
- name: shared-vol
  emptyDir: {}

Mount that volume between the two containers by adding the following lines under command for the busybox1 container:

volumeMounts:
- name: shared-vol
  mountPath: /output

For the busybox2 container, add the following lines to mount the same volume under command to complete creating the shared file:

volumeMounts:
- name: shared-vol
  mountPath: /input

The complete file

Finish creating the multi-container Pod using kubectl create -f shared-data-pod.yml.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
    name: shared-data-pod
spec:
    containers:
    - name: busybox1
      image: busybox
      command: ['sh', '-c', 'while true; do echo Success! >> /output/output.txt; sleep 5; done']
      volumeMounts:
        - name: shared-vol
          mountPath: /output
    - name: busybox2
      image: busybox
      command: ['sh', '-c', 'while true; do cat /input/output.txt; sleep 5; done']
      volumeMounts:
        - name: shared-vol
          mountPath: /input
    volumes:
    - name: shared-vol
    emptyDir: {}

And you can now apply the YAML file.

Cheers

Osama