AWS Architecting Solutions

Mentor Intros
Scott Farrell
• 3 AWS certifications - ACP, ASA , ASOA
• Ba Commerce - major in Accounting
• Masters of management - major in innovation
• Background in sysadmin, development, consulting
Basic Information – Contacts
• Forums
• The go-to point for all questions. A safe, collaborative space.
• be on your best behaviour
• Subject mentors
• questions about content
• Admin team (IT Masters) admin@itmasters.edu.au
• Extensions, subject selection, credits, special consideration
Basic Information – Subject Style
• AWS focus / hands-on focus
• Class time will also cover some theory and extension topics
• Pre reading is expected.
• lecture is not a summary of the text, it is assumed knowledge
• up and coming deliverables
• extension topics
• beyond the text, real examples, case studies
• discussion - Q&A
Housekeeping
• eBooks
• eExams
Materials
• https://learn.itmasters.edu.au
• Forums
• Weekly topic guides
• Resources (slides, homework, readings)
Materials: Textbook
• Access via kindle. Can also view in a browser.
• Exam focus on the textbook, and slides.
LABS
• LABS are intended to give you some hands on experience.
• the LABS also lead to questions in class, or for the forums.
• I will not be demo’ing material covered in the labs (as that is what the
labs are for), I’ll use the class time to cover topics not well addressed
elsewhere.
LABS
• organised by AWS
• you’ll need to use your own AWS ‘free account’
• I think they still require a credit card to sign up.
• try to turn off any resources after your lab. It conserves ‘free usage’ for
later.
• ec2 instances
• volumes
• elastic IPs.
• RDS instances
LABS
• hands on is important for learning
• some of the labs have some good detail
• for example powershell scripts as ‘user data’
• I am not here to teach Windows/Linux
• if the lab says Windows, and you use linux at work , you can
choose either. (my bent is linux - so don’t ask me about windows).
• The lab only needs to mostly work to provide the hands on. if it’s
not 100% accurate that’s fine.
Quick Recap: What is Cloud?
• On-demand access to a shared pool of computing resources
• (Near) infinite scalability
• Self-service
• Pay as you go
• Separation of responsibilities
Cloud / AWS is not cost saving
• if you are working on a design, don’t make the ‘cheapest’ choice
• You need to choose solutions that are ‘right sized’, and ‘technology fit’
• If you are in a sprint race, don’t choose gum boots because they are
on special. Not only will you get the answer wrong more often, you’ll
look silly at the start line.
• AWS / cloud is rarely the cheapest solution if viewed as a single
component.
Intro to EC2
• Definition: A service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity
in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier
for developers.
• Alt definition: EC2 is a service that allows people to rent virtual
machines that run in Amazon’s data centres.
• AWS terminology for a virtual machine is an “instance”
• Industry term VPS is analogous to instance
EC2 as Just a Virtual Machine
• AWS says: “EC2 instances are ephemeral.” But this isn’t a requirement.
The “instances” can perform traditional role – replacing on-
premise/VPS/co-lo servers
• EBS for block storage
• A virtual SAN, up to 20,000 IOPS and 500MB/s
• Fault tolerant
• More on EBS in week 2
• Instance recovery
• Uptime/machine lifetime is anecdotally “good”
• Self-service provisioning - important for availability
• This usage is very common
Demo: Provision and Connect to EC2
• run through a lab
• create a linux VM
EC2 as it’s Meant to be Used
• No SPOF (single point of failure)
• Scale horizontally, not vertically.
• Elastic
• Treat machines as disposable / design for failure
• Netflix chaos monkey https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/the-netflix-
simian-army-16e57fbab116
• Treat data centres (availability zones) much the same
Regions/Availability Zones (Briefly)
• Spread instances across multiple AZs
• Sydney AWS outage 2016 https://www.crn.com.au/news/aws-sydney-
suffers-outage-420476
• https://aws.amazon.com/message/4372T8/
• Note the second-last paragraph. A bit of an “I told you so.” They said: “Customers
that were running their applications across multiple Availability Zones in the Region
were able to maintain availability throughout the event”
• Average latency between AZs is 2ms https://www.quora.com/What-are-
typical-ping-times-between-different-EC2-availability-zones-within-the-
same-region
Extension - AWS/ec2 vs ??? comparison
• If you compare the basics, ec2 instance vs VPS, RDS vs installing your own DB
server, AWS is
• overly complicated/complex
• over priced
• consider that you get ‘best practice’ at each step
• RDS is not a database server, it’s a tuned DB server with backup and a DB
administrator
• an ec2 instance is infrastructure as software, not a VPS.
• compare a VPS (single VM) to an autoscaling web platform
Extension - Infrastructure as software
• AWS is a LOT more than browser driven ec2 instances
• software has a great innovation rate
• anything that can be performed in the web console, you can code
using the API
• good handling of versions, source control, test, release
• quickly build, deploy, upgrade, release infrastructure.
• software can control the hardware. A good example is spinning up ec2
instances for each report request. A report takes 50 core minutes. How
many reports can you create in any given 5 minute period.
Questions?