Amazon Web Services For Managers

19 Jul 2018 04:03
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I am asked frequently about the ins and outs of Amazon Web Services by C-levels, directors and managers. They aren't looking for nitty gritty nuances of scripting with all the API of the Elastic Compute Cloud, they are just interested in the general overview of how the'cloud' works.

When describing AWS for the first time to supervisors (or anybody, for that matter) it is ideal to talk in theories instead of in real terms. I've also noticed it's beneficial to try to tangiblize the discussion with familiar terms.

Hierarchical Organization

In a very high degree, you can think of EC2 as a global computing environment. Within EC2 are geographical regions which may be considered as data centers.

- EC2 (believe: cloud)

-- Regions (believe: info centre )

--—- Availability Zones (think: computer cluster)

Virtual Machines

Within an Availability Zone, we have can create virtual machines from predefined or custom Amazon Machine Images, or AMIs. An AMI can be considered as a photo of machine that you may load and operate within the cloud at an Availability Zone. Every time you take an AMI and start it, it is called an Instance of the AMI. You can choose an AMI and begin it several times, every time creates a new Instance.

Instances are virtual machines that are running, and I truly mean they are virtual. If precautions aren't taken, these digital machines may wink out of existence and also lead to a lot of consternation. So Google Cloud don't really wish to think about an Instance as a tool that is robust and persistent. It is merely a component of computational resources.

Virtual Hard Drives

To keep your information intact even if an Instance dies, you can use many different AWS services but among the more common ones is that the Elastic Block Store, or EBS. Consider EBS as a hard drive. Consequently, if you experience an Instance that is running your website and you want to make certain that the database remains healthy even when the Instance disappears, you may use an EBS'hard drive'. In the event of AWS, you have generated an EBS volume and mounted it in an case.

Other Digital Storage

You can find other services that you could have employed besides EBS for holding this fantastic database of yours. For example, the SimpleDB, or SDB, is a perfectly reasonable substitute and would be preferred in certain scenarios. However, SDB is a particular support for fundamental database shipping, whereas EBS is a generalized storage alternative. There is also the Relational Database Service, or RDS that provide robust database providers outside SDB. The alternative of service is often determined by the needs of the solution.

If we want to secure that data we now have on our EBS quantity, we aren't out of the woods yet because even hard drives can fail. We'll want to back up this into more secure storage. For this we can use the Simple Storage Solution, or S3 for brief. It's possible to think of S3 as a readily accessible tape backup. It permits you to have up to 100 directories of information in your tape. Each of those directories is referred to as a bucket in the S3 world. Because it is a good stable storage system, you will want to backup your EBS quantity (s) into S3 periodically. And, if you've personalized your Instance, you will want to save a new image of it in S3 also. This way, if your attentively customized Instance or EBS volume crashes for any reason, you can pull them from your copy in S3 fairly quickly and get up and running again.

Well, all this would be worthless if we didn't have great security to make sure that our solution was murdered. Two theories are employed in AWS for safety purposes. The first is a pair of keys which permits you and your developers to gain access to your systems. These are public/private important pairs and digital certificates required to securely log into the Instance. The second, called a security group, can be considered as a firewall configuration. You make a security group that defines how external entities - like internet browsers, or distant backgrounds, or ftp, or email, etc. - can or cannot access your info.

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