Introduction to Amazon Web Services for developers About presenter Roman Gomolko with 11 years of experience in development including 4 years of day-to-day work with Amazon Web Services. Disclaimer Cloud-hosting is buzz-word for a while and in my talk I would like to give an introduction to Amazon Web Services (AWS). We will talk about basic building blocks of AWS like EC2, ELB, ASG, S3, CloudFront, RDS, IAM, VPC and other scary or funny abbreviations. Then we will discuss how to migrate existing applications to AWS. This topic includes: • how to design infrastructure and services to use when migrating • how to choose proper instance types • how to estimate infrastructure cost • how it will affect performance of application migrated Then we will make an overview of services provided by AWS and possible apply in your current of future applications: • SQS • DynamoDB • Kinesis • CloudSearch • CodeDeploy • CloudFormation And if we survive we will talk a little how to design Cloud applications. That’s mainly about general principles. My talk mostly targeted towards decision makers and decisions pushers of small and medium size companies which are consider “going cloud” or already moving into this direction. Everyone interested in gaining knowledge in these areas are welcomed as well. We will spend around 2–3 hours together and you will be able to pitch-in any questions until we totally goes away from original plan.

1. Introduction to Amazon Web
Services for developers
Roman Gomolko
roman@userreport.com
July 2015
Ciklum Speakers Corner

2. Let’s get acquired

3. UserReport
● Developing products that allow to learn the audience
● Started using AWS more than 5 years ago
● Fully migrated to AWS more than 1.5 years ago
● Processing 3 billions requests monthly
● Generating reports based on 8 billions of requests with batched reports
● Online reports on 300 millions of records
● Used ~50% of services provided by AWS
● Totally happy regarding using AWS

4. Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is a model for
enabling access to a shared pool of
configurable computing resources

5. Typical Cloud benefits
● Pay for what you are using
● High scalability - retrieve as many resources as you need
● High availability
● Gartner's Hype cycle – cloud computing has reached a maturity

6. Cloud models
● IaaS
Infrastructure like physical (rarely) or virtual servers, storage, networking,
load balancers, IP addresses allocation etc
● PaaS
Hosted databases, pre-configured web-servers that can run your
application, platforms that can run your code
● aPaaS
Tools and services that automates and facilitates utilizing Cloud Services.
Providing tools for development, deployment, monitoring etc
● SaaS
Gmail, MailChimp, Highrise, Google photo, Jira Cloud etc

7. Amazon Web Services
IaaS
PaaS
aPaaS
SaaS

9. Naming convention
● Everything is Elastic
● Everything is Simple
● DRY
Elastic Compute Cloud = ECC = EC2
Simple Storage Service = SSS = S3
Elastic Load Balancer = ELB
AutoScale Group = ASG
...

10. AWS is regional

11. AWS is regional
● Almost all services are region specific
● Pricing of services depends on region
● Not all services are available in all regions
● New services are launching in N. Virginia (US East 1) first
http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regional-product-
services/

12. Regions are not solid
● Splitted into Availability Zones (AZ)
● AZs have independent power supply
● Cross-AZ network speed is blazing fast
● Some services belong to AZ, some - not

13. Iaas basics
● EC2
Virtual computers managed by XEN running on Intel CPUs
● EBS
SSD or magnetic drives dynamically attached to EC2 instances with
configurable size (up to 16Tb) with configurable IOPs
● ELB
Load balancing before your EC2 instances
● VPC
Creating network and group your instances/services into “Private Cloud”

14. PaaS basics
● CloudFront
CDN for downloading and streaming
● S3
Infinite storage for objects (files) with security and HTTP access
● RDS
Hosted databases like MySQL, MS SQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Aurora with
licenses included
● DynamoDB
NoSQL database designed for high performance and availability

15. PaaS basics
● Route53
Fully managed and DNS and domain registration
● ElastiCache
Fully managed hosted memcache and Redis
● SQS
Queue designed for high availability and millions of messages

16. Some more PaaS
● CloudSearch
Search engine for free-text search among millions of documents
● EMR
Fully managed Elastic MapReduce and Spark clusters
● Elastic Transcoder
Encoding media-files in different formats with different quality
● … and more

17. aPaaS
● CloudWatch
Monitoring of your infrastructure and applications
● Elastic Beanstalk
Automated web-applications and workers hosting
● CloudFormation
Manage your cloud services in one place with help of text file
● CodeDeploy
Automates deployment of your application
● OpsWorks
Chef cooked by AWS to automate provisioning and deployment

18. SaaS basics
● SES
Sending e-mails from Cloud
● SNS
Push notifications
● WorkMail
Hosted exchange server for organizations
● WorkSpaces
Virtual office became reality

19. Migration of existing web-application to AWS
DBWebServer

20. Migration to Cloud
● One bite at a time - migration to Cloud itself is a big deal
● Cloud may have similar services to what you are using in your app. Similar
is not the same.
● Usually you have application which works somehow try to keep your
structure unchanged
● Less efforts, faster migration

21. Hosting your web-application
1. Create EC2
2. Connect to it
3. Configure it
4. Deploy code to it
5. Access website

22. Creating EC2. Choose operating system image

23. Creating EC2. Choose instance type

24. Creating EC2. Instance details

25. Creating EC2. Storage

26. Creating EC2. Tags

27. Creating EC2. Security group

28. Creating EC2. Review. Almost done

29. Creating EC2. Selecting key-pair

30. Connecting to your instance. Wait until launched

31. Connecting to your Linux instance
Linux / Mac OS X
ssh -i "<keypair>.pem" ec2-user@<instance IP>
Windows
● convert .pem to .ppk using Putty KeyGen
● connect to instance using Putty
● refer help for more details

32. Connecting to your Windows instance
● Wait 4-20 minutes after starting instance
● Retrieve password using you keypair
● Use Remote Desktop to connect to your instance. Use Administrator as
name
● Password will expire, better create permanent user

33. Configuring your instance as you like
sudo apt-get install apache2
sudo apt-get install php5
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
import-module servermanager
add-windowsfeature Web-Server,
Web-WebServer, Web-Security

34. Deploy your application

35. Accessing your web-application
● Your public IP is not static. It will be changed after reboot
● You can request IP address and attach it to instance dynamically
● In future you can assign this IP to another instance
● Put this IP to your DNS or write to host file

36. Database. Let’s try RDS

37. Multi-AZ deployments for reliability
multiply hosting cost by number of AZ zones

38. Configure your instance and DB master credentials

39. Secure your database

40. Take advantage of managed solutions

41. Wait. Cloud? I need more redundancy
1. Create EC2
2. Connect to it
3. Configure it
4. Stop it
5. Create AMI
6. Launch required number of instances using this AMI
7. Deploy code to them
8. Access website

42. Launching from you AMI

43. Horizontal scaling of application checklist
● Data-less
● Stateless
● Shared session
● Same encryption keys

44. Distribute traffic between instances
● DNS round-robin
● Load balancer

45. Elastic Load Balancer
● Accept incoming traffic and distribute among instances
● Monitors instance availability
● Can accept HTTPS traffic and map to HTTP endpoint of web-server
● Allows to not expose web-servers to worldwide
● Allows Connection Draining
● Provides useful metrics like latency, requests per minute, count of 2XX,
4XX and 5XX response codes

46. I’ve become popular. Need to scale
Instance roles:
● Web/front-end
● Worker/back-end
● DB
Scaling strategies:
● Vertical scaling
● Horizontal scaling

47. Vertical scaling
● Good if your bottleneck is CPU, RAM or disk
● Can be done with downtime or without it

48. Vertical scaling of EC2.
● Simple - downtime
○ Stop
○ Change instance type
○ Start
● Complex - no downtime
○ Launch new instance with required instance type
○ Switch traffic from old instance to new one

49. Vertical scaling of RDS
● Can be done without downtime in case of Multi-AZ deployment
● Not that fast in any way

50. Where is fun stuff?

51. I want to be Elastic

52. AutoScale groups
Launch configuration - how your instance will look like
AutoScale group - control how many instances will be in your group

53. Launch Configuration - customize instance bootstrap

54. AutoScale group

55. AutoScale Group - scaling policies

56. Finally
● AWS can scale our application automatically looking on CPU load
● AWS can scale-down instances when load decreased

58. Small catch-up
● We know what is EC2 and how to deploy application first time
● We know how to horizontally scale up and down your application
● It looks pretty cumbersome
● We don’t know where we should store users’ files
● We don’t know how to improve website performance
● We don’t know how to update your application

59. Pricing
http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html

60. Bad reasons to migrate
● Migrating everything by just virtualizing existing stuff and expecting
savings
● Expecting magical performance boost and “Cloud will solve all problems”

61. Good reasons to migrate
● Extremely flexible
● Pay for what you use
o cheap to fail
o cutting cost of testing and applying new technologies
● Fast changes - get what you need when you need
● Allows to focus on your product - not on CDN, Mail sending, file storages,

62. File storage
● DIY - Distributed File System
● Let’s Amazon handle it - Elastic File System (Preview)
● Ready to change code - S3

63. S3, CloudFront, Beanstalk demo time