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John Paul Mueller
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Published:
October 31, 2016

AWS For Admins For Dummies

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Overview

Easily get your head in the Cloud with Amazon Web Services

With Amazon Web Services (AWS), you can do everything from backing up your personal hard drive to creating a full-fledged IT department in the Cloud. And while major corporations like Adobe and Netflix have turned to AWS for their Cloud computing needs, it isn't just for private companies. Amazon Web Services For Dummies is the singular resource that shows real people with real businesses how to use on-demand IT resources to help their companies grow.

If you're like most people just getting their feet wet with this service, your first question is likely to be, "How do I get started with AWS?" This book answers that question—and a multitude more—in language

you can understand and shows you how to put this Cloud computing service to work for you right away. AWS is immense and, naturally, intimidating, but with the help of this book, you'll peel back its many layers in no time!

  • Provides overviews that explain what tasks the services perform and how they relate to each other
  • Offers specific paths to follow in order to obtain a particular installation result
  • Gets you started without making a huge investment
  • Reduces the risk of failure by ensuring you understand available options as part of the configuration and usage process

Stop wasting time and resources on hardware and software that's quickly outdated. Get started with AWS today!

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About The Author

John Paul Mueller is a prolific technical writer and editor with 101 books and 600 articles to his credit. His topics range from networking and home security to database management and heads-down programming, and his editing skills have helped more than 63 authors refine their manuscripts. Visit his blog at http://blog.johnmuellerbooks.com/.

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aws for admins for dummies

CHEAT SHEET

Amazon Web Services (AWS) started out small, but has become a vast collection of cloud services that businesses can use to support any activity without having to invest in an IT infrastructure.A quick overview of the Amazon Web ServicesAmazon Web Services (AWS) is all about knowing which service to use. Amazon provides a considerable number of free-tier services that you can try, but some of them are better for experimentation purposes than others are.
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Amazon Web Services (AWS) started as a relatively small web service designed to make programmatic access of Amazon data easier. You could do all sorts of interesting things, such as search for products, upload your own product listings, perform sales tasks, and make purchases, but at the outset, everything focused on Amazon.
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Amazon Web Services (AWS) is all about knowing which service to use. Amazon provides a considerable number of free-tier services that you can try, but some of them are better for experimentation purposes than others are. The following table presents a quick overview of the services best suited to experimentation needs.
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A certification in AWS (Amazon Web Services) doesn't make you an expert. However, it does provide a quantified description of your minimum level of expertise — a textbook look of what you know, but not an assessment of real-world knowledge. In other words, you get a certification to prove that you have a given level of provable expertise and most employers will probably assume that you possess expertise in addition to what the certification tests.
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Amazon Web Services (AWS) started out small, but has become a vast collection of cloud services that businesses can use to support any activity without having to invest in an IT infrastructure.A quick overview of the Amazon Web ServicesAmazon Web Services (AWS) is all about knowing which service to use. Amazon provides a considerable number of free-tier services that you can try, but some of them are better for experimentation purposes than others are.
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To use the AWS (Amazon Web Services) services, you need a network connection. In some cases, you need more than one. You not only need an Internet connection for the AWS user interface, but the services may require dedicated connections as well and these connections can become part of your business network. Because of this close relationship, creating the network configuration carefully is essential.
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To use AWS (Amazon Web Services), you must risk the security of your computer in a major way. Administrators and security professionals can quickly drive themselves crazy trying to keep these interconnected computers safe, but that's part of the job description. You must follow best practices in securing the computer systems, the data they contain, your local network, and any third-party products you use.
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The Command-Line Interface (CLI) presents an uncomfortable environment for many people. Given that the CLI for the Amazon Web Services (AWS) free tier relies on Linux and that many administrators aren't familiar with the operating system, the situation becomes even less comfortable.However, by using the AWS consoles as much as possible, you can reduce the need for the CLI to a minimum.
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When working with Linux as you do in AWS (Amazon Web Services), you sometimes need to modify configuration files at the command line. Trying to perform this task without an editor is nearly impossible. The Editors group package provided with your Linux setup includes a number of editors that you can use to perform configuration file editing tasks.
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When you initially create your AWS (Amazon Web Services) account, Amazon assigns an identity to the account name and password that you provide as the root user. The root user has unrestricted access to all the AWS resources.As you might imagine, this makes the root user account dangerous, because anyone who gains access to it can also access everything your AWS account supports.
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Sometimes it's hard to figure out the whole idea behind permissions and policies in AWS (Amazon Web Services). To begin with, a permission defines the following: Who can access a resource What actions individuals or groups can perform with the resource Every user starts with no permissions at all. In other words, a user can't do anything, not even view security settings or use access keys to interact with a resource.
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EB enables developers to create applications that run anywhere on any device, yet don't suffer from problems of reliability and scalability that can occur when using a company-owned host. A focus of EB for use with AWS (Amazon Web Services) is to easily be able to upload, configure, and manage applications of all sorts.
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Just as there isn't one kind of hard drive, there isn't one kind of EBS volume. Amazon Web Services (AWS) currently provides access to both Solid-State Drive (SSD) and Hard Disk Drive (HDD) volumes. SSD provides high-speed access, while HDD provides lower-cost access of a more traditional hard drive. Amazon further subdivides the two technologies into two types each (listed in order of speed): EBS Provisioned IOPS SSD: Provides high-speed data access that you commonly need for data-intensive applications that rely on moderately-sized databases.
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In looking at the AWS (Amazon Web Services) pages, you may have noticed that they don't supply a single list of all the free services. What you get instead are various mixes of services that tell you something about the services but don't really help you understand what services are actually available.This table lists the various free services and tells you the vital statistics about each one so that you now have a single list of what you can get free.
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When hosting services locally, you need to provide all the required infrastructure, which can get expensive. AWS (Amazon Web Services) does provide guidance on the minimum requirements for hosting a service locally. For example, the figure shows the requirements for the AWS Storage Gateway. Make sure that you can actually host the service locally.
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Hidden in the AWS (Amazon Web Services) documentation is all sorts of useful information about various services. For example, AWS Storage Gateway will connect an on-premises software appliance (an application combined with just enough operating system capability to run on hardware or on a virtual machine) with cloud-based storage.
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AWS (Amazon Web Services) provides you with a number of methods for monitoring AWS-specific services. However, you may have underlying system performance issues or non-AWS application issues to deal with, which means having tools that can work outside of AWS. The Performance Tools group package contains a number of Linux-specific tools for accomplishing this task as follows (listed as mandatory, default, or optional packages): Utility/Package What It Does Mandatory Packages blktrace Performs block I/O tracing tasks to determine the time required to perform tasks such as data transfers.
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Remember that you have only 12 months of your free trial in which to make decisions about which AWS (Amazon Web Services) services to use in your business. Twelve months may seem like a lot of time, but you'll find that it evaporates before your eyes as you try to juggle your day-to-day responsibilities, meetings, and other needs.
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When you initially create your AWS (Amazon Web Services) account, only one AWS-managed policy is in place: AdministratorAccess. However, after you create the first user and log in to AWS using your new administrator account, you can access a large number of AWS-managed policies.Whenever possible, you should use the AWS-managed policies to ensure that the policy receives automatic updates that reflect changes in AWS functionality.
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Creating the Administrators group is the first step in ensuring that your AWS (Amazon Web Services) account remains safe. The next step is to create an account for yourself and assign it to the Administrators group so that you have full access to the administrative features of your AWS account. The following steps describe how to perform this task.
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Before you can use an Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume for Amazon Web Services (AWS), you must create it. EBS volumes can take on many different characteristics. The following steps describe how to create a simple volume that you can use with EC2. Sign into AWS using your administrator account. Navigate to the EC2 Console.
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Before you can create an Administrator user in AWS (Amazon Web Services), you must provide a group for it. Every user who can perform administrative tasks is part of the Administrators group. The following steps describe how to perform this task.Click Groups on the left side (Navigation pane) of the IAM Console page.
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In general, you want to avoid using inline policies in AWS (Amazon Web Services) when configuring Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) because they're hard to manage and you must go to the individual entities, such as groups, to make any required changes. In addition, the inline policies have a tendency to hide, making troubleshooting problems with your setup just that much harder.
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At some point, you need to consider the fact that you'll have to pay for services you need to use AWS (Amazon Web Services) effectively. Yes, you can perform a considerable amount of careful testing before payment becomes necessary, but eventually you'll have to pay for something.What this means is planning for the services that you must pay for in advance so that you don't suddenly find yourself buried in debt during the discovery phase of your AWS adventure.
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Before you can really do anything other than plan, you need an AWS (Amazon Web Services) account. Discovering the wonders of AWS is a hands-on activity, so you really do want to work with it online. Go through the free sign-up process described in the following steps:Navigate your browser to http://aws.amazon.
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CloudMGR is a cloud-management solution that enables you to interact with AWS using an alternative interface. The overall goal of CloudMGR is to reduce the confusion that many people feel when faced with the myriad AWS consoles and the sometimes buried options required to control the services. This particular product focuses on the needs of service providers, independent vendors, and enterprise users.
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Heroku is a multipart product that works with developers as much as it does with DevOps and administrators. The product defines three phases of custom app management: Deployment Management Scaling Although an administrator can become involved in deployment, the scope of Heroku likely applies more to developers and DevOps in this case.
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Hybridfox provides a simplified but limited management solution for a number of cloud environments: AWS, Eucalyptus, OpenStack, OpenNebula, and HP Cloud. The goal of this product is to allow you to use a single-browser environment, Firefox, to manage the supported cloud environments seamlessly. You can switch among cloud environments without using a different interface for each one.
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Before you can get the most out of AWS (Amazon Web Services), you need to know how to do a few simple tasks. Here, you create an online storage area, move a file to it, copy the file back to your hard drive, and then delete the file in the online storage.Moving data between local drives and the AWS cloud is one of the most common activities you perform, so this exercise is important, even if it seems a bit simplistic.
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Scalr focuses on using policies for management tasks, and that focus is immediately evident when you visit its site. Scalr comes in hosted, enterprise, and community editions. This means that you can get Scalr at a size that works best for your organization and that you can choose access methodologies that work best with your method of performing management tasks.
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RightScale provides administrators with an all-encompassing management package designed to meet particular needs. In other words, this is a custom management configuration and is more oriented to the needs of large enterprises with an even larger cloud presence. This solution helps you do everything from creating a cloud strategy to choosing the cloud environments best suited to meet your needs to deploying the selected solution.
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Even though AWS (Amazon Web Services) provides you with a wealth of Internet-specific tools, you sometimes need to perform tasks in a batch process or in a more convenient way. The Console Internet Tools group package that comes with your Linux setup contains the following packages (listed as either a default package or an optional package): Utility/Package What It Does Default Packages elinks Provides a text-based browser for use in the SSH session.
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Consider the meaning of elastic in many of the AWS (Amazon Web Services) service names. When you see the word elastic, you should think of the ability to stretch and contract. All the AWS documentation alludes to this fact, but it often makes the whole process sound quite complicated when it really isn't. Just think about a computer that can stretch when you need more resources and contract when you don't.
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Amazon does provide the means for using many of its Amazon Web Services (AWS) for free. However, as you look through the list of services, you see that the some expire, others don't. In addition, some have limits and others don't. Those that do have limits don't have the same limits, so you need to watch usage carefully.
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Although you can't physically see virtual environments and services, these elements all exist as part of a real computer environment that Amazon hosts on your behalf. You need to understand how these elements work to some extent because they have a physical presence and impact on your personal or business needs.
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Amazon Web Services (AWS) is actually a huge array of services that can affect consumers, Small to Medium-Sized Business (SMB), and enterprises. Using AWS, you can do everything from backing up your personal hard drive to creating a full-fledged IT department in the cloud.The installed base is immense. You can find case studies of companies like Adobe and Netflix that use AWS.
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Even though AWS (Amazon Web Services) has a lot to offer, you still need to consider how it answers your specific needs. This consideration goes beyond simply determining whether you really want to move to cloud-based services, but also taking into account other offerings that might serve your needs just as well (if not better).
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All the AWS (Amazon Web Services) tools are relatively high-level tools designed to give you a good overview of what your system is doing. These tools normally provide what you need because they summarize information in a way that makes it easy to work with. However, sometimes it's helpful to have a low-level view of your system using the tools that come in the System Tools group package.
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Online labs can help some folks learn how to use AWS (Amazon Web Services) more quickly. People learn differently. For some people, structured, hands-on activities beat reading or experimenting when it comes to learning something new. Even if hands-on activities aren't a first choice, having multiple learning-activity types tends to reinforce new skills and make them easier to retain.
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