Amazon Web Services (AWS) is Amazon’s cloud web hosting platform that offers flexible, reliable, scalable, easy-to-use and cost-effective solutions. This tutorial covers various important topics illustrating how AWS works and how it is beneficial to run your website on Amazon Web Services.
Audience
This tutorial is prepared for beginners who want to learn how Amazon Web Services works to provide reliable, flexible, and cost-effective cloud computing services.
Prerequisites
To benefit from this tutorial, you should have the desire to understand how Amazon Web Services can help you scale your cloud computing services.
In 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) started to offer IT services to the market in the form of web services, which is nowadays known as cloud computing. With this cloud, we need not plan for servers and other IT infrastructure which takes up much time in advance. Instead, these services can instantly spin up hundreds or thousands of servers in minutes and deliver results faster. We pay only for what we use with no up-front expenses and no long-term commitments, which makes AWS cost-efficient.
Today, AWS provides a highly reliable, scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that powers a multitude of businesses in 190 countries around the world.
What is Cloud Computing?
Cloud computing is an internet-based computing service in which large groups of remote servers are networked to allow centralized data storage and online access to computer services or resources.
Using cloud computing, organizations can use shared computing and storage resources rather than building, operating, and improving infrastructure on their own.
Cloud computing is a model that enables the following features.
- Users can provision and release resources on-demand.
- Resources can be scaled up or down automatically, depending on the load.
- Resources are accessible over a network with proper security.
- Cloud service providers can enable a pay-as-you-go model, where customers are charged based on the type of resources and per user.
Types of Clouds
There are three types of clouds − Public, Private, and Hybrid cloud.
Public Cloud
In the public cloud, the third-party service providers make resources and services available to their customers via the Internet. Customer data and related security are with the service providers’ owned infrastructure.
Private Cloud
A private cloud also provides almost similar features as a public cloud, but the data and services are managed by the organization or by the third party only for the customer’s organization. In this type of cloud, major control is over the infrastructure so security-related issues are minimized.
Hybrid Cloud
A hybrid cloud is a combination of both private and public clouds. The decision to run on private or public cloud usually depends on various parameters like the sensitivity of data and applications, industry certifications and required standards, regulations, etc.
Cloud Service Models
There are three types of service models in the cloud − IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.
IaaS
IaaS stands for Infrastructure as a Service. It provides users with the capability to provision processing, storage, and network connectivity on demand. Using this service model, the customers can develop their own applications on these resources.
PaaS
PaaS stands for Platform as a Service. Here, the service provider provides various services like databases, queues, workflow engines, e-mails, etc. to their customers. The customer can then use these components for building their own applications. The services, availability of resources and data backup are handled by the service provider that helping the customers to focus more on their application's functionality.
SaaS
SaaS stands for Software as a Service. As the name suggests, here the third-party providers provide end-user applications to their customers with some administrative capability at the application level, such as the ability to create and manage their users. Also, some level of customizability is possible such as the customers can use their own corporate logos, colours, etc.
Advantages of Cloud Computing
Here is a list of some of the most important advantages that Cloud Computing has to offer −
- Cost-Efficient − Building our own servers and tools is time-consuming as well as expensive as we need to order, pay for, install, and configure expensive hardware, long before we need it. However, using cloud computing, we only pay for the amount we use and when we use the computing resources. In this manner, cloud computing is cost-efficient.
- Reliability − A cloud computing platform provides much more managed, reliable and consistent service than an in-house IT infrastructure. It guarantees 24x7 and 365 days of service. If any of the servers fails, then hosted applications and services can easily be transited to any of the available servers.
- Unlimited Storage − Cloud computing provides almost unlimited storage capacity, i.e., we need not worry about running out of storage space or increasing our current storage space availability. We can access as much or as little as we need.
- Backup & Recovery − Storing data in the cloud, backing it up, and restoring the same is relatively easier than storing it on a physical device. The cloud service providers also have enough technology to recover our data, so there is the convenience of recovering our data anytime.
- Easy Access to Information − Once you register yourself in the cloud, you can access your account from anywhere in the world provided there is an internet connection at that point. Various storage and security facilities vary with the account type chosen.
Disadvantages of Cloud Computing
Although Cloud Computing provides a wonderful set of advantages, it has some drawbacks as well that often raise questions about its efficiency.
Security issues
Security is the major issue in cloud computing. The cloud service providers implement the best security standards and industry certifications, however, storing data and important files on external service providers always bears a risk.
AWS cloud infrastructure is designed to be the most flexible and secured cloud network. It provides a scalable and highly reliable platform that enables customers to deploy applications and data quickly and securely.
Technical issues
As cloud service providers offer services to several clients each day, sometimes the system can have some serious issues leading to business processes temporarily being suspended. Additionally, if the internet connection is offline then we will not be able to access any of the applications, servers, or data from the cloud.
Not easy to switch service providers
Cloud service providers promise vendors that the cloud will be flexible to use and integrate, however switching cloud services is not easy. Most organizations may find it difficult to host and integrate current cloud applications on another platform. Interoperability and support issues may arise such as applications developed on the Linux platform may not work properly on Microsoft Development Framework (.Net).
This is the basic structure of AWS EC2, where EC2 stands for Elastic Compute Cloud. EC2 allow users to use virtual machines of different configurations as per their requirement. It allows various configuration options, mapping of individual servers, various pricing options, etc. We will discuss these in detail in the AWS Products section. Following is the diagrammatic representation of the architecture.
Note − In the above diagram S3 stands for Simple Storage Service. It allows the users to store and retrieve various types of data using API calls. It doesn’t contain any computing element. We will discuss this topic in detail in the AWS products section.
Load Balancing
Load balancing simply means to hardware or software load over web servers, that improver's the efficiency of the server as well as the application. Following is the diagrammatic representation of AWS architecture with load balancing.
The hardware load balancer is a very common network appliance used in traditional web application architectures.
AWS provides the Elastic Load Balancing service, it distributes the traffic to EC2 instances across multiple available sources and dynamic addition and removal of Amazon EC2 host from the load-balancing rotation.
Elastic Load Balancing can dynamically grow and shrink the load-balancing capacity to adjust to traffic demands and also support sticky sessions to address more advanced routing needs.
Amazon Cloud-front
It is responsible for content delivery, i.e. used to deliver the website. It may contain dynamic, static, and streaming content using a global network of edge locations. Requests for content at the user's end are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, which improves the performance.
Amazon Cloud-front is optimized to work with other Amazon Web Services, like Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2. It also works fine with any non-AWS origin server and stores the original files in a similar manner.
In Amazon Web Services, there are no contracts or monthly commitments. We pay only for as much or as little content as we deliver through the service.
Elastic Load Balancer
It is used to spread the traffic to web servers, which improves performance. AWS provides the Elastic Load Balancing service, in which traffic is distributed to EC2 instances over multiple availability zones, and dynamic addition and removal of Amazon EC2 host from the load-balancing rotation.
Elastic Load Balancing can dynamically grow and shrink the load-balancing capacity as per the traffic conditions.
Security Management
Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides a feature called security groups, which is similar to an inbound network firewall, in which we have to specify the protocols, ports, and source IP ranges that are allowed to reach your EC2 instances.
Each EC2 instance can be assigned one or more security groups, each of which routes the appropriate traffic to each instance. Security groups can be configured using specific subnets or IP addresses which limits access to EC2 instances.
Elastic Caches
Amazon Elastic Cache is a web service that manages the memory cache in the cloud. In memory management, the cache has a very important role and helps to reduce the load on the services, improves the performance and scalability on the database tier by caching frequently used information.
Amazon RDS
Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) provides similar access as that of MySQL, Oracle, or Microsoft SQL Server database engine. The same queries, applications, and tools can be used with Amazon RDS.
It automatically patches the database software and manages backups as per the user’s instruction. It also supports point-in-time recovery. There are no up-front investments required, and we pay only for the resources we use.
Hosting RDMS on EC2 Instances
Amazon RDS allows users to install RDBMS (Relational Database Management System) of their choice like MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, etc. on an EC2 instance and can manage as required.
Amazon EC2 uses Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Storage) similar to network-attached storage. All data and logs running on EC2 instances should be placed on Amazon EBS volumes, which will be available even if the database host fails.
Amazon EBS volumes automatically provide redundancy within the availability zone, which increases the availability of simple disks. Further, if the volume is not sufficient for our databases needs, volume can be added to increase the performance of our database.
Using Amazon RDS, the service provider manages the storage and we only focus on managing the data.
Storage & Backups
AWS cloud provides various options for storing, accessing, and backing up web application data and assets. The Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) provides a simple web-services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web.
Amazon S3 stores data as objects within resources called buckets. The user can store as many objects as per requirement within the bucket and can read, write and delete objects from the bucket.
Amazon EBS is effective for data that needs to be accessed as block storage and requires persistence beyond the life of the running instance, such as database partitions and application logs.
Amazon EBS volumes can be maximized up to 1 TB, and these volumes can be striped for larger volumes and increased performance. Provisioned IOPS volumes are designed to meet the needs of database workloads that are sensitive to storage performance and consistency.
Amazon EBS currently supports up to 1,000 IOPS per volume. We can stripe multiple volumes together to deliver thousands of IOPS per instance to an application.
Auto Scaling
The difference between AWS cloud architecture and the traditional hosting model is that AWS can dynamically scale the web application fleet on-demand to handle changes in traffic.
In the traditional hosting model, traffic forecasting models are generally used to provision hosts ahead of projected traffic. In AWS, instances can be provisioned on the fly according to a set of triggers for scaling the fleet out and back in. Amazon AutoScaling can create capacity groups of servers that can grow or shrink on demand.
Key Considerations for Web Hosting in AWS
Following are some of the key considerations for web hosting −
No physical network devices needed
In AWS, network devices like firewalls, routers, and load-balancers for AWS applications no longer reside on physical devices and are replaced with software solutions.
Multiple options are available to ensure quality software solutions. For load-balancing choose Zeus, HAProxy, Nginx, Pound, etc. For establishing a VPN connection choose OpenVPN, OpenSwan, Vyatta, etc.
No security concerns
AWS provides a more secured model, in which every host is locked down. In Amazon EC2, security groups are designed for each type of host in the architecture, and a large variety of simple and tiered security models can be created to enable minimum access among hosts within your architecture as per requirement.
Availability of data centres
EC2 instances are easily available at most of the availability zones in the AWS region and provide a model for deploying your application across data centres for both high availability and reliability.
AWS Management Console is a web application for managing Amazon Web Services. AWS Management Console consists of a list of various services to choose from. It also provides all information related to our account like billing.
This console provides an inbuilt user interface to perform AWS tasks like working with Amazon S3 buckets, launching and connecting to Amazon EC2 instances, setting Amazon CloudWatch alarms, etc.
Following is the screenshot of the AWS management console for the Amazon EC2 service.
How to Access AWS?
Step 1 − Click on services. We get a list of various services.
Step 2 − Select the choice from the list of categories and we get their sub-categories such as Computer and Database category is selected in the following screenshots.
Step 3 − Select the service of your choice and the console of that service will open.
Customizing the Dashboard
Creating Services Shortcuts
Click the Edit menu on the navigation bar and a list of services appears. We can create their shortcuts by simply dragging them from the menu bar to the navigation bar.
Adding Services Shortcuts
When we drag the service from the menu bar to the navigation bar, the shortcut will be created and added. We can also arrange them in any order. In the following screenshot, we have created a shortcut for S3, EMR and DynamoDB services.
Deleting Services Shortcuts
To delete the shortcut, click the edit menu and drag the shortcut from the navigation bar to the service menu. The shortcut will be removed. In the following screenshot, we have removed the shortcut for EMR services.
Selecting a Region
Many of the services are region-specific and we need to select a region so that resources can be managed. Some of the services do not require a region to be selected like AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM).
To select a region, first, we need to select a service. Click the Oregon menu (on the left side of the console) and then select a region
Changing the Password
We can change the password of our AWS account. To change the password, the following are the steps.
Step 1 − Click the account name on the left side of the navigation bar.
Step 2 − Choose Security Credentials and a new page will open having various options. Select the password option to change the password and follow the instructions.
Step 3 − After signing in, a page opens again having certain options to change the password and follow the instructions.
When successful, we will receive a confirmation message.
Know Your Billing Information
Click the account name in the navigation bar and select the 'Billing & Cost Management' option.
Now a new page will open having all the information related to the money section. Using this service, we can pay AWS bills, monitor our usage and budget estimation.
The AWS Console mobile app, provided by Amazon Web Services, allows its users to view resources for select services and also supports a limited set of management functions for select resource types.
Following are the various services and support functions that can be accessed using the mobile app.
EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)
- Browse, filter and search instances.
- View configuration details.
- Check the status of CloudWatch metrics and alarms.
- Perform operations over instances like start, stop, reboot, termination.
- Manage security group rules.
- Manage Elastic IP Addresses.
- View block devices.
Elastic Load Balancing
- Browse, filter and search load balancers.
- View configuration details of attached instances.
- Add and remove instances from load balancers.
S3
- Browse buckets and view their properties.
- View properties of objects.
Route 53
- Browse and view hosted zones.
- Browse and view details of record sets.
RDS (Relational Database Service)
- Browse, filter, search and reboot instances.
- View configuration details, security and network settings.
Auto Scaling
- View group details, policies, metrics and alarms.
- Manage the number of instances as per the situation.
Elastic Beanstalk
- View applications and events.
- View environment configuration and swap environment CNAMEs.
- Restart app servers.
DynamoDB
- View tables and their details like metrics, index, alarms, etc.
CloudFormation
- View stack status, tags, parameters, output, events, and resources.
OpsWorks
- View configuration details of stack, layers, instances and applications.
- View instances, their logs, and reboot them.
CloudWatch
- View CloudWatch graphs of resources.
- List CloudWatch alarms by status and time.
- Action configurations for alarms.
Services Dashboard
- Provides information on available services and their status.
- All information related to the billing of the user.
- Switch the users to see the resources in multiple accounts.
Features of AWS Mobile App
To have access to the AWS Mobile App, we must have an existing AWS account. Simply create an identity using the account credentials and select the region in the menu. This app allows us to stay signed in to multiple identities at the same time.
For security reasons, it is recommended to secure the device with a passcode and to use an IAM user's credentials to log in to the app. In case the device is lost, then the IAM user can be deactivated to prevent unauthorized access.
Root accounts cannot be deactivated via mobile console. While using AWS Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), it is recommended to use either a hardware MFA device or a virtual MFA on a separate mobile device for account security reasons.
The latest version is 1.14. There is a feedback link in the App's menu to share our experiences and for any queries.
How to Use AWS Account?
Following are the steps to access AWS services −
- Create an AWS account.
- Sign-up for AWS services.
- Create your password and access your account credentials.
- Activate your services in the credits section.
Create an AWS Account
Amazon provides a fully functional free account for one year for users to use and learn the different components of AWS. You get access to AWS services like EC2, S3, DynamoDB, etc. for free. However, there are certain limitations based on the resources consumed.
Step 1 − To create an AWS account, open this link https://aws.amazon.com and sign-up for a new account and enter the required details.
If we already have an account, then we can sign in using the existing AWS password.
Step 2 − After providing an email address, complete this form. Amazon uses this information for billing, invoicing and identifying the account. After creating the account, sign-up for the services needed.
Step 3 − To sign-up for the services, enter the payment information. Amazon executes a minimal amount transaction against the card on the file to check that it is valid. This charge varies with the region.
Step 4 − Next, is identity verification. Amazon does a call back to verify the provided contact number.
Step 5 − Choose a support plan. Subscribe to one of the plans like Basic, Developer, Business, or Enterprise. The basic plan costs nothing and has limited resources, which is good to get familiar with AWS.
Step 6 − The final step is confirmation. Click the login link again and it redirects to the AWS management console.
Now the account is created and can be used to avail AWS services.
AWS Account Identifiers
AWS assigns two unique IDs to each AWS account.
- An AWS account ID
- A conical user ID
AWS Account ID
It is a 12-digit number like 123456789000 and is used to construct Amazon Resource Names (ARN). This ID helps to distinguish our resources from resources in other AWS accounts.
To know the AWS account number, click Support on the upper right side of the navigation bar in the AWS management console as shown in the following screenshot.
Conical String User ID
It is a long string of alphanumeric characters like 1234abcdef1234. This ID is used in the Amazon S3 bucket policy for cross-account access, i.e. to access resources in another AWS account.
Account Alias
Account alias is the URL for your sign-in page and contains the account ID by default. We can customize this URL with the company name and even overwrite the previous one.
How to Create/Delete Your Own AWS Account Alias?
Step 1 − Sign in to the AWS management console and open the IAM console using the following link https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam/
Step 2 − Select the customize link and create an alias of choice.
Step 3 − To delete the alias, click the customize link, then click the Yes, Delete button. This deletes the alias and it reverts to the Account ID.
Multi-Factor Authentication
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) provides additional security by authenticating the users to enter a unique authentication code from an approved authentication device or SMS text message when they access AWS websites or services. If the MFA code is correct, then only the user can access AWS services or else not.
Requirements
To use MFA services, the user has to assign a device (hardware or virtual) to an IAM user or AWS root account. Each MFA device assigned to the user must be unique, i.e. the user cannot enter a code from another user's device to authenticate.
How to Enable MFA Device?
Step 1 − Open the following link, HTTPS:// console.aws.amazon.com/iam/
Step 2 − On the web page, choose users from the navigation pane on the right side to view the list of the user name.
Step 3 − Scroll down to security credentials and choose MFA. Click activate MFA.
Step 4 − Follow the instructions and the MFA device will get activated with the account.
There are 3 ways to enable an MFA device −
SMS MFA Device
In this method, MFA requires us to configure the IAM user with the phone number of the user's SMS-compatible mobile device. When the user signs in, AWS sends a six-digit code by SMS text message to the user's mobile device. The user is required to enter the same code on a second web page during sign-in to authenticate the right user. This SMS-based MFA cannot be used with the AWS root account.
Hardware MFA Device
In this method, MFA requires us to assign an MFA device (hardware) to the IAM user or the AWS root account. The device generates a six-digit numeric code based upon a time-synchronized one-time password algorithm. The user has to enter the same code from the device on a second web page during sign-in to authenticate the right user.
Virtual MFA Device
In this method, MFA requires us to assign an MFA device (virtual) to the IAM user or the AWS root account. A virtual device is a software application (mobile app) running on a mobile device that emulates a physical device. The device generates a six-digit numeric code based upon a time-synchronized one-time password algorithm. The user has to enter the same code from the device on a second web page during sign-in to authenticate the right user.
AWS Identity & Access Management (IAM)
IAM is a user entity that we create in AWS to represent a person that uses it with limited access to resources. Hence, we do not have to use the root account in our day-to-day activities as the root account has unrestricted access to our AWS resources.
How to Create Users in IAM?
Step 1 − Open the link https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam/ to sign in to the AWS Management console.
Step 2 − Select the Users option on the left navigation pane to open the list of all users.
Step 3 − We can also create New Users using the Create New Users option, a new window will open. Enter the user name which we want to create. Select the create option and a new user will be created.
Step 4 − We can also see Access Key IDs and secret keys by selecting the Show Users Security Credentials link. We can also save these details on the computer using the Download Credentials option.
Step 5 − We can manage the user’s own security credentials like creating a password, managing MFA devices, managing security certificates, creating/deleting access keys, adding the user to groups, etc.
There are many more features that are optional and are available on the web page.
