Amazon Web Services For Managers
I am asked often about the intricacies of Amazon Web Services by C-levels, directors and managers. They are not looking for nitty gritty nuances of Proxy with all the API of the Elastic Compute Cloudthey are just interested in the general summary of the way the'cloud' functions.
When explaining AWS for the first time to managers (or anybody, for that matter) it is ideal to speak in theories rather than in concrete terms. I've also noticed it's helpful to attempt to tangiblize the discussion with recognizable terms. With phrases like"Elastic IP" gets quizical looks, but calling it a publicly available IP address helps individuals to get a better overall grasp of concepts before using the AWS conditions for things.
Hierarchical Organization
In a very high degree, you can think of EC2 as a global computing environment. Within EC2 are geographical areas which can be thought of as data centers. Inside of these data centers are computer clusters that in AWS parlance are called Availability Zones:
- EC2 (think: cloud)
------ Regions (think: info centre )
------------- Availability Zones (believe: computer cluster)
Virtual Machines
Within an Availability Zonewe have can make virtual machines from custom or predefined Amazon Machine Images, or AMIs. An AMI can be considered as a snapshot of machine that you can load and operate within the cloud at an Availability Zone. Each time you take an AMI and start it, it is known as an instance of the AMI. You can choose an AMI and begin it many times, each time creates a new Instance.
Instances are virtual machines which are running, and I truly mean they are virtual. If precautions aren't taken, these virtual machines may wink out of existence and also lead to a great deal of consternation. So that you do not really want to think of an Instance as a tool that's strong and persistent. It's merely a component of computational resources.
To help keep your data intact even when an Instance dies, you may use many different AWS providers but one of the more common ones is the Elastic Block Store, or EBS. Consider EBS as a Hard Disk. It's possible to make an EBS from 1GB to 1TB and'install' it on any of your digital machine Instances. Consequently, in case you have an Instance that is running your website and you wish to be certain the database remains healthy even when the Instance disappears, then you may use an EBS'hard drive'. At the vernacular of AWS, you have created an EBS volume and mounted it on an Instance.
Other Digital Storage
There are other services that you could have employed besides EBS for carrying this imaginary database of yours. For instance, the SimpleDB, or SDB, is a perfectly reasonable substitute and could be favored in certain situations. But, SDB is a particular service for fundamental database delivery, whereas EBS is a generalized storage solution. There's also that the Relational Database Service, or RDS that provide robust database services outside SDB. The alternative of service is often determined by the requirements of this solution.
If we would like to secure that information we have on our EBS quantity, we are not from the woods yet since even hard drives may fail. We'll want to back this up into more secure storage. For this we could use the Simple Storage Solution, or S3 for short. You can think about S3 as a readily accessible tape backup. It permits you to have up to 100 directories of data in your cassette. Every one of these directories is called a bucket in the S3 entire world. Because it is a fantastic stable storage system, you'll want to backup your EBS quantity (s) into S3 periodically. And, when you've personalized your Instance, you are going to want to save a new picture of it in S3 also. In this manner, if your attentively customized Instance or EBS volume crashes for any reason, you can pull them out of your copy in S3 fairly quickly and get ready to go .
Robust Security
Well, all of this would be useless if we didn't have good security to make sure that our solution was murdered. Two concepts are used in AWS for safety functions. The first is a set of keys which permits you and your developers to access your systems. These are public/private key pairs and digital certificates necessary to log in the Instance. The second, called a security group, can be considered as a firewall setup. You make a security group that defines how outside entities - such as web browsers, or distant backgrounds, or ftp, or email, etc. - can or cannot access your info.
When explaining AWS for the first time to managers (or anybody, for that matter) it is ideal to speak in theories rather than in concrete terms. I've also noticed it's helpful to attempt to tangiblize the discussion with recognizable terms. With phrases like"Elastic IP" gets quizical looks, but calling it a publicly available IP address helps individuals to get a better overall grasp of concepts before using the AWS conditions for things.
Hierarchical Organization
In a very high degree, you can think of EC2 as a global computing environment. Within EC2 are geographical areas which can be thought of as data centers. Inside of these data centers are computer clusters that in AWS parlance are called Availability Zones:
- EC2 (think: cloud)
------ Regions (think: info centre )
------------- Availability Zones (believe: computer cluster)
Virtual Machines
Within an Availability Zonewe have can make virtual machines from custom or predefined Amazon Machine Images, or AMIs. An AMI can be considered as a snapshot of machine that you can load and operate within the cloud at an Availability Zone. Each time you take an AMI and start it, it is known as an instance of the AMI. You can choose an AMI and begin it many times, each time creates a new Instance.
Instances are virtual machines which are running, and I truly mean they are virtual. If precautions aren't taken, these virtual machines may wink out of existence and also lead to a great deal of consternation. So that you do not really want to think of an Instance as a tool that's strong and persistent. It's merely a component of computational resources.
To help keep your data intact even when an Instance dies, you may use many different AWS providers but one of the more common ones is the Elastic Block Store, or EBS. Consider EBS as a Hard Disk. It's possible to make an EBS from 1GB to 1TB and'install' it on any of your digital machine Instances. Consequently, in case you have an Instance that is running your website and you wish to be certain the database remains healthy even when the Instance disappears, then you may use an EBS'hard drive'. At the vernacular of AWS, you have created an EBS volume and mounted it on an Instance.
Other Digital Storage
There are other services that you could have employed besides EBS for carrying this imaginary database of yours. For instance, the SimpleDB, or SDB, is a perfectly reasonable substitute and could be favored in certain situations. But, SDB is a particular service for fundamental database delivery, whereas EBS is a generalized storage solution. There's also that the Relational Database Service, or RDS that provide robust database services outside SDB. The alternative of service is often determined by the requirements of this solution.
If we would like to secure that information we have on our EBS quantity, we are not from the woods yet since even hard drives may fail. We'll want to back this up into more secure storage. For this we could use the Simple Storage Solution, or S3 for short. You can think about S3 as a readily accessible tape backup. It permits you to have up to 100 directories of data in your cassette. Every one of these directories is called a bucket in the S3 entire world. Because it is a fantastic stable storage system, you'll want to backup your EBS quantity (s) into S3 periodically. And, when you've personalized your Instance, you are going to want to save a new picture of it in S3 also. In this manner, if your attentively customized Instance or EBS volume crashes for any reason, you can pull them out of your copy in S3 fairly quickly and get ready to go .
Robust Security
Well, all of this would be useless if we didn't have good security to make sure that our solution was murdered. Two concepts are used in AWS for safety functions. The first is a set of keys which permits you and your developers to access your systems. These are public/private key pairs and digital certificates necessary to log in the Instance. The second, called a security group, can be considered as a firewall setup. You make a security group that defines how outside entities - such as web browsers, or distant backgrounds, or ftp, or email, etc. - can or cannot access your info.
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