Amazon Web Services For Managers
I'm asked frequently about the ins and outs of Amazon Web Services by C-levels, directors and managers. They are not looking for nitty gritty nuances of Proxy with the API of their Elastic Compute Cloudthey are just interested in the general summary of how the'cloud' functions.
When describing AWS for the first time to supervisors (or anybody, for that matter) it is best to speak in concepts rather than in concrete terms. I have also noticed it is beneficial to attempt to tangiblize the discussion with familiar terms. Using terms like"Elastic IP" gets quizical looks, but calling it a publicly available IP address helps individuals to get a better overall grasp of theories before using the AWS terms for things.
At a very large degree, you can think of EC2 as a global computing environment. Within EC2 are geographic regions which can be considered as information centers.
- EC2 (think: cloud)
------ Regions (believe: data center)
------------- Availability Zones (think: pc cluster)
Inside of an Availability Zone, we have can make virtual machines from predefined or custom Amazon Machine Images, or AMIs. An AMI is thought of as a snapshot of machine which you may load and run inside the cloud at an Availability Zone. Every time you take an AMI and begin it, it is known as an Instance of the AMI. You are able to take an AMI and begin it several 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 digital machines may wink out of existence and also lead to a great deal of consternation. So that you do not really wish to think about an Instance as a tool that's robust and persistent. It's merely a component of computational tools.
Virtual Hard Drives
To keep your information intact even when an Instance dies, you may use several different AWS services but one of the more common ones would be the Elastic Block Store, or EBS. Think of EBS as a hard drive. You can make an EBS from 1GB to 1TB and'install' it on some of your virtual machine Instances. So, if you experience an Instance that's running your website and you wish to make certain the database remains healthy even if the Instance disappears, then you may use an EBS'hard drive'. In the event of AWS, you've generated an EBS volume and mounted it in an Instance.
Other Digital Storage
You can find other services that you could have employed besides EBS for carrying this fantastic database of yours. For example, the SimpleDB, or SDB, is a totally reasonable substitute and would be favored in certain situations. But, SDB is a particular support for basic database delivery, whereas EBS is a generalized storage solution. There is also the Relational Database Service, or RDS that provide robust database providers beyond SDB. The choice of service is frequently dependent upon the needs of the solution.
If we would like to secure that information we have on our EBS volume, we aren't out of the woods yet because even hard drives may fail. We'll want to back up this into more stable storage. For this we could use the Simple Storage Option, or S3 for short. You can think of S3 as a readily accessible tape backup. It permits you to have up to 100 directories of data in your cassette. Each of those directories is called a bucket from the S3 entire world. Because it is a good stable storage method, 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 image 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 backup in S3 fairly quickly and get ready to go again.
Robust Security
Well, all of this would be useless if we did not have great security to be certain that our solution was hacked. Two concepts are employed 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 important pairs and digital certificates necessary to log into the case. Microsoft Azure , called a security set, can be thought of as a firewall configuration. You create a security group that defines how external entities - like internet browsers, or remote desktops, or ftp, or email, etc. - can or cannot access your info.
When describing AWS for the first time to supervisors (or anybody, for that matter) it is best to speak in concepts rather than in concrete terms. I have also noticed it is beneficial to attempt to tangiblize the discussion with familiar terms. Using terms like"Elastic IP" gets quizical looks, but calling it a publicly available IP address helps individuals to get a better overall grasp of theories before using the AWS terms for things.
At a very large degree, you can think of EC2 as a global computing environment. Within EC2 are geographic regions which can be considered as information centers.
- EC2 (think: cloud)
------ Regions (believe: data center)
------------- Availability Zones (think: pc cluster)
Inside of an Availability Zone, we have can make virtual machines from predefined or custom Amazon Machine Images, or AMIs. An AMI is thought of as a snapshot of machine which you may load and run inside the cloud at an Availability Zone. Every time you take an AMI and begin it, it is known as an Instance of the AMI. You are able to take an AMI and begin it several 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 digital machines may wink out of existence and also lead to a great deal of consternation. So that you do not really wish to think about an Instance as a tool that's robust and persistent. It's merely a component of computational tools.
Virtual Hard Drives
To keep your information intact even when an Instance dies, you may use several different AWS services but one of the more common ones would be the Elastic Block Store, or EBS. Think of EBS as a hard drive. You can make an EBS from 1GB to 1TB and'install' it on some of your virtual machine Instances. So, if you experience an Instance that's running your website and you wish to make certain the database remains healthy even if the Instance disappears, then you may use an EBS'hard drive'. In the event of AWS, you've generated an EBS volume and mounted it in an Instance.
Other Digital Storage
You can find other services that you could have employed besides EBS for carrying this fantastic database of yours. For example, the SimpleDB, or SDB, is a totally reasonable substitute and would be favored in certain situations. But, SDB is a particular support for basic database delivery, whereas EBS is a generalized storage solution. There is also the Relational Database Service, or RDS that provide robust database providers beyond SDB. The choice of service is frequently dependent upon the needs of the solution.
If we would like to secure that information we have on our EBS volume, we aren't out of the woods yet because even hard drives may fail. We'll want to back up this into more stable storage. For this we could use the Simple Storage Option, or S3 for short. You can think of S3 as a readily accessible tape backup. It permits you to have up to 100 directories of data in your cassette. Each of those directories is called a bucket from the S3 entire world. Because it is a good stable storage method, 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 image 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 backup in S3 fairly quickly and get ready to go again.
Robust Security
Well, all of this would be useless if we did not have great security to be certain that our solution was hacked. Two concepts are employed 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 important pairs and digital certificates necessary to log into the case. Microsoft Azure , called a security set, can be thought of as a firewall configuration. You create a security group that defines how external entities - like internet browsers, or remote desktops, or ftp, or email, etc. - can or cannot access your info.
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