AWS® For Admins For Dummies®
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Amazon Web Services (AWS) started out as a rather small undertaking that allowed a developer to create applications that queried all things Amazon. You could perform queries, obtain sales data, and even upload offerings for sale. However, the focus was on Amazon. That’s not the case today! Now you can manage an entire company using AWS. The offerings are varied, more than any one organization is likely to need, and the focus is no longer on Amazon, but on your company and your company’s needs.
Of course, you might wonder why Amazon deserves special attention given that there are many other cloud providers (such as Google, Microsoft, and IBM) available today. According to a recent ComputerWorld article (http://www.computerworld.com/article/3102904/cloud-computing/four-us-companies-rule-the-worlds-cloud-infrastructure.html), Amazon currently owns 31 percent of the cloud computing market, which means that your organization stands to benefit from Amazon’s huge installed base of customer-tested services. According to CIO magazine, AWS is so popular that companies like Gartner that track statistics for it have had to change their charting methods just to keep AWS on the charts when compared to the competition. AWS For Admins For Dummies helps you understand not only why you need these services to remain competitive but also how to use them to gain the maximum effectiveness and efficiency for your organization.
Following the progress of AWS over the years gives me a unique perspective of the services it offers today, which is why you need AWS For Admins For Dummies if your job is to administer your organization’s offerings and perform tasks like getting a cloud-based setup started. Just digging through the offerings and figuring out what you need is likely to prove daunting, which is why this book offers you clear-cut paths and helps you overcome the hype to do something useful in a short time.
The purpose of AWS For Admins For Dummies is to help you figure out what you need and create a basic functional setup that enables you to become productive sooner than later. This book separates the programming aspects of AWS from the administrative aspects, so you don’t have to read reams of developer-specific information to find the one item you really need as an administrator. Of course, this book isn’t just for administrators, but for anyone who needs to get a basic AWS setup configured for any need. DevOps and developers can use this book as well, even though it does focus on administrative tasks.
AWS For Admins For Dummies is designed to make things simple. That’s why it focuses on using the AWS consoles to perform tasks whenever possible and resorts to the command-line interface only when necessary. By following the procedures in this book, you can set up and configure a computing environment quickly and easily.
This book also helps you separate hype from reality. The Amazon documentation would often have you believe that everything works perfectly in AWS, which clearly can’t happen. Every piece of software, even cloud software, has quirks and issues that you need to know about. Most important, this book helps you understand when moving to the cloud might be a bad idea because of a number of issues that even the media is less than thrilled to tell you about. Rather than be lured by the hype, you’ll be best served by knowing when a cloud environment actually does meet your needs, rather than set you up for problems at some point or, worse yet, prove useless.
To help you absorb the concepts, this book uses the following conventions:
http://www.dummies.com.You might find it difficult to believe that I’ve assumed anything about you — after all, I haven’t even met you yet! Although most assumptions are indeed foolish, I made certain assumptions to provide a starting point for the book.
The first assumption is that you’re familiar with the platform you want to use, because the book doesn’t provide any guidance in this regard. This book doesn’t discuss any platform-specific issues. You really do need to know how to install applications, use applications, and generally work with your chosen platform before you begin working with this book.
You also need to be familiar with your browser and understand how to interact with browser-based applications. Sprinkled throughout are numerous references to online material that will enhance your learning experience. In addition, most of the tasks you perform with AWS require that you work in your browser.
This book is pretty much platform independent. However, none of the procedures are tested using small mobile devices, such as a smartphone (and some are almost guaranteed not to work on a small device). Differences in appearance will emerge when using a smaller device — that is, a control that appears as a button on a larger device could appear as a link or other control on a smaller device. You need access to the sort of setup that an administrator will use to create and configure online setups, which means a larger tablet, notebook, or, better yet, a full desktop system. The various individuals working on this book used desktop systems running the Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X platforms using a number of common browsers.
As you read this book, you encounter icons in the margins that indicate material of special interest (or not, as the case may be!). Here’s what the icons mean:
This book isn’t the end of your AWS learning experience — it’s really just the beginning. I provide online content to make this book more flexible and better able to meet your needs. That way, as I receive email from you, I can address questions and tell you how updates to AWS or its associated add-ons affect book content. In fact, you gain access to these cool additions:
www.dummies.com and searching AWS For Admins For Dummies Cheat Sheet. The cheat sheet contains really neat information such as figuring out which service you want to use.http://blog.johnmuellerbooks.com/.It’s time to start your AWS adventure! If you’re completely new to AWS, you should start with Chapter 1 and progress through the book at a pace that allows you to absorb as much of the material as possible. Chapter 2 is especially important because it helps you understand what Amazon means by free-tier services. You should also read Chapter 3, even if you have experience with AWS, because it provides information about the services discussed in the book.
Readers who have some exposure to AWS can move directly to Chapter 4. You can always go back to earlier chapters as necessary when you have questions. However, you do need to understand how each technique works before moving to the next one. Every technique and procedure has important lessons for you, and you could miss vital content if you start skipping too much information.
Part 1
IN THIS PART …
Get started with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Understand the AWS free tier.
Get an overview of the various AWS services.
Decide which of the AWS services your organization needs.
Chapter 1
IN THIS CHAPTER
Considering the AWS cloud environment
Defining Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
Specifying a need for AWS
Getting an AWS-related certification
Rounding out your education
Amazon Web Services (AWS) started out as a tiny bit of software that enabled people to perform a limited number of tasks directly on Amazon, such as querying a product, placing a product request, or checking on an order status. The initial service didn’t do much, but people loved it, so it grew and then kept growing. Today, AWS is a huge web service, so big that it’s nearly impossible for anyone to explore it fully. It performs all sorts of tasks that don’t even relate to buying and selling products. In fact, the buying and selling of products is more of a sideline today as people use AWS more for computing services of all types (things like data storage and running applications). The purpose of this chapter is to help you understand what makes AWS special — namely, those services that administrators are most likely to get excited about. The chapter doesn’t cover many of the services because AWS is simply too large. For example, the chapter doesn’t cover much about services that are specifically designed to meet developer needs.
Part of making AWS small enough to understand is to define the AWS environment. For such an understanding, you need to know a little about Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS). You don’t delve too deeply into these topics in this chapter, but you do gain enough information to understand how the AWS environment meets specific administration needs.
After you gain an understanding of how AWS works, you need to consider how to actually use it to perform useful work. As organizations continue to downsize IT, administrators must become more efficient, and AWS has a lot to offer in that regard. In fact, even if you look only at the administrator-related services, you’re likely to find the number of services nearly overwhelming. This chapter helps you make sense of how you might use various services to meet specific needs in your organization.
Even though you can use AWS quite well without a certification, obtaining an AWS certification will help you get a better job with the organization of your dreams. This chapter gives you a basic overview of what certification can do for you and helps you determine whether you really need certification to meet your needs today. Of course, those needs will change over time, so knowing what certification has to offer is helpful, even if you don’t intend to get certified today.
Finally, you need to round out your AWS education to use AWS effectively. The last part of the chapter offers some ideas of the types of educational resources you might use. Of course, this book is your starting point, but to meet specific needs, you may need to do more.
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 at https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/. (The page also includes a link to create an account, a topic discussed in Chapter 2.) AWS use isn’t just for private companies either — even the government makes use of its services.
The technologies that make all these services possible are actually simple in conception. Think of a pair of tin cans with a string attached between them. Amazon holds one tin can and you hold the other. By talking into one tin can, you can hear what is said at the other end. The implementation, however, relies on details that make communication harder than you might initially think. The following sections give you an overview on how the AWS cloud works.
Service-driven application architectures, sometimes known as Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), come in many forms. No matter how you view them, service-driven application architectures are extensions of the client-server technologies used in the early days of computing, in that a client makes a request that a server fulfills by performing an action or sending a response. However, the implementation details have changed significantly over the years, making modern applications far more reliable, flexible, and less reliant on a specific network configuration. The request and response process can involve multiple levels of granularity, with the term microservice applied to the smallest request and response pairs. Developers often refer to an application that relies on a service-driven application architecture as a composite application because it exists as multiple pieces glued together to form a whole. Service-driven application architectures follow many specific patterns, but in general, they use the following sequence to perform communication tasks.
http://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_soap.asp and how REST works at http://www.tutorialspoint.com/restful/ — a passing knowledge of both is helpful in working with AWS.)Even though many of the processes you perform with AWS require using an app (so that you have a user interface rather than code to work with), the underlying process is the same. The code provided in the app makes requests for you and then waits for a response. In some cases, the app must determine the success or failure of an action on the server. You need to realize, however, that these actions take place in code and that the code uses a sequence of steps to accomplish the task you’ve asked it to perform.
In creating apps to help manage underlying services, AWS also defines workflows. A workflow is an organized method of accomplishing tasks. For example, when you want to save a file to AWS using S3, you must first create a bucket to hold the file. Only after you create a bucket can you save a file to AWS. In addition, you can’t retrieve a file from the bucket until you first save a file there, which makes sense because you can’t grab a file out of thin air. In short, a workflow defines a procedure for working with software, and the concept has been around for a long time. (The first workflows appeared in the mid-1970s with simple office automation prototypes at Xerox Parc and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.)
Workflows can consist of additional workflows. In addition, workflows manage the interaction between users and underlying services. A process is the aggregation of services managed by workflows into a cohesive whole. The workflows may perform generic tasks, but processes tend to be specific and help users accomplish particular goals. A process-driven workflow is proactive and attempts to circumvent potential problems by
A function is the reactive use of services managed by workflows to address specific problems in real time. Even though it would be nice if process-driven workflows worked all the time, the reality is that even with 99.999 percent reliability, the process will fail at some point, and a function-driven workflow must be in place to address that failure. Although process-driven workflows focus on flexible completion of tasks, function-driven workflows focus on procedurally attenuating the effect of a failure. In short, function-driven workflows address needs. The AWS services and workflows also deal with this issue through the user interface, such as by manually restoring a backup to mitigate a system failure.
Even though this book frequently refers to virtual environments and services that you can’t physically see, 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. Three technologies enable anyone to create a virtual computer center using AWS:
The following sections provide an extended discussion of these three technologies and help you understand how they interact with each other. The point of these sections is that each element performs a different task, yet you need all three to create a complete solution.
The simplest way to view IaaS is as a means of providing access to virtualized computer resources over an Internet connection. IaaS acts as one of three methods of sharing resources over the Internet, alongside SaaS and PaaS. AWS supports IaaS by providing access to virtualized hardware, software, servers, storage, and other infrastructure components. In short, you can use IaaS to replace every physical element in your computing setup except those required to establish and maintain Internet connectivity and those required to provide nonvirtualized services (such as printing). The advantages of IaaS are many, but here are the ones that most people consider essential:
Keep in mind that there is no free lunch. AWS and other IaaS providers are interested in making a profit. They do so by investing in huge quantities of hardware, software, and management personnel to oversee it all. The benefits of scale help create profit, and many businesses simply can’t create setups they require for less money.
However, you must consider the definite disadvantages of IaaS as well:
SaaS is all about cloud-based applications. Products like online email and office suites are examples of cloud-based applications. A client typically accesses the application using a local application, such as a browser. The browser runs on local hardware, but the application runs on the host hardware. What a client sees is the application running in the browser as if it is working locally. In most cases, the application runs within a browser without any alteration to the local system. However, some applications do require the addition of plug-ins.
The difference between IaaS and SaaS is the level of service. When working with IaaS, a client typically requires detailed support that spans entire solutions. A SaaS solution may include only the application. However, it can also include the following:
PaaS is more of a development solution than a production environment solution. A development team typically uses PaaS to create custom solutions or modify existing solutions. The development staff has full control over the application and can perform all development-related tasks, such as debugging and testing. As with the SaaS solution, the host normally maintains control over
In this case, however, the development staff can access the middleware to enhance application development without reinventing the wheel. Writing application code to make the application cloud-ready isn’t necessary because the middleware already contains these features. The development team gains access to cloud-based application features that include the following:
Even though AWS 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). Even though this book is about AWS, you should compare AWS with other cloud services. You may choose to use AWS as part of your solution rather than as the only solution. Of course, this means knowing the areas in which AWS excels. The following sections address both of these possibilities: using other cloud services instead of AWS, or in addition to it.
You have many ways to compare cloud services. One of the ways in which companies commonly look at services is by the market share they have. A large market share tends to ensure that the cloud service will be around for a long time and that many people find its services both useful and functional. A recent InfoWorld article (http://www.infoworld.com/article/3065842/cloud-computing/beyond-aws-the-clouds-next-stage.html) points out that AWS currently corners 70 to 80 percent of the cloud market. In addition, AWS revenues keep increasing, which lets Amazon continue adding new features while maintaining existing features at peak efficiency.
http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/cloud-systems-management/metapod/index.html)https://cloud.google.com/products/)https://www.joyent.com/)https://azure.microsoft.com/)Of the competitors listed here, Google Cloud Platform comes closest to offering the same feature set found in AWS. However, in looking at the Google offerings, you should note the prominence of machine learning services that aren’t found in AWS. On the other hand, AWS has more to offer in the way of the Internet of Things (IoT), applications, and mobile services.
Each of the vendors offering these services is different. For example, Joyent offers a simple setup that may appeal more strongly to an SMB that has only a few needs to address and no desire to become involved in a complex service. Microsoft, on the other hand, has strong SQL database-management support as well as the connection with the Windows platform that businesses may want to maintain. The point is that you must look at each of the vendors to determine who can best meet your needs (although, as previously stated, most people are voting with their dollars on AWS).
In looking at the services that AWS provides, you can see that the emphasis is on enterprise productivity. For example, Google Cloud Platform offers four enhanced machine learning services that you could use for analysis purposes, but AWS offers only one. However, Google Cloud Platform can’t match AWS when it comes to mobile service, which is an area that users most definitely want included for accessing applications. Unless your business is heavily involved in analysis tasks, the offerings that AWS provides are significantly better in many ways. Here are the service categories that AWS offers:
A certification 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.
The pursuit of a certification can also help you better understand areas in which your current education is weak. Going through the learning and testing process can help you become a better administrator. With the need to obtain the guidelines to achieve proficiency and later demonstrate proficiency in mind, the following sections discuss the various AWS certifications so that you can get a better idea of where to spend your time when getting one.
AWS currently provides a number of certifications, which you can see at https://aws.amazon.com/certification/. You can expect Amazon to add more as AWS continues to expand. The following list provides a quick overview of the levels of certifications:
You can find all sorts of interesting aids online for getting your certification. However, the best place to start is directly on the Amazon website. Unfortunately, the information you find isn’t the best organized at times. Start by ensuring that you meet the requirements in the Candidate Overview section. Until you meet those requirements, it isn’t particularly useful to move forward (unless you want to end up with a paper certification — one that doesn’t actually mean anything).
After you have fulfilled the minimum requirements, download the Exam Guide. The guide tells you that you need to be proficient in a number of areas in order to pass, which shouldn’t surprise you. AWS wants to ensure that you actually know the material. Fortunately, you can also find online sources to help you make sense of the Exam Guide. For example, there is an excellent video on the requirements for the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate exam at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCkD8lpadj8. Watching the video and going through the Exam Guide can help you get a better idea of what you need to do.
At some point, you want to download the example questions. However, given that AWS provides only one set of example questions and that those precise questions are unlikely to appear on the exam, memorizing them won’t do you any good. What you need to do is study and when you feel you’re ready, try the example questions, which can help you determine your weak areas. Unfortunately, there are only a few example questions — not enough to give you a good feel for the exam.
Every certification also comes with a Take a Practice Exam option. Be sure to save this feature for last. Again, you don’t get many questions, the questions don’t change, and they’re not likely to appear on the exam in the precise form you see them. The purpose of the practice exam is to help you sense whether you’re ready.
As you go through the book, make sure to also look at the Getting Started and FAQs for each of the services covered. These two sources of information contain a great deal of information that Amazon is likely to use for exam questions. You don’t have to memorize the material, but being familiar with it gives you a definite advantage.
Obtaining a certification helps you prove your level of proficiency to someone else, which is one level of the education process. In many cases, you can skip this level unless you have specific needs that a certification can address. However, you must continue to build on your expertise. Simply learning the basics and then never cracking a book again will result in your eventual termination as an administrator because computer technology continues to change. In short, education is continuous when you’re an administrator. Getting a well-rounded education is essential, as is continuing to learn more whenever you can and in whatever way that you can. Even dibs and dabs of time spent learning can make a big difference.
https://www.youtube.com/) that demonstrate techniques for working with AWS.https://www.quora.com/), to obtain additional insights into cloud strategies from other professionals.