Quick revision on topics AWS CloudFront, SNS, SQS before appearing AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam.
CloudFront, SNS, SQS revision!
This article notes down a few important points about AWS (Amazon Web Services) CloudFront, SNS, and SQS. This can be helpful in last-minute revision before appearing for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate level certification exam.
This is third part of AWS CSA revision series. Rest of the series listed below :
In this article, we are checking out key points about CloudFront(CDN Content Delivery Network), SNS (Simple Notification Service), and SQS (Simple Queue Service).
Origin can be S3 bucket or CNAME of Elastic Load Balancer ELB
S3 bucket as the origin. URL will be bucket_name.s3-reagion.cloudfront.net
Private content sharing with signed URL with an expiration time limit
To serve a new object version, create a new distribution, or create invalidation of the old objects. Since invalidation costs, creating new distribution always helps.
Limits :
1,00,000 Requests per second per distribution
200 distributions per account
40Gbps speed per distribution
25 origins per distribution
20 GB max file size to serve
By default, object expiration is 24 hours. The minimum TTL is 0.
Amazon SNS
The latest addition to SNS is Lambda
SNS has two clients: Publishers and subscribers
Publishers communicate with subscribers by sending messages to the topic.
Protocol supported :
HTTP
HTTPS
SMS
email
email-JSON
Amazon SQS
AWS Lambda
SNS Topic of the same name can be created after 30-60 seconds the previous topic deleted.
Amazon SQS
The default visibility timeout is 30 secs. The maximum is 12 hours.
Mainly used to decouple your application
The default period message stays in queue is 4 days. Min-Max periods are 1 min to 2 weeks.
The maximum SQS message size is 256KB.
Supports an unlimited number of queues and unlimited messages per queue.
Quick revision on topics AWS VPC, Route53, IAM before appearing AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam.
VPC, Route53, IAM revision!
This article notes down a few important points about AWS (Amazon Web Services) VPC, Route53, and IAM. This can be helpful in last-minute revision before appearing for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate level certification exam.
This is the second part of the AWS CSA revision series. Rest of the series listed below :
NACL (Network Access Control List) controls traffic security at the subnet level
Security groups control traffic security at the instance level
NACL is stateless (i.e. all traffic need to exclusively allow) while Security groups are stateful (i.e. response traffic is automatically allowed)
Only 1 Internet gateway per VPC is allowed.
VPC peering can be done between two AWS accounts or other VPS within the same region.
VPC peering is a direct network route between two VPC enabling sharing resources in different subnets.
Limits :
5 VPC per region
50 customer gateways per region
200 route table per region
50 entries per route table
5 elastic IP
5 security group per network interface
500 security groups per VPC
50 rules per security group
First 4 and last 1 IP of each subnet is reserved by AWS as below :
x.x.x.0: Network IP
x.x.x.1 : VPC router IP
x.x.x.2: For VPC DNS
x.x.x.3: For future use
x.x.x.255: Broadcast IP
Route 53
Can register domain, act as DNS, Check health of resources.
Port 53 used to serve request by DNS hence the name route 53!
Primarily TCP used to serve DNS request but if the response is more than 512 bytes it will use TCP.
Currently supported records :
A (address record)
AAAA (IPv6 address record)
CNAME (canonical name record)
MX (mail exchange record)
NAPTR (name authority pointer record)
NS (name server record)
PTR (pointer record)
SOA (start of authority record)
SPF (sender policy framework)
SRV (service locator)
TXT (text record)
Routing policies :
Simple routing: Single resource serving traffic
Weighted routing: Divert proportion wise traffic to multiple resources
Latency routing: Returns result with the lowest latency to requestor origin
Failover routing: Active-passive. One resource takes traffic when the other one is failed
Geolocation routing: Returns DNS queries based on the geolocation of the user
Limits :
500 hosted zones per AWS account
50 domains per AWS account
Ideal TTL values for CNAME to the existing domain are 24 hours and CNAM to S3 or ELB is 1 hour.
There is no default TTL for any record type in Route 53. You have to specify TTL for your records.
Weights can be assigned as integer 0 to 255. 0 means no weight i.e. don’t route to that record. The probability of routing to be done to a particular record equals to the weight of that record/Sum of all record weights.
IAM (Identity and Access Management)
Never use the root account for login. Create an admin user and use it for administrative tasks
Created users, groups and roles are global and available across all regions in the same AWS account
Prebuilt policy for :
Administrator – All access
Power-user – Everything administrator has except IAM management access
Read-only – Only view access (accounting purpose)
By default, the newly created user has normal deny on all AWS resources. Explicit allow will override normal deny.
Cross account roles can be defined. It assumes access of other users granted to another user.
The public key can be viewed in the account settings anytime. The private key visible only at the time of creation. If lost can not be retrieved and need to create fresh key pair to use.
Quick revision on topics AWS EC2, S3, RDS before appearing AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam.
EC2, S3, RDS revision!
This article notes down a few important points about AWS (Amazon Web Services) EC2, S3, and RDS. This can be helpful in last-minute revision before appearing for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate level certification exam.
This is first part of AWS CSA revision series. Rest of the series listed below :
Understand AWS cloud terminology of 71 services! Get acquainted with terms used in the AWS world to start with your AWS cloud career!
AWS Cloud terminology
AWS i.e. Amazon Web Services cloud platform providing list of web services on pay per use basis. It’s one of the famous cloud platforms to date. Due to flexibility, availability, elasticity, scalability, and no-maintenance, many corporations are moving to the cloud. Since many companies using these services, it becomes necessary that sysadmin or DevOps should be aware of AWS.
This article aims at listing services provided by AWS and explaining the terminology used in the AWS world.
As of today, AWS offers a total of 71 services which are grouped together in 17 groups as below :
Compute
It’s a cloud computing means virtual server provisioning. This group provides the below services.
EC2 container service: Its high performance, highly scalable which allows running services on EC2 clustered environment
Lightsail: This service enables the user to launch and manage virtual servers (EC2) very easily.
Elastic Beanstalk: This service manages capacity provisioning, load balancing, scaling, health monitoring of your application automatically thus reducing your management load.
Lambda: It allows you to run your code only when needed without managing servers for it.
Batch: It enables users to run computing workloads (batches) in a customized managed way.
Storage
It’s cloud storage i.e. cloud storage facility provided by Amazon. This group includes :
S3: S3 stands for Simple Storage Service (3 times S). This provides you online storage to store/retrieve any data at any time, from anywhere.
EFS: EFS stands for Elastic File System. It’s online storage that can be used with EC2 servers.
Glacier: Its a low cost/slow performance data storage solution mainly aimed at archives or long term backups.
Storage Gateway: Its interface which connects your on-premise applications (hosted outside AWS) with AWS storage.
Database
AWS also offers to host databases on their Infra so that clients can benefit from cutting edge tech Amazon have for faster/efficient/secured data processing. This group includes :
RDS: RDS stands for Relational Database Service. Helps to set up, operate, manage a relational database on cloud.
DynamoDB: Its NoSQL database providing fast processing and high scalability.
ElastiCache: It’s a way to manage in-memory cache for your web application to run them faster!
Redshift: It’s a huge (petabyte-size) fully scalable, data warehouse service in the cloud.
Networking & Content Delivery
As AWS provides a cloud EC2 server, its corollary that networking will be in the picture too. Content delivery is used to serve files to users from their geographically nearest location. This is pretty much famous for speeding up websites nowadays.
VPC: VPC stands for Virtual Private Cloud. It’s your very own virtual network dedicated to your AWS account.
CloudFront: Its content delivery network by AWS.
Direct Connect: Its a network way of connecting your datacenter/premises with AWS to increase throughput, reduce network cost, and avoid connectivity issues that may arise due to internet-based connectivity.
Route 53: Its a cloud domain name system DNS web service.
Migration
Its a set of services to help you migrate from on-premises services to AWS. It includes :
Application Discovery Service: A service dedicated to analyzing your servers, network, application to help/speed up the migration.
DMS: DMS stands for Database Migration Service. It is used to migrate your data from on-premises DB to RDS or DB hosted on EC2.
Server Migration: Also called SMS (Server Migration Service) is an agentless service that moves your workloads from on-premises to AWS.
Snowball: Intended to use when you want to transfer huge amount of data in/out of AWS using physical storage appliances (rather than internet/network based transfers)
Developer Tools
As the name suggests, its a group of services helping developers to code easy/better way on the cloud.
CodeCommit: Its a secure, scalable, managed source control service to host code repositories.
CodeBuild: Code builder on the cloud. Executes tests codes and build software packages for deployments.
CodeDeploy: Deployment service to automate application deployments on AWS servers or on-premises.
CodePipeline: This deployment service enables coders to visualize their application before release.
X-Ray: Analyse applications with event calls.
Management Tools
Group of services which helps you manage your web services in AWS cloud.
CloudWatch: Monitoring service to monitor your AWS resources or applications.
CloudFormation: Infrastructure as a code! It’s a way of managing AWS relative infra in a collective and orderly manner.
CloudTrail: Audit & compliance tool for AWS account.
Config: AWS resource inventory, configuration history, and configuration change notifications to enable security and governance.
OpsWorks: Automation to configure, deploy EC2 or on-premises compute
Service Catalog: Create and manage IT service catalogs which are approved to use in your/company account
Trusted Advisor: Its AWS AI helping you to have better, money-saving AWS infra by inspecting your AWS Infra.
Managed Service: Provides ongoing infra management
Security, Identity & compliance
Important group of AWS services helping you secure your AWS space.
IAM: IAM stands for Identity and Access Management. Controls user access to your AWS resources and services.
Inspector: Automated security assessment helping you to secure and compliance your apps on AWS.
Certificate Manager: Provision, manage, and deploy SSL/TLS certificates for AWS applications.
Directory Service: Its Microsoft Active Directory for AWS.
WAF & Shield: WAF stands for Web Application Firewall. Monitors and controls access to your content on CloudFront or Load balancer.
Compliance Reports: Compliance reporting of your AWS infra space to make sure your apps and the infra are compliant with your policies.
Analytics
Data analytics of your AWS space to help you see, plan, act on happenings in your account.
Athena: Its a SQL based query service to analyze S3 stored data.
EMR: EMR stands for Elastic Map Reduce. Service for big data processing and analysis.
CloudSearch: Search capability of AWS within application and services.
Elasticsearch Service: To create a domain and deploy, operate, and scale Elasticsearch clusters in the AWS Cloud
Kinesis: Stream’s large amounts of data in real-time.
Data Pipeline: Helps to move data between different AWS services.
QuickSight: Collect, analyze, and present insight into business data on AWS.
Artificial Intelligence
AI in AWS!
Lex: Helps to build conversational interfaces in an application using voice and text.
Polly: Its a text to speech service.
Rekognition: Gives you the ability to add image analysis to applications
Machine Learning: It has algorithms to learn patterns in your data.
Internet of Things
This service enables AWS highly available on different devices.
AWS IoT: It lets connected hardware devices to interact with AWS applications.
Game Development
As name suggest this services aims at Game Development.
Amazon GameLift: This service aims for deploying, managing dedicated gaming servers for session-based multiplayer games.
Mobile Services
Group of services mainly aimed at handheld devices
Mobile Hub: Helps you to create mobile app backend features and integrate them into mobile apps.
Cognito: Controls mobile user’s authentication and access to AWS on internet-connected devices.
Device Farm: Mobile app testing service enables you to test apps across android, iOS on real phones hosted by AWS.
Mobile Analytics: Measure, track, and analyze mobile app data on AWS.
Pinpoint: Targeted push notification and mobile engagements.
Application Services
Its a group of services which can be used with your applications in AWS.
Step Functions: Define and use various functions in your applications
SWF: SWF stands for Simple Workflow Service. Its cloud workflow management helps developers to co-ordinate and contribute at different stages of the application life cycle.
API Gateway: Helps developers to create, manage, host APIs
Elastic Transcoder: Helps developers to converts media files to play of various devices.
Messaging
Notification and messaging services in AWS
SQS: SQS stands for Simple Queue Service. Fully managed messaging queue service to communicate between services and apps in AWS.
SNS: SNS stands for Simple Notification Service. Push notification service for AWS users to alert them about their services in AWS space.
SES: SES stands for Simple Email Service. Its cost-effective email service from AWS for its own customers.
Business Productivity
Group of services to help boost your business productivity.
WorkDocs: Collaborative file sharing, storing, and editing service.
WorkMail: Secured business mail, calendar service
Amazon Chime: Online business meetings!
Desktop & App Streaming
Its desktop app streaming over cloud.
WorkSpaces: Fully managed, secure desktop computing service on the cloud
AppStream 2.0: Stream desktop applications from the cloud.
Small tutorial with screenshots that show how to open port on the AWS EC2 Linux server. This will help you to manage port-specific services on the EC2 server.
Open port on AWS EC2 Linux
AWS i.e. Amazon Web Services is no new term for the IT world. It’s a cloud services platform offered by Amazon. Under its Free tier account, it offers you limited services free of cost for one year. This is one of the best places to try out new technologies without spending much on the financial front.
AWS offers server computing as one of their services and they call them EC (Elastic Computing). Under this, we can build our Linux servers. We have already seen how to set up a Linux server on AWS free of cost.
By default, all Linux servers build under EC2 has post 22 i.e. SSH service port (inbound from all IP) is open only. So, if you are hosting any port-specific service then the relative port needs to be open on the AWS firewall for your server.
Also, it has port 1 to 65535 are open too (outbound for all traffic). If you want to change this you can use the same below process for editing outbound rules too.
Setting up a firewall rule on AWS for your server is an easy job. You will be able to open ports in seconds for your server. I will walk you through the procedure with screenshots to open a port for the EC2 server.
Step 1
Log in to the AWS account and navigate to the EC2 management console. Go to Security Groups under Network & Security menu as highlighted below :
AWS EC2 management console
Step 2
On Security, Groups screen select your EC2 server and under Actions menu select Edit inbound rules
AWS inbound rules menu
Step 3
Now you will be presented with an inbound rule window. You can add/edit/delete inbound rules here. There are several protocols like HTTP, nfs, etc listed in the drop-down menu which auto-populate ports for you. If you have customer service and port you can define it too.
AWS add inbound rule
For example, if you want to open port 80 then you have to select :
Type: HTTP
Protocol: TCP
Port range: 80
Source: Anywhere (Open port 80 for all incoming req from any IP (0.0.0.0/0), My IP: then it will auto-populate your current public internet IP
Step 4
That’s it. Once you save these settings your server inbound port 80 is open! you can check by telneting to port 80 for your EC2 server public DNS (can be found it EC2 server details)
