14 Steps to Launching an Application, part 3

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14 Steps to Launching an Application, part 3

Step 10: Adding Amazon RDS

You are now ready to add Amazon RDS, or Amazon Relational Database, to your architecture. This step will teach you how to launch a Multi-AZ RDS instance. When your DB instance is created, and/or modified, to run as a Multi-AZ deployment, Amazon RDS automatically provisions, maintains, and synchronizes a stand-by replica in another Availability Zone. In this way, any updates on your DB instance, are automatically synchronized and replicated across different Availability Zones to the stand-by, in order to protect your database updates against any DB instance failure. During planned maintenance, or in the rare case of DB instance or Availability Zone failure, Amazon RDS automatically links to the stand-by, thus enabling you to resume writing and reading into your database as soon as the said stand-by gets promoted. Your application resumes database operations without any manual administrative intervention since the name record of your DB instance is not modified and remains the same. Therefore, replication is always transparent with the help of Multi-AZ deployments, and there is no need for direct interaction with the stand-by.

The following steps will teach you how to setup your own Amazon RDS database:

Note: The DB instance that we’re launching now will be live (not running in sandbox mode). Therefore, standard Amazon RDS usage fees will be incurred by you until the instance has been terminated. The total charges, however, will be at a minimum if you complete the procedure in a single sitting, and terminate the DB instance once you’ve finished.

Step 11: Deploying Your Application

Now that all of your AWS resources have been created, we will learn how to deploy an application to your Amazon EC2 instance. We will download, modify and deploy a sample application to your Amazon EC2 instance in this step. Amazon assists you in building an deploying all your .NET applications, by providing an AWS Tool Kit for Visual Studio. For further information, please visit http://aws.amazon.com/visualstudio/.

Step 12: Creating a Custom AMI

Since the customization of your Amazon EC2 instance has been done, you can now save this AMI, or Amazon Machine Image, and launch further environments with this saved configuration by using AWS CloudFormation. This step is optional. So if you prefer to finish this tutorial immediately, please skip ahead to Step 14: Cleaning-Up Your AWS Resources.

Step 13: Launching New Environments using CloudFormation

AWS CloudFormation can be used to create and provision the AWS infrastructure deployments predictably, and in repetition. AWS can help in building extremely reliable, highly scalable and cost effective applications without having to worry about creating and/or configuring the AWS infrastructure. AWS consists of certain template files that you can use in creating or deleting any collection of resources functioning as a single unit (AWS CloudFormation stack). Thus, by using AWS CloudFormation, you can provide leverage to other Amazon services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS, Amazon SNS, Elastic Load Balancing and Auto-Scaling.

This example will teach us you how to use the CloudFormer tool and subsequently generate a template based on the AWS resources you have created. CloudFormer is a tool that intends to create a viable starting point for your template. After creating the template, you will be able to customize it in order to launch new environments with multiple instances that span all the various Availability Zones. This will enable you to create an architecture which is completely fault-tolerant. This is also an optional step, and can thus be skipped.   

Step 14: Cleaning-Up Your AWS Resources

Congratulations! Your web application has just been deployed. Now we will terminate our environment and clean-up our resources to prevent the accruing of any other, unnecessary charges. Click on the following links to learn about:

 

>>14 Steps to Launching an Application, part 1

>>14 Steps to Launching an Application, part 2