Important step with cloud adoption is to manage quick cycles of learning and improvement of the cloud environment. The following presentation brought you by Amazon AWS guys contains great amount of slides including best practices and examples for Continuous Deployment, Optimization and Integration.
In this article I describe how we created a redundant PostgreSQL database on the Amazon cloud using EBS snapshots as backups to deploy a PostgreSQL DB server DR mobile application for one of our customers.
PostgreSQL 9.1 includes new capabilities for asynchronous fast replication syncing between master and slaves. The master server streams new data to the current available slave. This version includes great improvements that generated significant fast WAL (Write Ahead Log) processing, which generates replication and fast launching capabilities for the slave servers.
The cloud presents many security management challenges. Ensuring compliance, identity management, and other security best practices can be a challenging task. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is one of the tools that can be used to mitigate the risks associated with these challenges. In this article, I will discuss a few of the high points of IAM, including the different options and limitations that this AWS service brings together with its fascinating capabilities.
Many cloud computing users strive to apply security best practices to their cloud computing strategies. One of the best components that Amazon offers to manage security in their cloud computing service is their IAM mechanism, which allows an account owner to create users and manage their permissions within an AWS account.
Greplin built a lot of their infrastructure on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Elastic Block Store (EBS). Following the serious AWS 2011 April outage they tested in deep the EBS performance and came with benchmarks with regards to disk I/O. We invite you to check it out.
The great informative post includes best practices, benefits and Caveats. The post led to some great comments also in this YCombinator thread with some more referrals to additional relevant knowledge resources.
Lets start with a basic scenario where there is a sudden peak in the demand for an application service as the amount of clients’ requests increase. This event leads to a direct and immediate impact of the loa placed on the web servers that host the service. In the traditional world, the number of servers is fixed, therefore an overload adversely affects the application performance and the service may slow down or even be terminated. The IT team would want to restore the environment functionality and bring the service up as soon as possible. The immediate impact of such an event on the business can be devastating. Starting with this simple understanding, we can move into the world of cloud computing use including resources consumption, while relating to the key differences between the traditional data center and today’s cloud technologies.
An EBS Snapshot is a copy of an EBS volume at a particular point in time.
A snapshot can be taken of a volume, regardless of whether or not the volume is attached to a running instance. A snapshot comprises data blocks that are incrementally saved to Simple Storage Service (S3), meaning that only the blocks on the device that have changed since your last snapshot are saved. When saved to S3, the snapshot is assigned a timestamp and unique AWS ID.
It is crucial to back up your EBS volumes with EBS snapshots, to prevent losing important data.
It is best practice to have at least one backup snapshot per volume. It is especially recommended that you take periodic snapshots when running a DB.
There is a common perception that cloud storage should not really worry you because it is very cheap and available at any time. Is that really true ? It is common to hear AWS consumers say that AWS storage = S3 – this is true but it is not the whole truth.
The Service Level Agreement (SLA) discussion puts penalties and compensations on the table. Can we say that the compensation method the customer expects is the same as the Software as a Service (SaaS) vendor’s SLA provides?
