In my journey through the cloud I often come across great new initiatives. The interesting fact is that although the cloud is a pure revolution terms such as SLA, TCO and ROI remain valid, new methodologies and techniques are presented to support them in the cloud.
Scaling is one of the most important factors for Cloud Services. It allows the user to optimize the cost by providing resources only when required. Amazon Cloud Auto Scaling provides horizontal scaling by automatically adding or removing the computer resources for the application hosted on AWS. The changes are on demand based on the triggers configured by the user.
Consider the following scenario: when the user’s web application is hosted on AWS and there is a sudden increase of traffic to that website. If the user fails to scale up based on the need, the application may fail or give a slow response. If the user has configured parameters such that AWS adds more application resources (EC2 Instances) when the traffic increases the application will continue to respond with the same performance as before.
The present guide demonstrates how to install Auto Scaling CLI on a Windows machine.
In part one I described the AWS EBS snapshot mechanism. In this part I will drill deeper on how to calculate the EBS snapshot cost. I will show how to be able to do a rough estimation or even to perform an accurate cost analysis using monitoring tools.
In order to estimate how large your EBS snapshots will be, you need to know how much your volumes are changing. One way would be to guesstimate,we can use a simple thumb rule that is often used in- backup planning: A typical data volume of a production server changes about 3% a day. Let’s try and calculate the cost. Assuming a 1TB EBS volume, that is 70% full at first. We take snapshots and keep them for 30 days. So, the first full will be taking 700GB (70% of 1TB). For the incremental snapshots we can multiply 30 (days) by 30GB (3% of 1TB) and we reach 900GB. Add them together and we reach about 1.6TB of total snapshot storage. AWS compresses the snapshots when they are stored in S3.
AWS CloudFront is a content distribution service offered by AWS to speed up the distribution of static content, such as media files, html, js, css, etc. CloudFront provides the log file option to log the end user access request data, its status and other relevant information. The log file will be stored in the S3 bucket. The log file can be in the same bucket as the distribution origin or it can also be in a separate bucket. The user can configure the same bucket for multiple distributions. The user can specify the prefix to the log file to distinguish the distribution details. The CloudFront stores the data to the log file periodically. Each log record will have the user access details, such as the date, time, the edge location information which served the content, the bytes from the server to the client, the client IP, the protocol (HTTP/s), the query string, and more.
The user account where the CloudFront distribution is located should have full access to the S3 bucket. If the bucket belongs to some other AWS account, provide the access rights.
The present guide demonstrates how to enable logging for the CloudFront download or the streaming distribution.
AWS CloudFront is a content distribution service offered by AWS to speed up the distribution of static content, such as media files, html, js, css, etc. CloudFront serves its content through its ever growing edge locations network. The AWS CloudFront serves its content from the origin server configured during the distribution configuration. For the download distribution, CloudFront supports custom origins similar to a storage device such as an HTTP server. CloudFront supports the AWS services, such as EC2, and ELB as the custom origin. While working with the custom origin, the following is recommended:
The CloudFront streaming distribution does not support the custom origin functionality.
The present guide demonstrates how to create a download distribution for the AWS CloudFront using AWS EC2 as the custom origin.
AWS CloudFront is a content distribution service offered by AWS to speed up the distribution of static content, such as media files, html, js, css, etc. CloudFront can stream media files using the Adobe Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP). It is required that the streams file is on AWS S3 and should not be served from any other origin. The user can stream the file using a JWPlayer, Adobe Flash player or flow player. The user can create a streaming distribution. The end user can view the streamed media file using the player specified by the user.
The AWS allows creating multiple streaming distributions for a single bucket and the user can stream the media objects using any of the valid streaming distributions.
The present guide demonstrates how to list, view or update an existing streaming distribution.
Cloud computing comes with amazing financial benefits for the organization…assuming it’s done right. In this presentation, Adrian Cockcroft of Netflix explains how a rapid innovation cycle encourages faster returns and a more economic cloud. He posits that lowering the cost of failure will create a more innovative organization and culture – but how?
AWS CloudFront is a content distribution service offered by AWS to serve low latency content with high data speed. CloudFront caches the object to its edge location. The user can configure how long an object can stay in the cache. When creating a CloudFront download distribution, it allows the user to configure the caching behavior for the different path patterns: E.g. one cache behavior is for all .css files while the other is for all .jpg files. When a new distribution is created, CloudFront forwards all requests to the origin specified during the creation of the distribution. The user can add another caching behavior for a different path pattern.
The present guide demonstrates how to configure the cache behavior for a download distribution.
AWS CloudFront is a content distribution service offered by AWS to speed up the distribution of static content, such as media files, html, js, css, etc. The user needs to create a distribution of their bucket or of the AWS service.
When CloudFront serves the objects from AWS S3, it is required to provide public access of that object so that the others can access it. When the object permission is set as mentioned above, the end user can also access the object directly from AWS S3 using the URL: http://<bucketname>.s3.amazonawsaws.com/<objectname>
The user can secure access of their CloudFront distribution using signed URLs. If the user wants to setup a signed URL it is also required that the access of the S3 bucket for the general public is restricted. To restrict access to the AWS S3 bucket, the user can configure an origin access identity.
The origin access identity is a special CloudFront user. The user can allow access to only this CloudFront user using the S3 bucket access and policy. If the origin access identity has been configured and some other user tries to access the AWS S3 object directly, access will be denied as it is accessible to only the origin access identity.
The present guide demonstrates how to create an origin access identity for CloudFront streaming or the download distribution.
AWS CloudFront is a content distribution service offered by AWS to speed up the distribution of static content, such as media files, html, js, css, etc. The user needs to create a distribution of their bucket or of the AWS service.
The user may want to restrict access of the object distributed through CloudFront. The user can specify access of the object using CloudFront signed URLs such that others cannot access it without the signed URL. To create signed URLs for the AWS S3 objects, the user needs at least one AWS account that has an active CloudFront key pair. This account is called the trusted signer.
When the trusted signer is added to the CloudFront distribution, CloudFront requires that the user uses a signed URL to access the object from AWS S3. CloudFront verifies the signed URL to ensure that it is valid and not tampered.
The present guide demonstrates how to add trusted signers for CloudFront streaming or the download distribution.
