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AWS Auto Scaling provides horizontal scaling by automatically adding or removing compute resources for the application hosted on AWS. The user can achieve Auto Scaling in different ways, such as maintaining the number of healthy instances or adding/ removing instances based on demand.

AWS does not provide the AWS Management console for Auto Scaling. Thus, all the operations should be performed through CLI or API. When the user wants to configure Auto Scaling for their resources, it is required to follow certain steps. The first step is to create a launch configuration, which defines resources, such as AMI, EBS or Instance Type or detailed monitoring to be added by Auto Scaling.

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AWS is ideally suited for making the user’s applications tolerant to disaster. One of the options for making the user’s application suitable to DR is to keep a back up of the data / application setup in multiple regions. If the first region is not reachable due to some reason, the user can start the application from the other region. In Dec 2021 AWS introduced the functionality to copy snapshot across regions. In March 2022 AWS announced the functionality to migrate the AMI from one region to another. The present guide demonstrates how to copy an AMI from one region to other.

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Newvem’s Utilization Heat Map enables you to visualize your 30-day cloud usage by hour, region, business activity, and more in a single glance.

Did you know that more than 15% of clouds are underutilized? That’s more than $30M of the $200M in EC2 spend that Newvem has analyzed over the past year! Such a waste but it can be easily remedied with Cloud Utilization Heat Maps!

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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.

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AWS Auto Scaling provides horizontal scaling by automatically adding or removing computer resources for the application hosted on AWS. The user can achieve Auto Scaling in different ways, such as maintaining the number of healthy instances or adding/ removing instances based on demand. The present guide demonstrates how to create, view or delete an Auto Scaling configuration.

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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.

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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.

Rough estimation

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.

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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.

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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 clocks of the custom origin is synchronized with AWS
• Host and serve the same content on all the servers
• The origin must be available publicly

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.

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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.

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