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In this article, we covered the basics of disaster recovery (DR) and pilot flame architecture using the (AWS) cloud. This post describes the first step towards fault-tolerant architectures as we will explain now.

Functional Architecture of Low Capacity in Standby

A latent functional architecture, while being low capacity, represents a good start in the pursuit of high availability (HA), as it can replace the production infrastructure. Even with the limits resulting from low capacity, functional architecture can support production traffic and provide aid to scaling. You should change the structure of low capacity scaling in order to handle production load.

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“Everything fails, all the time” Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon.

The Cloud Will Fail

Hurricanes, BIOS updates, earthquakes, DNS failures, SSL certificates, storms … these were responsible for the last years cloud outage in cloud services and traditional data center infrastructure. What do they have in common?

Bad luck? Bad practice? Consequences? Maybe, what they teach us is that we need a “Plan B”.  If the core of our business is on the Internet, we need a disaster-proof infrastructure that enables us to stay on track (or recover) within a feasible time defined in our Business Continuity Plan. In this post I will focus on disaster recovery and its various facets. Before getting into the technical side, let me review some basics.

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The benefits of migrating workloads between different cloud providers or between private and public clouds can only truly be redeemed with an understanding of the cloud business model and cloud workload management. It seems that cloud adoption has reached the phase where advanced cloud users are creating their own hybrid solutions or migrating between clouds while striving to achieve interoperability values within their systems. This article aims to answer some of the questions that arise when managing cloud workloads.

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AWS Auto Scaling provides horizontal scaling by automatically adding or removing compute resources for the application hosted on Amazon AWS cloud. Auto Scaling ensures that the number of Amazon EC2 instances increases seamlessly when the demand escalates for maintaining the application performance, and decreases automatically when the demand declines for minimizing the costs. This guide demonstrates how to configure Auto Scaling to scale manually with a fixed number of instances.

AWS does not provide an AWS Management console for Auto Scaling. Thus, all the operations should be performed through CLI or AWS APIs. 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 the 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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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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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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Availability and Uptime Management is one of five components in the ITIL Service Delivery area. It is responsible for ensuring application systems are up and available for use according to the service criticality and the defined Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

Your uptime management team should analyze your online business availability requirements and ensure that optimized, cost-effective contingency plans are put in place and tested on a regular basis to ensure an online robust service that meets the business needs. For example, Internet ecommerce systems may have almost zero recovery RTO (Recovery Time Objective) in comparison to less critical, non-customer-facing applications where even a few days of recovery can be provisioned on a less expensive cloud infrastructure with limited redundancy capabilities.

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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?

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AWS CloudFront is a content distribution service offered by AWS to speed up the distribution of static or dynamic content, such as media files, html, js css, etc as well php. CloudFront serves its content through edge locations. As of Dec 2021, AWS had more than 35+ edge locations across the globe. When the user requests for any static content from CloudFront, it will find the nearest edge location to the user and deliver the content from that edge location to reduce the latency.

The present guide demonstrates how to create a download distribution with the AWS S3 service for CloudFront.

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