Problem:
We need to perform a task under which we have to transfer all files ( CSV format) stored in AWS S3 bucket to a on-premise LAN folder using the Lambda functions. This will be a scheduled tasks which will be carried out after every 1 hour, and the file will again be transferred from S3 to on-premise LAN folder while replacing the existing ones. Size of these files is not large (preferably under few MBs).
I am not able to find out any AWS managed service to accomplish this task.
I am a newbie to AWS, any solution to this problem is most welcome.
Thanks,
Actually, I am looking for a solution by which I can push S3 files to on-premise folder automatically
For that you need to make the on-premise network visible to the logic (lambda, whatever..) "pushing" the content. The default solution is using the AWS site-to-site VPN.
There are multiple options for setting up the VPN, you could choose based on the needs.
Then the on-premise network will look just like another subnet.
However - VPN has its complexity and cost. In most of the cases it is much easier to "pull" data from the on-premise environment.
To sync data there are multiple options. For a managed service, I could point out the S3 Gateway which based on your description sounds like an insane overkill.
Maybe you could start with a simple cron job (or a task timer if working with windows) and run a CLI command to sync the S3 content or just copy specified files.
Check out S3 Sync, I think it will help you accomplish this task: https://awscli.amazonaws.com/v2/documentation/api/latest/reference/s3/sync.html#examples
To run any AWS CLI in your computer, you will need to setup credentials, and the setup account/roles should have permissions to do the task (e.g. access S3)
Check out AWS CLI setup here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/cli-chap-configure.html
Can someone explain me whats the best way to transfer data from a harddrive on an EC2 Instance (running Windows Server 2012) to an S3 Bucket for the same AWS Account on a daily basis?
Backround idea to this:
I'm generating a .csv file for one of our Business partners daily at 11:00 am and I want to deliver it to S3 (he has access to our S3 Bucket).
After that he can pull it out of S3 manually or automatically whenever he wants.
Hope you can help me, I only found manually solutions with the CLI, but no automated way for daily transfers.
Best Regards
You can directly mount S3 buckets as mounted drives on your EC2 instances. This way you don't even need some sort of triggers/daily task scheduler along with third party service as objects would be directly available in the S3 bucket.
For Linux typically you would use Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE). Take a look at this repo if you need it for Linux: https://github.com/s3fs-fuse/s3fs-fuse.
Regarding Windows, there is this tool:
https://tntdrive.com/mount-amazon-s3-bucket.aspx
If these tools don't suit you or if you don't want to mount directly the s3 bucket, here is another option: Whatever you can do with the CLI you should be able to do with the SDK. Therefore if you are able to code in one of the various language AWS Lambda proposes - C#/Java/Go/Powershell/Python/Node.js/Ruby - you could automate that using a Lambda function along with a daily task scheduler triggering at 11a.m.
Hope this helps!
Create a small application that uploads your file to an S3 bucket (there are a some example here). Then use Task Scheduler to execute your application on a regular basis.
I need to transfer all our files (With folders structure) to AWS S3. I have researched lot about how this done.
Most of the places mentioned s3fs. But looks like this is bit old. And I have tried to install s3fs to my exsisting CentOS 6 web server. But its stuck on $ make command. (Yes there is Makefile.in)
And as per this answer AWS S3 Transfer Acceleration is the next better option. But still I have to write a PHP script (My application is PHP) to transfer all folders and files to S3. It is working same as how file save in S3 (API putObject), but faster. Please correct me if I am wrong.
Is there any other better solution (I prefer FTP) to transfer 1TB files with folders from CentOS 6 server to AWS S3? Is there any way to use FTP client in EC2 to transfer files from outside CentOS 6 to AWS S3?
Use the aws s3 sync command of the AWS Command-Line Interface (CLI).
This will preserve your directory structure and can be restarted in case of disconnection. Each execution will only copy new, changed or missing files.
Be aware that 1TB is a lot of data and can take significant time to copy.
An alternative is to use AWS Snowball, which is a device that AWS can send to you. It can hold 50TB or 80TB of data. Simply copy your data to the device, then ship it back to AWS and they will copy the data to Amazon S3.
I have a service hosted on Amazon Web Services. There I have multiple EC2 instances running with the exact same setup and data, managed by an Elastic Load Balancer and scaling groups.
Those instances are web servers running web applications based on PHP. So currently there are the very same files etc. placed on every instance. But when the ELB / scaling group launches a new instance based on load rules etc., the files might not be up-to-date.
Additionally, I'd rather like to use a shared file system for PHP sessions etc. than sticky sessions.
So, my question is, for those reasons and maybe more coming up in the future, I would like to have a shared file system entity which I can attach to my EC2 instances.
What way would you suggest to resolve this? Are there any solutions offered by AWS directly so I can rely on their services rather than doing it on my on with a DRBD and so on? What is the easiest approach? DRBD, NFS, ...? Is S3 also feasible for those intends?
Thanks in advance.
As mentioned in a comment, AWS has announced EFS (http://aws.amazon.com/efs/) a shared network file system. It is currently in very limited preview, but based on previous AWS services I would hope to see it generally available in the next few months.
In the meantime there are a couple of third party shared file system solutions for AWS such as SoftNAS https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B00PJ9FGVU/ref=srh_res_product_title?ie=UTF8&sr=0-3&qid=1432203627313
S3 is possible but not always ideal, the main blocker being it does not natively support any filesystem protocols, instead all interactions need to be via an AWS API or via http calls. Additionally when looking at using it for session stores the 'eventually consistent' model will likely cause issues.
That being said - if all you need is updated resources, you could create a simple script to run either as a cron or on startup that downloads the files from s3.
Finally in the case of static resources like css/images don't store them on your webserver in the first place - there are plenty of articles covering the benefit of storing and accessing static web resources directly from s3 while keeping the dynamic stuff on your server.
From what we can tell at this point, EFS is expected to provide basic NFS file sharing on SSD-backed storage. Once available, it will be a v1.0 proprietary file system. There is no encryption and its AWS-only. The data is completely under AWS control.
SoftNAS is a mature, proven advanced ZFS-based NAS Filer that is full-featured, including encrypted EBS and S3 storage, storage snapshots for data protection, writable clones for DevOps and QA testing, RAM and SSD caching for maximum IOPS and throughput, deduplication and compression, cross-zone HA and a 100% up-time SLA. It supports NFS with LDAP and Active Directory authentication, CIFS/SMB with AD users/groups, iSCSI multi-pathing, FTP and (soon) AFP. SoftNAS instances and all storage is completely under your control and you have complete control of the EBS and S3 encryption and keys (you can use EBS encryption or any Linux compatible encryption and key management approach you prefer or require).
The ZFS filesystem is a proven filesystem that is trusted by thousands of enterprises globally. Customers are running more than 600 million files in production on SoftNAS today - ZFS is capable of scaling into the billions.
SoftNAS is cross-platform, and runs on cloud platforms other than AWS, including Azure, CenturyLink Cloud, Faction cloud, VMware vSPhere/ESXi, VMware vCloud Air and Hyper-V, so your data is not limited or locked into AWS. More platforms are planned. It provides cross-platform replication, making it easy to migrate data between any supported public cloud, private cloud, or premise-based data center.
SoftNAS is backed by industry-leading technical support from cloud storage specialists (it's all we do), something you may need or want.
Those are some of the more noteworthy differences between EFS and SoftNAS. For a more detailed comparison chart:
https://www.softnas.com/wp/nas-storage/softnas-cloud-aws-nfs-cifs/how-does-it-compare/
If you are willing to roll your own HA NFS cluster, and be responsible for its care, feeding and support, then you can use Linux and DRBD/corosync or any number of other Linux clustering approaches. You will have to support it yourself and be responsible for whatever happens.
There's also GlusterFS. It does well up to 250,000 files (in our testing) and has been observed to suffer from an IOPS brownout when approaching 1 million files, and IOPS blackouts above 1 million files (according to customers who have used it). For smaller deployments it reportedly works reasonably well.
Hope that helps.
CTO - SoftNAS
For keeping your webserver sessions in sync you can easily switch to Redis or Memcached as your session handler. This is a simple setting in the PHP.ini and they can all access the same Redis or Memcached server to do sessions. You can use Amazon's Elasticache which will manage the Redis or Memcache instance for you.
http://phpave.com/redis-as-a-php-session-handler/ <- explains how to setup Redis with PHP pretty easily
For keeping your files in sync is a little bit more complicated.
How to I push new code changes to all my webservers?
You could use Git. When you deploy you can setup multiple servers and it will push your branch (master) to the multiple servers. So every new build goes out to all webserver.
What about new machines that launch?
I would setup new machines to run a rsync script from a trusted source, your master web server. That way they sync their web folders with the master when they boot and would be identical even if the AMI had old web files in it.
What about files that change and need to be live updated?
Store any user uploaded files in S3. So if user uploads a document on Server 1 then the file is stored in s3 and location is stored in a database. Then if a different user is on server 2 he can see the same file and access it as if it was on server 2. The file would be retrieved from s3 and served to the client.
GlusterFS is also an open source distributed file system used by many to create shared storage across EC2 instances
Until Amazon EFS hits production the best approach in my opinion is to build a storage backend exporting NFS from EC2 instances, maybe using Pacemaker/Corosync to achieve HA.
You could create an EBS volume that stores the files and instruct Pacemaker to umount/dettach and then attach/mount the EBS volume to the healthy NFS cluster node.
Hi we currently use a product called SoftNAS in our AWS environment. It allows us to chooses between both EBS and S3 backed storage. It has built in replication as well as a high availability option. May be something you can check out. I believe they offer a free trial you can try out on AWS
We are using ObjectiveFS and it is working well for us. It uses S3 for storage and is straight forward to set up.
They've also written a doc on how to share files between EC2 instances.
http://objectivefs.com/howto/how-to-share-files-between-ec2-instances
Here is my scenario.
We have an ELB setup with two reserved instances of EC2 acting as web server under it (Amazon Linux).
There are some rapidly changing files (pdf, xls, jpg, etc) on the web server which are consumed by the websites hosted on the EC2 instances. Code files are identical and we will be sure to update both the servers manually at the same time with new code as and when needed.
The main problem is the user uploaded content which is stored on the EC2 instance.
What is the best approach to make sure that the uploaded files are available on both the servers almost instantly ?
Many people have suggested the use of rsync or unison, but this will involve setting a cron job. I am looking for something like FileSystemWatcher in C# which is triggered
ONLY when the contents of the specified folder are changed. Moreover due to the ELB we are not sure which of the EC2 instances will actually be connected to the user when the files are uploaded.
To add to the above we have one more Staging Server which pushes certain files to one of the EC2 web servers. We want these files too replicated to the other instance.
I was wondering whether S3 can solve the problem ? Will this setup be still good if we decide to enable auto scaling ?
I am confused at this stage. Please help
S3 will be the choice for your case. In this way, you don't have to sync files between EC2 instances. Also it is probably the best choice if you need to enable auto scaling. You should not put any data in EC2 instances, they should be stateless so that you can easily auto scale.
To use S3, it will require your application to support it instead of directly writing to local file system. It should be quite easy, there are many libraries in each language which can help you to store files into S3.