I have an EC2 instance which hosts a windows service, .net API and a simple .net website. There's also the added complication of a Route 53 endpoint pointing to it and an https cert being allocated via Amazon certificate manager. Yes, it's a lot of apps on a single instance and I will look at separating them later. I got a message from AWS saying that due to the underlying infrastructure becoming unstable, they'll need to terminate the instance in a week.
Lot of options come to mind, none of which I've tried before or know much about. These options include spinning up another instance, backing up and restoring this instance on to the new one. OR using AWS elastic beanstalk or something to automate the infrastructure setup and code deployment. Which of these (or another) options is most feasible and quick to get working and where should I start looking?
If it's just the instance, I'd go for an EBS snapshot and then restore the ec2 instance from it. Finally, swap the IP in Route 53.
It's a relatively quick and rather straight-forward process, that's well documented by AWS and there are loads of how-to's on the Web too.
Here's where to start:
Create Amazon EBS Snapshot
and here's how to restore it.
On the other hand, you could go for a .Net app on Elastic Beanstalk but that requires a bit more work to set up the environment and prepare the app for deployment.
More on how to create and deploy .NET on Elastic Beanstalk.
Related
So I’ve just finished working on my first big personal project, bought a domain name, created an AWS account, watched a lot of AWS tutorials, but I still can’t figure out how to host my web app on AWS. The whole AWS thing is a mystery to me. No tutorial online seems to teach exactly what I need.
What I’m trying to do is this:
Host my dynamic web app on a secure https connection.
Host the web app using the personalized domain name I purchased.
Link my git repo to AWS so I can easily commit and push changes when needed.
Please assist me by pointing me to a resource that can help me achieve the above 3 tasks.
For now, the web app is still hosted on Heroku’s free service; feel free to take a look at the application, and provide some feedback if you can.
Link to web app:my web app
You mentioned - The web app is still hosted on Heroku’s free service
So, if you want the same thing in AWS, use Elastic Beanstalk.
First Question: How to host my web app on AWS?
There can be multiple options to host your web app:-
S3 Bucket to host your website. How to Host in S3
Elastic Beanstalk. Link
ECS - using containers
Single EC2 Server to host your website.
EKS - Kubernetes
By the way, there are many couples of things which you need to take care of before starting.
Second Question, Host the web app using the personalized domain name I purchased.
If you have used S3, the hosted URL will be in HTTP and you can create a route entry in your purchased domain settings. If it is AWS, create a new record in Route53.
If you host your website on EC2, you will get Public IP Address. Make a route entry with that Public IP.
If you have used ECS or EKS, you might require to use the Load Balancer and then you will have the Load Balancer DNS. Make a route entry with your Load Balancer DNS. Then again question will arise which kind of Load Balancer you want to use. [Like Application, Classic or Network Load Balancer]
If you use Elastic Beanstalk. It's a managed service, when you host you will directly get an endpoint. Make a route entry with that endpoint.
Third, Link my git repo to AWS so I can easily commit and push changes when needed.
For this, you have to use Code Build and connect Github as a Source while creating Code Build Project. Link
For CI-CD, there are multiple things again.
As Heroku’s is a PaaS, which provides you the platform and but when it comes to AWS, it is an IaaS. So you get the infrastructure and when you get the provisioned infrastructure, there are so many things which you need to take care of like you have to think like an Architect. Prepare the architecture and then proceed. It requires knowledge of other things also networking, security etc.
To answer your question, the best way to host a web app in AWS is Elastic Beanstalk
But what is AWS Elastic Beanstalk and what does it do?
AWS Elastic Beanstalk encompasses processes and operations connected with the deployment of web apps into the cloud environment, as well as their scaling.
Elastic Beanstalk automates the deployment by putting forward the required capacity, balancing the load, autoscaling, and monitoring software efficiency and performance. All that is left for a developer to do is to apply the code. In these conditions, the application owner has overall control over the capacity that AWS provides for the software and can access it at any time.
So this is the best way to deploy the app and let’s follow the steps.
Open the Elastic Beanstalk console and find the management page of your environment.
Select “Upload and Deploy”.
Select “Choose File” and choose the source bundle with the dialog box.
Deploy and select the URL to open the new website.
You can use CodeDeploy to connect your Github and deploy your code
Conclusion
I have taken a simplistic approach and told you exactly what you need to do the required task without going into the hus and fuss of AWS. Saying that there is still a lot that can be done to bring the real value of your application in terms of balancing the load, scaling or improving the performance.
What are the exact differences between EC2, Beanstalk and LightSail in AWS?
What are good real time scenarios in which I should use these services?
They are all based on EC2, the compute service from AWS allowing you to create EC2 instances (virtual machines in the cloud).
Lightsail is packaged in a similar way than Virtual Private Server, making it easy for anyone to start with their own server. It has a simplified management console and many options are tuned with default values that maximize availability and security.
Elastic Beanstalk is a service for application developers that provisions an EC2 instance and a load balancer automatically. It creates the EC2 instance, it installs an execution environment on these machines and will deploy your application for you (Elastic Beanstalk support Java, Node, Python, Docker and many others)
Behind the scenes, Elastic Beanstalk creates regular EC2 instances that you will see in your AWS Console.
And EC2 is the bare service that allows the other to be possible. If you choose to create an EC2 instance, you will have to choose your operating system, manage your ssh key, install your application runtime and configure security settings by yourself. You have full control of that virtual machine.
In simple terms:
EC2 - virtual host or an image. which you can use it to install apps and have a machine to do whatever you like.
Lightsail - is similar but more user friendly management option and good for small applications.
Beanstalk - an orchestration tool, which does all the work to create an EC2, install application, software and give you freedom from manual tasks in creating an environment.
More details at - https://stackshare.io/stackups/amazon-ec2-vs-amazon-lightsail-vs-aws-elastic-beanstalk
I don't know if my scenario is typical in any way, but here are the differences that were critical for me. I'm happier EC2 than EB:
EC2:
just a remote linux machine with shell (command line) access
tracable application-level errors, easy to see what is wrong with your application
you can use AWS web console panel or AWS command line tool to manage
you will need repeated steps if you want to reproduce same environment
some effort to get proper shell access (eg fix security rule to your IP only)
no load balancer provided by default
Elastic Beanstalk
a service that creates a EC2 instance with a programming language of your choice (eg Python, PHP, etc)
runs one application on that machine (for python - application.py)
upload applications as .zip file, extra effort needed to use your git source
need to get used to environment vs applications mental model
application level errors hidden deep in the server logs, logs downloaded in separate menu
can be managed by web console, but also needs another CLI tool in addition to AWS CLI (you end up installing two CLI tools)
provides load balancer and other server-level services, takes away the manual setup part
great for scaling stable appications, not so much for trial-and-see experimentaion
probably more expensive than just an EC2 instance
Amazon EC2 is a virtual host, in other words, it is a server where you can SSH configure your application, install dependencies and so on, like in your local machine. EC2 has a dozen of AMI (Amazon Machine Image: it is some kind of operating system of your EC2 server, for instance, you can have EC2 running on Linux based OS or in windows OS). To summarize, it is a great idea if you need a machine in your hands.
Amazon Lightsail is a simple tool that you can deploy and manage application with small management of servers. You can find it very practical if your application is small, For instance, it will perfectly fit your application if you use Wordpress or other CMS.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an orchestration tool. You can manage your application within that service, it is more elevated then AWS Light Sail.
If you still do not understand the differences, you can take a look at each service overview.
There is also an answer in Quora
I have spent only 10 mins on these technologies but here is my first take.
EC2 - a baremetal service. It gives you a server with an OS. That is it. There is nothing else installed on it. So if you need a webserver (nginx) or python, you'll need to do it yourself.
Beanstalk - helps you deploy your applications. Say you have a python/flask application which you want to run on a server. Traditionally you'll have to build the app, move the deployable package to another machine where a web server should be installed, then move the package into some directory in the web server. Beanstalk does all this for you automatically.
LightSail - I haven't tried it but it seem to be an even simpler option to create a server with pre-installed os/software.
In summary, these seem to make application deployment more easier by pre-configuring the server/EC2s with the required software packages and security policies (eg. port nos. etc.).
I am not an expert so I could be wrong.
I've been tasked with getting a new SSL installed on a website, the site is hosted on AWS EC2.
I've discovered that I need the key pair in order to connect to the server instance, however the client doesn't have contact with the former web master.
I don't have much familiarity with AWS so I'm somewhat at a loss of how to proceed. I'm guessing I would need the old key pair to access the server instance and install the SSL?
I see there's also the Certificate Manager section in AWS, but don't currently see an SSL in there. Will installing it here attach it to the website or do I need to access the server instance and install it there?
There is a documented process for updating the SSH keys on an EC2 instance. However, this will require some downtime, and must not be run on an instance-store-backed instance. If you're new to AWS then you might not be able to determine whether this is the case, so would be risky.
Instead, I think your best option is to bring up an Elastic Load Balancer to be the new front-end for the application: clients will connect to it, and it will in turn connect to the application instance. You can attach an ACM cert to the ELB, and shifting traffic should be a matter of changing the DNS entry (but, of course, test it out first!).
Moving forward, you should redeploy the application to a new EC2 instance, and then point the ELB at this instance. This may be easier said than done, because the old instance is probably manually configured. With luck you have the site in source control, and can do deploys in a test environment.
If not, and you're running on Linux, you'll need to make a snapshot of the live instance and attach it to a different instance to learn how it's configured. Start with the EC2 EBS docs and try it out in a test environment before touching production.
I'm not sure if there's any good way to recover the content from a Windows EC2 instance. And if you're not comfortable with doing ops, you should find someone who is.
I'm building a Sails app that is using socket.io and see that Sails offers a method for using multiple servers via redis:
http://sailsjs.org/documentation/concepts/realtime/multi-server-environments
Since I will be placing the app on AWS, preferably with ELB (elastic load balancer) and autoscale group with multiple EC2 instances was wondering how I can handle so it doesn't need a separate redis instance?
Maybe we can use AWS Elasticache? If so - how would this be done?
Now that AWS has released the new ALB application load balancer which has websockets, could this be used to help simplify things?
Thanks in advance
Updates for use-cases in application
Allow end-user to update data dynamically from their own dashboard
and display analytics/stats in real-time to an administrator
Application status' to change based on specific timings eg. at a
given start date/time the app allows users to update data.
Regarding your first question, you don't want to run Redis on the same servers that Sails is running on, especially if you are using AutoScaling. The Redis server needs to be a separate server that won't disappear if your environment experiences a "scale-in" event. So Redis is going to have to be on a separate "server" somewhere.
ElastiCache is just separate EC2 instances, running Redis, where AWS handles most of the management for you to the point that you can't even SSH into the instance. It's similar to how RDS works. ElastiCache will certainly work for your scenario. You might also want to look at the third-party service RedisLabs which also manages Redis instances on AWS for you.
Regarding your second question, an Application Load Balancer will have no bearing on your Redis usage. It will however bring actual support for WebSockets which it sounds like you are using. So yes, you should be using an ALB instead of an ELB.
I have an application on an Windows server EC2 with an SQL server for our database.
What I would like to do is an load balancer so the application won't fail due to overload.
I have a couple of questions that Im not certain about it.
I believe that i need to create an image of my current instance and duplicate it. my problem is that my database is based on my current instance so it would duplicate my database as well.
Do I need another instance just for my database?
If yes, then it means that I need a total of 3 instances. 2 for the application and 1 for the database.
In this case I need to change my application to connect to the new instance database instead of the current database.
After all that happens I need to add a load balancer.
I hope I made myself clear.
I would recommend using RDS (http://aws.amazon.com/rds/) for this. This way you don't have to worry about the database server and just host your application server on EC2 instances. Your AMI will then contain just the application server and thus when you scale up you will be launching additional app servers only and not database servers.
Since you are deploying a .NET application, I would also recommend taking a look at Elastic Beanstalk (http://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/) since it will really help to make auto scaling much easier and your solution will scale up/down as well as self-heal itself.
As far the load balancer is concerned, you can either manually update your load balancer will the new instances of your application server or you can let your auto scale script do it for you. If you go for ElasticBeanstalk, then Elastic Beanstalk will take care of adding/removing instances to/from your Elastic Load Balancer for you on its own.