Is it hard to deploy a cloud server? - amazon-web-services

Sorry I'm new to web server. I want to deploy a cloud server for user data:
User can login using web, with verification code sent to user's phone.
User can manipulate his data (add/modify/remove) when login.
Android/iPhone client can manipulate user data when login.
Server should have a database for storage, SQLLite or others.
It would be good to use Amazon/Ali-cloud cloud service, provided it can speed up my deployment. I'm not sure if I need run into blobs such as H5, PHP/JSP, node.js or others. Can you provide a guide for me, web link or book?
And, what's the most popular programming interface between Android/IOS app and cloud server? http post/get or other wrapper ?

Surely you can speed up your deployment using Amazon Web Services. This is my recommendation:
For Webserver,
Amazon EC2: Launch an instance where you can install Apache/Nginx
here. You will need a RDS instance running parallel with your server
which will lower your need on server CPU/Mem, but will cost also.
For Database, you can have many approach ways here:
Amazon RDS: Launch an instance where you host your Database
(mysql/...). This one will provide you with Database Name, Hostname,
Users, ... which you can use to connect with your webserver in EC2.
Your Android/IOS application can use RDS information for the database
connection.
Amazon DynamoDB: Fast, Flexible for NoSQL (wonder if you want to use
traditional database or NoSQL?): https://aws.amazon.com/amplify/
For Mobile/Website access control,
AWS Cognito: Great for user-accounts, designed for real-time data
model: https://aws.amazon.com/cognito/?nc1=f_ls
For serverless if you want to GET/PUT API on your webserver for
easier,
AWS Lambda: https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/?nc1=f_ls

Taking into account that you are just starting with your application, I would suggest going with serverless architecture with AWS Lambda running your business logic.
Key benefits:
No server management = spend time on building your application vs on maintaining infrastructure
Flexible scaling = scale based on what you really need
Pay for value = don't pay for resources that you don't need
Automated high availability = serverless provides built-in availability and fault tolerance
To learn more on serverless, you may want to check Building Serverless Web Applications - 2017 AWS Online Tech Talks.
Now when it comes to going deep, I would suggest checking online trainings available from acloud.guru, cloud academy, udemy or linuxacademy for serverless and also for the development language you want to use (Node.js is often used for such scenarios).

Related

Platform as a Service AWS solution to store informaton received by PHP application

I am new in the AWS Cloud services.
I am doing the learning project to better understand AWS services.
I assigned a project to prepare a new environment in the cloud, to which my team will later migrate their applications. The Stakeholders have come up with some Technical and Business requirements:
Due to the budget issue, the company cannot afford a dedicated DB engineer, so they are willing to outsource the DB management from a Cloud provider, to store and maintain the customer information received by PHP application. You must pick the right solution from AWS, which should be a Platform as a Service.It should also provide high availability, patching and back-ups. (hint: Create DB subnet group)
Which AWS Cloud service I could use to implement this requirement?
Please let me know if I need to provide more details.
Thank you in advance.
You can utilize the Database as a Service(DaaS) options from AWS. There are plenty of choices depending on the data and its requirements. Here is a snapshot from the official documentation:
Analyze your requirements and learn about the above choices to make an educated decision.
If you are looking for a relation database,
Its amazon RDS, A PaaS service provided my amazon web services. it is a highly available, scalable relational database solution service that you can setup and run in the cloud.
In regards to backups, you can enable automated daily backups and also make use of the backup retention policy to define the number of days you want to keep the backups.
Amazon RDS supports different relational databases such as mysql, postgres, oracle ,etc
If you are looking for a document database,
you got some options mainly DynamoDB and new DocumentDb solution.

Migrating on premise web application to AWS ec2

Can some one please advise the steps required for migrating a web application which is currently running on tomcat server at onpremise to AWS ec2 instance. I understand this is not a straight forward and requires some detailed process.
The code is wrriten in Java and database used as oracle.
So it would be helpfull if someone can suggest me any relavent document or any website which gives some demo to refer me and proceed with this scenario.
If it's a personal project then I would recommend Lightsail as the simplest way to deploy existing Java application.
For a database a small instance of MySQL or if relational database is not needed then a document database like DynamoDB. https://aws.amazon.com/products/databases/?nc2=h_m1
There are multiple choices one how to migrate a Java application to AWS.
You could potentially use existing AWS services like:
Lightsail - https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/
Beanstock - https://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/
or
EC2 instance and install Tomcat manually
Use ECS with Docker https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/tutorials/deploy-docker-containers/?nc2=type_a
As for Database solution Oracle is an option but quite expensive one.
When moving to AWS it's better to use one of the RDS managed databases like MySQL, Postgress or more expensive like Aurora.
In order to propose an architecture some details would be needed on predicted load, the size of the application and volume of data. Is the product regional or global, are there any additional issues that need to be addressed while moving to a cloud (performance, availability etc), how users are authenticated (are any other services needed).

Which AWS services for mobile app backend?

I'm trying to figure out what AWS services I need for the mobile application I'm working on with my startup. The application we're working on should go into the app-/play-store later this year, so we need a "best-practice" solution for our case. It must be high scaleable so if there are thousands of requests to the server it should remain stable and fast. Also we maybe want to deploy a website on it.
Actually we are using Uberspace (link) servers with an Node.js application and MongoDB running on it. Everything works fine, but for the release version we want to go with AWS. What we need is something we can run Node.js / MongoDB (or something similar to MongoDB) on and something to store images like profile pictures that can be requested by the user.
I have already read some informations about AWS on their website but that didn't help a lot. There are so many services and we don't know which of these fit our needs perfectly.
A friend told me to just use AWS EC2 for the Node.js server + MongoDB and S3 to store images, but on some websites I have read that it is better to use this architecture:
We would be glad if there is someone who can share his/her knowledge with us!
To run code: you can use lambda, but be careful: the benefit you
don't have to worry about server, the downside is lambda sometimes
unreasonably slow. If you need it really fast then you need it on EC2
with auto-scaling. If you tune it up properly it works like a charm.
To store data: DynamoDB if you want it really fast (single digits
milliseconds regardless of load and DB size) and according to best
practices. It REQUIRES proper schema or will cost you a fortune,
otherwise use MongoDB on EC2.
If you need RDBMS then RDS (benefits:
scalability, availability, no headache with maintenance)
Cache: they have both Redis and memcached.
S3: to store static assets.
I do not suggest CloudFront, there are another CDN on market with better
price/possibilities.
API gateway: yes, if you have an API.
Depending on your app, you may need SQS.
Cognito is a good service if you want to authenticate your users at using google/fb/etc.
CloudWatch: if you're metric-addict then it's not for you, perhaps standalone EC2
will be better. But, for most people CloudWatch is abcolutely OK.
Create all necessary alarms (CPU overload etc).
You should use roles
to allow access to your S3/DB from lambda/AWS.
You should not use the root account but create a separate user instead.
Create billing alarm: you'll know if you're going to break budget.
Create lambda functions to backup your EBS volumes (and whatever else you may need to backup). There's no problem if backup starts a second later, so
Lambda is ok here.
Run Trusted Adviser now and then.
it'd be better for you to set it up using CloudFormation stack: you'll be able to deploy the same infrastructure with ease in another region if/when needed, also it's relatively easier to manage Infrastructure-as-a-code than when it built manually.
If you want a very high scalable application, you may be need to use a serverless architecture with AWS lambda.
There is a framework called serverless that helps you to manage and organize all your lambda function and put them behind AWS Gateway.
For the storage you can use AWS EC2 and install MongoDB or you can go with AWS DynamODB as your NoSql storage.
If you want a frontend, both web and mobile, you may be want to visit the react native approach.
I hope I've been helpful.

Choosing the right AWS Services and software tools

I'm developing a prototype IoT application which does the following
Receive/Store data from sensors.
Web application with a web-based IDE for users to deploy simple JavaScript/Python scripts which gets executed in Docker Containers.
Data from the sensors gets streamed to these containers.
User programs can use this data to do analytics, monitoring etc.
The logs of these programs are outputted to the user on the webapp
Current Architecture and Services
Using one AWS EC2 instance. I chose EC2 because I was trying to figure out the architecture.
Stack is Node.js, RabbitMQ, Express, MySQl, MongoDB and Docker
I'm not interested in using AWS IoT services like AWS IoT and Greengrass
I've ruled out Heroku since I'm using other AWS services.
Questions and Concerns
My goal is prototype development for a Beta release to a set of 50 users
(hopefully someone else will help/work on a production release)
As far as possible, I don't want to spend a lot of time migrating between services since developing the product is key. Should I stick with EC2 or move to Beanstalk?
If I stick with EC2, what is the best way to handle small-medium traffic? Use one large EC2 machine or many small micro instances?
What is a good way to manage containers? Is it worth it use swarm and do container management? What if I have to use multiple instances?
I also have small scripts which have status of information of sensors which are needed by web app and other services. If I move to multiple instances, how can I make these scripts available to multiple machines?
The above question also holds good for servers, message buses, databases etc.
My goal is certainly not production release. I want to complete the product, show I have users who are interested and of course, show that the product works!
Any help in this regard will be really appreciated!
If you want to manage docker containers with least hassle in AWS, you can use Amazon ECS service to deploy your containers or else go with Beanstalk. Also you don't need to use Swarm in AWS, ECS will work for you.
Its always better to scale out rather scale up, using small to medium size EC2 instances. However the challenge you will face here is managing and scaling underlying EC2's as well as your docker containers. This leads you to use Large EC2 instances to keep EC2 scaling aside and focus on docker scaling(Which will add additional costs for you)
Another alternative you can use for the Web Application part is to use, AWS Lambda and API Gateway stack with Serverless Framework, which needs least operational overhead and comes with DevOps tools.
You may keep your web app on Heroku and run your IoT server in AWS EC2 or AWS Lambda. Heroku is on AWS itself, so this split setup will not affect performance. You may heal that inconvenience of "sitting on two chairs" by writing a Terraform script which provisions both EC2 instance and Heroku app and ties them together.
Alternatively, you can use Dockhero add-on to run your IoT server in a Docker container alongside your Heroku app.
ps: I'm a Dockhero maintainer

AWS Lambda vs Heroku: what are the key differences?

I searched online but can't find a good answer to what the key differences are between AWS Lambda vs Heroku. I can for example write Node JS but when should I use Lambda and when Heroku?
AWS Lambda is for creating server side apps based on serverless architecture, while Heroku is a platform as a service (PaaS) which can be used to build and run server apps.
Heroku is a service which provides tools to deploy, manage, and scale server applications.
You can use node.js, go, python, etc. for your server app which runs on a Heroku instance.
Here are the key differences:
On Lambda you pay for the computation time, while on Heroku you pay monthly.
Lambda instances are created on demand, while Heroku instance is always running.
Heroku provides add-ons which are easy to use to integrate third party services, such as MailGun and Redis, in your service.
If your service is just going to do something simple such as converting an image and saving it on a S3 bucket, you can use AWS Lambda, but if you are creating a complex service which is doing multiple different tasks, it is better to use Heroku and choose a language/framework which fits your needs.
You can learn more on serverless architecture here.