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.
Related
At home, I use AWS Amplify to host my personal portfolio website since it is so easy and cheap to host.
At work, they have me making other SPAs (in vue.js) and putting the code in private GitHub repos,
but I have to host the websites on EC2 instances and push the code using AWS CodeDeploy/CodePipeline.
Using EC2s to do this is so much more expensive
(Amplify: $12-20/year for domain name, EC2: ~$80-90/year for compute time)
and time consuming.
Is there a reason someone might
not want to use Amplify when building SPAs?
My initial thought is that using CodePipeline might get the user to the
page faster since it's already built and ready to go. Although the site I have in mind is for internal users and
will won't be visited very often, maybe a few times a week. Is that right? Feel free to correct me / my assumptions.
I wasn't able to find much online, but talking to AWS professionals helped me find an answer:
AWS Amplify is a managed service, so you have much less control over the environment/installed packages that might affect your website / you have to deal with other implied disadvantages of managed services
The build time will eventually cost more than it is to run the EC2 if a lot of people visit the site
You don't have the ability to use load balancers to distribute traffic
You may see here https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/host-your-apps-with-aws-amplify-console-from-the-aws-amplify-cli/ that is mentioned about AWS Amplify are able to use the:
Git repo / Codecommit
AWS Cloudfront
AWS S3
With the AWS Amplify also can do continuous deployment similar like AWS Codepipelines
Perhaps that can help you
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).
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
Is there a way list/view(graphically?) all created resources on amazon? All the db's users, pools etc.
The best way I can think of is to run each of the cli aws <resource> ls commands in a bash file.
What would be great would be to have a graphical tool that showed all the relationships. Is anyone aware of such a tool?
UPDATE
I decided to make my own start on this, currently its just on the cli, but might move to graphical output. Help needed!
https://github.com/QuantumInformation/aws-x-ray
No, it is not possible to easily list all services created on AWS.
Each service has a set of API calls and will typically have Describe* calls that can list resources. However, these commands would need to be issued to each service individually and they typically have different syntax.
There are third-party services (eg Kumolus) that offer functionality to list and visualize services but they are typically focussed on Amazon EC2 and Amazon VPC-based services. They definitely would not go 'into' a database to list DB users, but they would show Amazon RDS instances.
I'm trying to determine the "best" way for a small company to keep web app EC2 instances in sync with current files while using autoscaling.
From my research, CloudFormation, Chef, Puppet, OpsWorks, and others seem like the tools to do so. All of them seem to have a decent learning curve, so I am hoping someone can point me in the right direction and I'll learn one.
The initial setup I am after is:
Route53
1x Load Balancer
2x EC2 (different AZ) - Apache/PHP
1x ElastiCache Redis
2x EC2 (different AZ) w/ MySQL
Email thru Google Apps
Customer File/Image Storage via S3
CloudFront for CDN
The only major challenge I can see is versioning/syncing the web/app server. We're small now, so I could probably just manually update the EBS or even using rsync, but I would rather automate it and be setup for autoscaling.
This is probably too broad of a question and may be closed, but let me give you a few thoughts.
Why not use RDS for MySQL?
You need to get into the thought of how to make and promote disk images. In the cloud world, you don't want to be rsyncing around a bunch of files from server to server. When you are ready to publish a revised set of code, just make am image from your staging environment, start new EC2 instances in your ELB based on that image, and turn off old instances. You may have a little different deployment sequence if you need to coordinate with DB schema changes, but that is a pretty straightforward approach.
You should still seek to automate some of your activities using tools such as those you mentioned. You don't need to do this all at once. Just figure out a manual part in your process that you want to automate and do it.