I am about to launch an iOS app that will be communicating with my custom REST API. Right now I am running a single EC2 t2.micro instance running an Apache web server with MySQLi. Before I go ahead and launch it for the public, I want to hear what proper steps should be taken regarding the following.
Should I run two separate EC2 instances? One only for the web server and the other to handle only the database?
How should I approach setting up the database? Should I still use MySQLi or should I start using Amazon's RDS?
In relationship to number two, when the database and/or web server runs out of space, how is this issue handled so that it seamlessly adds space to allow the database/web server to continue growth? I also read something regarding auto-scale.
I will be expecting many requests per minute to my web server and want to take precaution.
The answer to these questions largely depends on the requirements of your application, your budget, and on what you decide to manage vs. what you'd prefer to allow AWS to manage. However, I'll answer these as best I can.
1) Yes. Separating the database from the web server (that is, 2 different EC2 instances) makes sense for a lot of reasons. This will allow you to tailor resources like memory, CPU, etc. to each layer of your application separately. You do not want your web and database competing for the same resources. Additionally, an issue that forces you to take down one (web or database) will not force you to also take down the other. If your database lives on one of the web servers and you need to perform maintenance, your app will effectively become offline, since down goes your database as you perform updates. Also, ideally you would protect your database server within a private subnet in your VPC. If you have the web and database on the same server, they will both be in a public subnet, since you're web will require access to an internet gateway.
2) Depends. If you want to maintain total control of the database server, than use an EC2 instance where you retain operating system control. If you want to take advantage of features like Multi-AZ for high availability or allowing AWS to manage things like updates for you, RDS can be a great option. Cost also plays a role. For things like read-replicas and Multi-AZ, you will pay more, but you are purchasing performance and high availability. Thus, depends on your requirements. You can find the features of RDS here: RDS Product Details
3) For anything running on an EC2 instance (database or web) or if you decide to use RDS, you may provision and attach additional storage volumes as necessary. The type of storage you select will depend on the performance requirements, your budget, and the kind of workload you expect your database to face. Amazon provides the storage options available to you as well as a section for adding more storage here: RDS Storage Options
If you are worried about too many requests overwhelming your EC2 t2.micro instance, consider creating an ELB load balancer and setting up an auto-scaling group which will allow you to expand your capacity as necessary while distributing traffic such that no one server gets overwhelmed.
Related
here's how the story goes.
We started transforming a monolith, single-machine, e-commerce application (Apache/PHP) to cloud infrastructure. Obviously, the application and the database (MySQL) were on the same machine.
We decided to move to AWS. And as the first step of transformation, we decided to split the database and application. Hosting application on a c4.xlarge machine. And hosting database to RDS Aurora MySQL on a db.r5.large machine, with default options.
This setup performed well. Especially the database performance went up high.
Unfortunately, when the traffic spiked up, we started experiencing long response times. Looked like RDS, although being really fast for executing queries, wasn't returning results fast enough over the network to the EC2 machine.
So that was our conclusion after an in-depth analysis of the setup including Apache/MySQL/PHP tuning parameters. The delayed response time was definitely due to the network latency between EC2 and RDS/Aurora machine, both machines being in the same region.
Before adding additional resources (ex: ElastiCache etc) we'd first like to look into any default configuration we can play around with to solve this problem.
What do you think we missed there?
One of the bigest strength with the cloud is the scalability and you should always design your application to utilise it and it sounds like your RDS instance is getting chocked due to nr of request more than the process time for the queries. So rather go more small instances with load balancing than one big doing all the job. And with Load Balancers you will get away from a singel point of failure due to you can have replicas of your database and they can even be placed in different AZ.
Here is a blogpost you can read on the topic:
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/scaling-your-amazon-rds-instance-vertically-and-horizontally/
Good luck in your aws journey.
The Best answer to your question is using read replicas, but remember only your read requests could be sent to your read replicas so you would need to design your application that way
Also for some cost savings, you should try aurora serverless
One more option is passing traffic between ec2 and rds through a private network rather than using the public internet to connect your ec2 to rds that can be one of the mistakes that might be happening
I have a very basic idea on servers. So far I have only worked with few Ubuntu VPS server which I can easily maintain, install a database, upload my code and run my projects. And to save static data like image/video I use local SSD storage of my server.
Now I got some projects where AWS is required to use. In the beginning, I thought it would be very similar to my normal Ubuntu based VPS server. But while I start researching/reading articles also their own docs I find out it has lots more cool features for server and at the same, it's little complicated for a beginner. I would be really glad if someone give his time and reply on these questions of mine to clear concept about AWS of mine and people like me
As my plan is to use one EC2 instance to run my project. But I can see many experts suggest to use Elastic Beanstalk and create EC2 instance inside that. While I can directly run my project with EC2 without taking help from Elastic Beanstalk. So why it's better / what other help do it(Elastic Beanstalk) provide?
When I am checking the pricing of EC2(On-demand > Linux Unix) it says ECU as Variable. What does that mean? And where does ECU work
Instance Storage (GB) as EBS only. Does that mean I can't have any storage with my server I must buy separately? But in my previous VPS server, I use to get fewer storages with my server. Because storage is required if I want to install new software like MySQL/Redis/Python each of them requires local storage. Also if I want to upload my code or few static images it requires storage.
Like storage do I also need to buy other instances for a database? Like if I want to use PostgreSQL as my database do I need to buy AWS RDS or I can install that inside my Linux system?
Lastly, what are the main differences of my normal VPS Linux server and in AWS EC2 Linux server?
Thanks in advance for giving time :)
Let me try to answer your questions inline.
As my plan is to use one EC2 instance to run my project. But I can
see many experts suggest to use Elastic Beanstalk and create EC2
instance inside that. While I can directly run my project with EC2
without taking help from Elastic Beanstalk. So why it's better /
what other help do it(Elastic Beanstalk) provide?
If you are planning to use a single server and a database going with EC2 and RDS would be straightforward. However, if you are planning to set up, autoscaling (automatically increasing the number of servers only when load increases and return back to one server), load balancing and DevOps support, you need to set them up which requires more knowledge on AWS platform. AWS Elastic Beanstalk does these for you automatically, also by giving you the options to select the technology of your application and simply upload the code.
When I am checking the pricing of EC2(On-demand > Linux Unix) it says ECU as Variable. What does that mean? And where does ECU work
ECU is simply a rough figure to compare the processing across multiple EC2 classes that are having the different levels processing power.
Instance Storage (GB) as EBS only. Does that mean I can't have any storage with my server I must buy separately? But in my previous VPS server, I use to get fewer storages with my server. Because storage is required if I want to install new software like MySQL/Redis/Python each of them requires local storage. Also if I want to upload my code or few static images it requires storage.
EBS storage is reliable storage (With internal redundancy) that will last beyond your instance lifetime. Which means, you can upgrade the EC2 class and install software, or store files, which will remain in the EBS volume unless you delete it.
Since you are basically paying for the GBs, you can also create another EBS volume for static files and mount it to the EC2 instance if you want.
Like storage do I also need to buy other instances for a database? Like if I want to use PostgreSQL as my database do I need to buy AWS RDS or I can install that inside my Linux system?
It's not mandatory but recommended since you can even use a smaller instance for a web server and use another one for the DB. It's up to you. For example, the cost would be roughly similar if you use two small EC2 instances for a web server and DB server (Or use RDS) or use a single medium-size EC2 instance where both DB and web is running.
Lastly what are the main differences of my normal VPS Linux server and in AWS EC2 Linux server?
You will get more options in terms of selecting the hardware underneath since AWS provides different configuration options. In addition, EC2 instances are able to utilize the AWS ecosystem for Networking, Security, Load balancing & etc for better-optimized solution architectures in terms of reliability, security, performance & etc.
Q1) Beanstalk is a management application. AWS has several: CloudFormation, OpsWorks. Third party vendors have their own: Chef, Ansible, Terraform, etc. I really like Beanstalk and how it makes deploying code very easy for small sites (one command). I can scale up or scale down with a button push. I also use CloudFormation every day for just about everything.
Q2) ECU is a AWS Equivalent Compute Unit used to compare one instance with another. How does that translate to physical CPUs? Don't know as AWS does not publish its absolute meaning. Use is only to compare EC2 instances.
Q3) When you launch an EC2 instance, you will need storage. This is an additional cost (around $0.10 per GB per month). You will specify the size and type of storage (there are a number of types). There is also Instance Store Volumes. Stay away from these unless you really understand how to use them (they don't persist a shutdown so all data is lost). There are good use cases for Instance Store (AI, Big Data, Image processing), but a website is not one of them.
Q4) If your EC2 instance is big enough (2 GB of memory and larger), you can install PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc on your EC2 instance. Otherwise AWS has a number of database optios: DynamoDB, RDS, Aurora, etc.
Q5) Difficult to answer as each vendor offers its own set of features. EC2 instances are virtual machines. You have control over the raw power of that VM. Most VPS servers have management interfaces that EC2 does not. Usually EC2 is more expensive than VPS servers.
Watch a couple of AWS videos on YouTube. This will help you to understand AWS and why it is so successful in the cloud. Linux Academy, A Cloud Guru, etc. have very good training courses on AWS.
AWS Essentials: EC2 Basics
If you have further questions, open a new StackOverflow question per question. You will seldom get answers to long multi-question questions.
We are currently runs in-house hardware that we would like to potentially move to AWS. Our main application uses MySQL on a Linux machine (200GB Disk, 32GB RAM, 4 Cores) serving content to customers through a hardware load balancer (around 1 million unique users per month).
We also use a 500 GB CDN hosted by a third party that we would like to move to AWS potentially. What AWS services would you recommend we look at to achieve comparable functionality and would you have a rough monthly cost estimate?
The main reason we would like to move to AWS would be for cost reduction in hardware and better backup strategies.
Thanks!
1.You can host your application using two or more EC2 instances and you can use elastic load balancer to distribute load amongst these EC2 instances.
2.You could use amazon aurora MySQL(server less) which offers you pay as you go service which will allow to get maximum benefits minimising your cost.It is the very best option for your MySQL database as your users are very high and so as the load on the database.
3.For CDN you could go for aws cloudfront and s3. it offers higher availability to your application and it also has less costing.You just need to make some proper configuration and you are ready to go.
AWS is the best cloud option for you as it provides service for your each problem so can use services according to your use and make most of it.
It also provides very good costing options whcih makes your tasks easy.
Please go through aws docs and costing before you choose aws.
Comparable functionality would be to use AWS RDS to replace your MySQL database, one or more EC2 instances to run your application, and then AWS Load Balancer to distribute the load amongst those EC2 web instances. A combination of S3 and Cloudfront to use as a CDN.
Cost is going to depend on how many ec2 instances you use, and the size and options you use for RDS database(s) plus storage and bandwidth - impossible for me to estimate for you
But you can do your own estimates here: https://awstcocalculator.com/
I am working on a project and am at a point where the POC is done and now want to move towards a real product. I am trying to understand the Amazon cloud offerings just to see if I need to be aware of them at development time. I have a bunch of questions that I cannot get answered from the Amazon site. Its probably because I am new to the whole web services thing and have never hosted a site before. I am hoping someone out here will explain this to me like I am a C programmer :)
I see amazon has a bunch of offerings -
EC2
Elastic Block Store
Simple DB
AuotScaling
Elastic Load Balancing
I understand EC2 is virtual server instances that I can use and these could come pre-loaded with what I want (say Apache + python). I have the following questions -
If I want a custom instance of something (like say a custom apache module I wrote for my project). Can I create a server instance using the exact modules and make it the default the next time I create a new instance or in Autoscaling?
Do I get an IP Address to access this? Can I set my own hostname to it? I mean do I get a DNS record? Or is it what Elastic IP is?
How do I access it from the outside? SSH? Remote Desktop? Or is it entirely up to how I configure the instance?
What do they mean by Inter-Region or Intra-Region data transfer? What is data transfer to begin with? Is it just people using my instance? So if I go live with it that will be the cost I have to pay for people using it?
What is the difference between AutoScaling and Elastic Load Balancing?
What is Elastic Block Store? Is it storage? If so do I have to worry about backups or do they take care of it?
About the Simple DB -
It looks like the interface to use this is different to my regular SQL calls. Am I correct?
If so the whole development needs to be tailored specifically for Amazon. Which kind of sucks. Is there a better alternative?
Do I get data backups or do I have to worry about it myself?
Will I be able to connect to the DB using regular tools to inspect the DB (during or afte development). Or do I get other tools made by Amazon for it?
What about security? The DB is obviously somewhere in the cloud farm away from the EC2 instance. My DB password is going over the wire and so is all my data totally unencrypted. Don't I have to worry about that? The question comes up only because I don't own any of the hardware.
I really hope some one points me in the right direction here.
Thanks for taking the time to read.
P
I just went through the question and here I tried to answer few of them,
1) AWS EC2 instances doesnt publish pre-configured instances, in fact its configured by the developers and made it publicly available to the users so that they can use it. One can any one of those instances or you can just opt for what ever OS you want which is raw and provision it accordingly and create a snap shot of it so that you can use it for autos caling.The snap shot becomes the base AMI in your case.
2) Every instance you boot will have a public DNS attach to it, you can use the public DNS to connect to that instance using ssh if your are a linux user or using putty if you are a windows users. Apart from that, you can also attach a elastic IP which comes with a cost will is like peanuts and attach it to the instance and access your instance through the elastic IP and you can either map the public DNS or elastic ip to map to a website by adding a A record or Cname respectively.
3)AWS owns databases in the different parts of the world. For example you deploy your application depending upon your customer base, if you target customers are based out of India, the nearest region available is Singapore which is called as ap-southeast-1 by AWS. Each region will have multiple availability zones, example ap-southeast-1a and ap-southeast-1b, which are two different databases and geographically part. Intre region means from ap-southeast-1a to ap-southeast-1b. Inter Region means, from ap-southeast-1 to us-east-1 which is Northern Virginia Data centre. AWS charges from in coming and out going bandwidth, trust me its nothing.
They chargge 1/8th of a cent per GB. Its a thing to even think about it.
4)Elastic Load balancer is cluster which divides the load equally to all your regions across availability zones (if you are running in multi AZ) ELB sits on top the AWS EC2 instances and monitors the instance health periodically and enables auto scaling
5) To help you understand what is autoscaling please go through this document http://aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/
6)Elastic Block store or EBS are like hard disk which is a persistent data storage which can be attached to your instance.Regarding back up yes dependents upon your use case. I do backups of EBS periodically.
7)Simple Db now renamed as dynamo DB is nosql DB, I hope you understand what is nosql db, its a non RDMS db systems. Please read some documentation to understand what is nosql db is.
8)If you have mysql or oracle db you can opt for RDS, please read the documents.
9)I personally feel you are newbie to the entire cloud eco system, you need to understand what exactly cloud does first.
10)You dont have to make large number of changes to development as such, just make sure it works fine in your local box, it can be deployed to cloud with out much ado.
11) You dont have to use any extra tool for that, change the database end point to RDS(if your use it) or else install mysql in your ec2 instance and connect to the local db which resides in the ec2 instance and connect to it,which is as simple as your development mode.
12)You dont have to worry about any security issues aws, it is secured. Dont follow the myths, I am have been using aws since 3 years running I dont even know remember how many applications, like(e-commerce,m-commerce,social media apps) I never faced any kind of security issues and also aws allows to set your security how ever you want.
Go ahead, happy coding. Contact me if you have any problem.
The answer above is a good summary on AWS. Just wanted to add
AWS offers full data center, so it depends what you are trying to achieve. For starters you will need,
EC2 - This is your server, it comes with instance storage, which will be lost on restart
EBS - Your mounted storage, the data is persisted across reboots
S3 - Provides storage (RESTful API's on top, the cost is usage based rather than "provisioned" as in EBS)
Databases - can start with Amazon RDS, which provides managed database services, you can chose between various available databases. You can also install your own database using EC2 + EBS, you will have to take care of managing the database yourself.
Elastic IP: Public facing IP address, you can point your DNS server to this.
One great tool to calculate the pricing,
http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html
Some other services to take in account are:
VPC (Virtual Private Cloud). This is your own private network. You can define subnets, route tables and internet gateways there. I would strongly recommend to use VPC for any serious deployment of more than one instance.
Glacier - this will replace your tape library to storing backups.
Cloud Formation - great tool for deployment and automation of instances.
every once in a while i read/hear about AWS and now i tried reading the docs.
But such docs seem to be written for people who already know which AWS they need to use and only search for how it can be used.
So, for myself, to understand AWS better i try to sketch a hypothetical Webapplication with a few questions.
The apps purpose is to modify content like videos or images. So a user has some kind of webinterface where he can upload his files, do some settings and a server grabs the file and modifies it (e.g. reencoding). The Service also extracts the audio track of a video and trys to index the spoken words so the customer can search within his videos. (well its just hypothetical)
So my questions:
given my own domain 'oneofmydomains.com' is it possible to host the complete webinterface on AWS? i thought about using GWT to create the interface and just deliver the JS/images via AWS, but which one, simple storage? what about some kind of index.html, is there an EC2 instance needed to host a webserver which has to run 24/7 causing costs?
now the user has the interface with a login form, is it possible to manage logins with an AWS? here i also think about an EC2 instance hosting a database, but it would also cause costs and im not sure if there is a better way?
the user has logged in and uploads a file. which storage solution could be used to save the customers original and modified content?
now the user wants to browse the status of his uploads, this means i need some kind of ACL, so that the customer only sees his own files. do i need to use a database (e.g. EC2) for this, or does amazon provide some kind of ACL, so the GWT webinterface will be secure without any EC2?
the customers files are reencoded and the audio track is indexed. so he wants to search for a video. Which service could be used to create and maintain the index for each customer?
hope someone can give a few answers so i understand AWS better on how one could use it
thx!
Amazon AWS offers a whole ecosystem of services which should cover all aspects of a given architecture, from hosting to data storage, or messaging, etc. Whether they're the best fit for purpose will have to be decided on a case by case basis. Seeing as your question is quite broad I'll just cover some of the basics of what AWS has to offer and what the different types of services are for:
EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing)
Amazon's cloud solution, which is basically the same as older virtual machine technology but the 'cloud' offers additional knots and bots such as automated provisioning, scaling, billing etc.
you pay for what your use (by hour), for the basic (single CPU, 1.7GB ram) would prob cost you just under $3 a day if you run it 24/7 (on a windows instance that is)
there's a number of different OS to choose from including linux and windows, linux instances are cheaper to run without the license cost associated with windows
once you're set up the server to be the way you want, including any server updates/patches, you can create your own AMI (Amazon machine image) which you can then use to bring up another identical instance
however, if all your html are baked into the image it'll make updates difficult, so normal approach is to include a service (windows service for instance) which will pull the latest deployment package from a storage (see S3 later) service and update the site at start up and at intervals
there's the Elastic Load Balancer (which has its own cost but only one is needed in most cases) which you can put in front of all your web servers
there's also the Cloud Watch (again, extra cost) service which you can enable on a per instance basis to help you monitor the CPU, network in/out, etc. of your running instance
you can set up AutoScalers which can automatically bring up or terminate instances based on some metric, e.g. terminate 1 instance at a time if average CPU utilization is less than 50% for 5 mins, bring up 1 instance at a time if average CPU goes beyond 70% for 5 mins
you can use the instances as web servers, use them to run a DB, or a Memcache cluster, etc. choice is yours
typically, I wouldn't recommend having Amazon instances talk to a DB outside of Amazon because of the round trip is much longer, the usual approach is to use SimpleDB (see below) as the database
the AmazonSDK contains enough classes to help you write some custom monitor/scaling service if you ever need to, but the AWS console allows you to do most of your configuration anyway
SimpleDB
Amazon's non-relational, key-value data store, compared to a traditional database you tend to pay a penalty on per query performance but get high scalability without having to do any extra work.
you pay for usage, i.e. how much work it takes to execute your query
extremely scalable by default, Amazon scales up SimpleDB instances based on traffic without you having to do anything, AND any control for that matter
data are partitioned in to 'domains' (equivalent to a table in normal SQL DB)
data are non-relational, if you need a relational model then check out Amazon RDB, I don't have any experience with it so not the best person to comment on it..
you can execute SQL like query against the database still, usually through some plugin or tool, Amazon doesn't provide a front end for this at the moment
be aware of 'eventual consistency', data are duplicated on multiple instances after Amazon scales up your database, and synchronization is not guaranteed when you do an update so it's possible (though highly unlikely) to update some data then read it back straight away and get the old data back
there's 'Consistent Read' and 'Conditional Update' mechanisms available to guard against the eventual consistency problem, if you're developing in .Net, I suggest using SimpleSavant client to talk to SimpleDB
S3 (Simple Storage Service)
Amazon's storage service, again, extremely scalable, and safe too - when you save a file on S3 it's replicated across multiple nodes so you get some DR ability straight away.
you only pay for data transfer
files are stored against a key
you create 'buckets' to hold your files, and each bucket has a unique url (unique across all of Amazon, and therefore S3 accounts)
CloudBerry S3 Explorer is the best UI client I've used in Windows
using the AmazonSDK you can write your own repository layer which utilizes S3
Sorry if this is a bit long winded, but that's the 3 most popular web services that Amazon provides and should cover all the requirements you've mentioned. We've been using Amazon AWS for some time now and there's still some kinks and bugs there but it's generally moving forward and pretty stable.
One downside to using something like aws is being vendor locked-in, whilst you could run your services outside of amazon and in your own datacenter or moving files out of S3 (at a cost though), getting out of SimpleDB will likely to represent the bulk of the work during migration.