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).
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
I have to setup ec2 for a medium rails app running on apache2, mysql, capistrano and a few background services. I would like to know what is the best practices that every developer usually does to set up his rails app. I would like to know what kind of setup that is easy to scale and can mimimic at least
auto deployment
security
regular data backup and an easy and quick way to restore the data
server recovery
fault tolerance
I am also interested in how to monitor the server status and performance and other kind of best practice would be also helpful.
ps: take into account also that my app database will grow a fast.
I think a good look into the AWS docs and in particular the architecture center would be the best place to start. However, let me address as many of your questions as I can.
Database
The easiest way to get a scalable, fault tolerant database on AWS is to use the Relational Database Service. You should read the docs and best practices to ensure you get the most out of it - ie. multiple AZs.
EC2 Servers
The most recommended way to structure your servers is to decouple them into Web Servers (serve html to users) and App Servers (application logic, usually returns json or xml etc). See this architecture example.
However, the key is to use an AutoScaling group behind an Elastic Load Balancer.
Automation
If you want to use capistrano, just install it into your servers. You could create a pre-configured AMI with it installed along with whatever else you want. Alternatively, you could install it in a deployment script. However, the most recommended method for this kind of thing is to use the AWS OpsWorks service which is Chef in the cloud.
Server Recovery & Fault Tolerance
If you use EC2 AutoScaling, if a server becomes unavailable ie. hardware fails or it stops replying to EC2 health checks, AutoScaling will automatically terminate it and launch a replacement.
With the addition of the ELB and ELB health checks, instances that stop responding to web requests can be brought out of service by the ELB.
You need to read the docs for more info on this.
Backup and Recovery
For backing up data on EBS volumes attached to EC2 instances, use EBS Snapshots. However, the best types of architectures keep EC2 instances stateless - they don't store anything except application code, if they died it wouldn't matter. In these situations all data, including user files can be stored on S3. On S3, you have a number of back up options such as Cross Region Replication and or data archiving to Glacier
Monitoring
AWS provides CloudWatch which can provide you with hypervisor visible metrics such as network in and out, CPU utilization and more. If you want to get more data, you could use custom metrics and push things like eg. memory usage. In addition to cloudwatch, you could use a server level monitoring tool.
Deployment
I recommend AWS Code Deploy.
Security
Use Security Groups to open only the ports you want users to be able to connect on. Also, use security groups to lock down important ports eg.22 to only a specific set of IPs. You can also use Network ACLS to block undesired traffic. AWS provides more information and suggestions here.
I also recommend you read this Whitepaper.
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I have developed a .NET MVC application and have started playing around with AWS and deploying it via the Visual Studio Toolkit. I have successfully deployed the application using the Elastic Beanstalk option in the toolkit.
As I was going over the tutorials for deploying .NET apps to AWS with the toolkit, I noticed there are tutorials for deploying with both Elastic Beanstalk and CloudFormation. What is the difference between these two?
From what I can tell, it seems like they both essentially are doing the same thing - making it easier to deploy your application to the AWS cloud (setting up EC2 instances, load balancer, auto-scaling, etc). I have tried reading up on them both, but I can't seem to get anything other than a bunch of buzz-words that sound like the same thing to me. I even found an FAQ on the AWS website that is supposed to answer this exact question, yet I don't really understand.
Should I be using one or the other? Both?
They're actually pretty different. Elastic Beanstalk is intended to make developers' lives easier. CloudFormation is intended to make systems engineers' lives easier.
Elastic Beanstalk is a PaaS-like layer on top of AWS's IaaS services which abstracts away the underlying EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancers, auto-scaling groups, etc. This makes it a lot easier for developers, who don't want to be dealing with all the systems stuff, to get their application quickly deployed on AWS. It's very similar to other PaaS products such as Heroku, EngineYard, Google App Engine, etc. With Elastic Beanstalk, you don't need to understand how any of the underlying magic works.
CloudFormation, on the other hand, doesn't automatically do anything. It's simply a way to define all the resources needed for deployment in a huge JSON/YAML file. So a CloudFormation template might actually create two Elastic Beanstalk environments (production and staging), a couple of ElasticCache clusters, a DynamoDB table, and then the proper DNS in Route53. I then upload this template to AWS, walk away, and 45 minutes later everything is ready and waiting. Since it's just a plain-text JSON/YAML file, I can stick it in my source control which provides a great way to version my application deployments. It also ensures that I have a repeatable, "known good" configuration that I can quickly deploy in a different region.
For getting started quickly deploying a standard .NET web-application, Elastic Beanstalk is the right service for you.
AWS CloudFormation: "Template-Driven Provisioning"
AWS CloudFormation gives developers and systems administrators an easy way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, provisioning and updating them in an orderly and predictable fashion.
CloudFormation (CFn) is a lightweight, low-level abstraction over existing AWS APIs. Using a static JSON/YAML template document, you declare a set of Resources (such as an EC2 instance or an S3 bucket) that correspond to CRUD operations on the AWS APIs.
When you create a CloudFormation stack, CloudFormation calls the corresponding APIs to create the associated Resources, and when you delete a stack, CloudFormation calls the corresponding APIs to delete them. Most (but not all) AWS APIs are supported.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk: "Web Apps Made Easy"
AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an easy-to-use service for deploying and scaling web applications and services developed with Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker on familiar servers such as Apache, Nginx, Passenger, and IIS.
You can simply upload your code and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment, from capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling to application health monitoring.
Elastic Beanstalk (EB) is a higher-level, managed 'platform as a service' (PaaS) for hosting web applications, similar in scope to Heroku. Rather than deal with low-level AWS resources directly, EB provides a fully-managed platform where you create an application environment using a web interface, select which platform your application uses, create and upload a source bundle, and EB handles the rest.
Using EB, you get all sorts of built-in features for monitoring your application environment and deploying new versions of your application.
Under the hood, EB uses CloudFormation to create and manage the application's various AWS resources. You can customize and extend the default EB environment by adding CloudFormation Resources to an EB configuration file deployed with your application.
Conclusion
If your application is a standard web-tier application using one of Elastic Beanstalk's supported platforms, and you want easy-to-manage, highly-scalable hosting for your application, use Elastic Beanstalk.
If you:
Want to manage all of your application's AWS resources directly;
Want to manage or heavily customize your instance-provisioning or deployment process;
Need to use an application platform not supported by Elastic Beanstalk; or
Just don't want/need any of the higher-level Elastic Beanstalk features
then use CloudFormation directly and avoid the added configuration layer of Elastic Beanstalk.
Cloud Formation is a service that lets you deploy AWS services. You create a template file that describes which services you want. When you deploy that template, Cloud Formation creates the resources for you as a "package". All the resources you defined in your template are started and terminated together. Examples of types of resources that can be created with Cloud Formation are: S3, EC2 instances, AutoScaling, DynamoDb, etc. For EC2, Cloud Formation also gives you the ability to make use of "cfn-init" scripts; which can be used in conjunction with the template to boot strap your instances.
Elastic Beanstalk uses Cloud Formation templates and scipts to: 1. Create a Load Balancer and Auto Scaling Group, 2. Copy your code to S3, 3. Bootstrap an Ec2 instance to Download the code from S3 and deploy it.
Cloud Formation is not as easy to use as EB, but it is much more powerful, because you can create resources other than EC2 instances, control how the cfn-init script, and etc.
There are other differences worth noting. Elastic beanstalk is designed as a container for a single app. I've a set of several websites and services but found it very difficult to deploy multiple websites with beanstalk and was advised, after several attempts, by AWS help to use cloud formation in this situation as it has the extra flexibility.
Theres a really helpful article on bootstrapping AWS cloud formation and updating a running site here thats much clearer than the AWS pages. Still trying to work out if we can deploy from VS straight to the cloud formation template stored on S3 and get it to auto update like beanstalk...
These services are designed to complement each other. AWS Elastic Beanstalk provides an environment to easily deploy and run applications in the cloud. It is integrated with developer tools and provides a one-stop experience for you to manage the lifecycle of your applications. AWS CloudFormation is a convenient provisioning mechanism for a broad range of AWS and third party resources. It supports the infrastructure needs of many different types of applications such as existing enterprise applications, legacy applications, applications built using a variety of AWS resources and container-based solutions (including those built using AWS Elastic Beanstalk).
AWS CloudFormation supports Elastic Beanstalk application environments as one of the AWS resource types. This allows you, for example, to create and manage an AWS Elastic Beanstalk–hosted application along with an RDS database to store the application data. In addition to RDS instances, any other supported AWS resource can be added to the group as well.
Both are for provisioning infrastructure; but they differ in their approach.
Beanstalk: The starting point is the code. I have a NodeJs code I want to upload & run it; please provision the infrastructure for me. (PaaS) Platform as a Service
CloudFormation: The starting point is the infrastructure. Please create an EC2 instance, with one LoadBalancer, Security Group etc so that I can uploaded my NodeJs code to it. Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment, from capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling to application health monitoring based on the code you upload to it, where as CloudFormation is an automated provisioning engine designed to deploy entire cloud environments via a JSON script.
Beanstalk: Gives the developer the ability to manage only code and not systems
Cloud Formation: Simplifies and makes everything easier for a Systems Engineer
If a developer or the dev team is looking for a quick MVP testing, the best option is to quickly get deployed with Beanstalk and check.
When a AWS migration happens, systems engineer will get involved in provisioning and Cloud Formation will help a lot and give much more granular control.
Beanstack internally uses cloudformation.
Beanstalk - Basically helpful for software developers.
Example : You want to start the PC quickly and run an application. You don't buy the PC items (harddisk, ram, Processor) separately. You buy a whole CPU or a laptop of a required config. You dont care how its running inside as you want your application to run for you. Beanstalk gives you this feature of everything ready made with no worries.
Cloudformation - Basically helpful for system engineer/ Hardware.
Example : You want to assemble 100's of PC's and give it to the developers then instead of assembling so many PC's you can just give a list of items and the PC is assembled for you by the retailer.
Similarly create a template and send it to cloudformation it will finish your work with no effort.