I am new to Amazon Web Services. I was reading about Amazon ElastiCache and wanted to clarify if it is like (may be more than that) using RAM filesystem in Linux where we use a portion of system memory as a file system. As I referred AWS documentation it says ElastiCache is a web service. Is it like an EC2 instance with few memory modules attached? I really want to understand how it exactly works.
Our company has decided to migrate our physical servers into AWS cloud. We use Apache web server and MySQL Database running in Linux. We provide a SaaS platform for e-mail marketing and event scheduling for our customers. There is usually a high web traffic to our website during 9am-5pm on weekdays. I would like to understand if we want to use ElastiCache service, how it will be configured in AWS.? We have planned two EC2 instances for our web server and an RDS instance for the database.
Thanks.
Elastic cache is simply managed Redis or Memcached. Depending which one you choose, you would use the client for the cache with your application.
How you would implement it depends on what kind of caching you are trying to accomplish.
Related
Imagine two cases:
I have web server running in an EC2 instance and it is connected to the database in the RDS, the managed database service.
I have web server and database running in the same EC2 instance.
Is my database in RDS going to be slower to access because it's not in the same machine?
How many milliseconds, approximately, does it add to your latency between the two?
Does this become bottleneck?
What about other managed database services like Azure, GCP, Digital Ocean, etc?
Do they behave the same?
Yes, it will be slower to RDS instances from your Webserver than a database on the same host, because you need to go over the network and that adds latency.
The drawback of running the DB on the same server is that you can't use a managed service to take care of your database and you're mixing largely stateless components (webserver) with stateful components (database). This solution is typically not scalable either. If you add more webservers, things get messy.
Don't know about Azure, GCP or Digital Ocean, but I'd be very surprised if things are different there. There's good reasons to separate these components.
AWS seems a little daunting with too many overlapping services so I'm looking for some advice and direction.
We have a mobile app for which we've developed a sync server (i.e. user will sign-up, sync data kept on AWS). Currently we've setup an EC2 instance with a web server, Django end-points and a postgres server. However we need the following:
Ensure the service is available from different regions of the
world for faster access
If that requires putting the postgres server outside of the EC2, what service do we need and how would replication work?
We will have larger file attachments stored on S3 separately, but need to do this securely and encrypt the files
Eventually we will host a web-app (i.e. an Angular 2 app) that would
connect to the same database.
We also would need to do all this in the most economical way and then scale up as the load increases.
Please any guidance would be appreciated. I'm struggling with terminologies at the moment. We also setup an Amazon SSL Certificate however that requires an Elastic Load Balancer but we only have one EC2 instance. What do we do to get this all working securely?
Based on the information provided, I would recommend you to start with AWS Elastic Beanstalk, where it will manage autoscaling and loadbalancing while providing you with a DNS URL for external domain mapping.
To ensure that the service is available from different regions for faster access, you can cache the static Angular App using Cloudfront. Then you will be able to add SSL Certificate to Cloudfront instead of ELB. If you plan to create multiple environments for different regions, you can use Route53 for geo based routing.
To take Postgres server outside EC2, you can use AWS RDS and it supports synchronous replication with fail-over for Multi-AZ deployments and also Postgres in RDS also supports Cross Region Replication if you plan to setup multiple deployment environments in different regions. Also you can create Read Replicas to improve reading speeds which will be asynchronously replicated.
You can encrypt the files in S3 using AES256 using Keys from KMS or from your client and I would recommend using Signed URLs with Cloudfront in front of S3 serving these files, so that clients can securely and directly access them improving the performance by getting advantage from distributed caching.
You can host the Angular App in AWS S3 and Cache using Cloudfront for faster access. Another option is to cache the static asset path in Cloudfront so that subsequent requests for static assets will be served from Cloudfront.
FAQs from Amazon
Who should use AWS Elastic Beanstalk?
Those who want to deploy and manage their applications within minutes
in the AWS Cloud. You don’t need experience with cloud computing to
get started. AWS Elastic Beanstalk supports Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js,
Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker web applications.
Your current environment isn't scalable (either load-responsive or to another region). If you need scalability then it should be re-arranged. It is difficult to provide you with details because the required environment depends on the applications architecture, however there are some suggestions:
DB: For better stability multi-AZ RDS setup for the DB is recommended. Benefit is RDS is fully managed service so you don't need to worry about replication, maintenance etc.
Web/app servers: you can deploy a copy in any region you want and connect to the same DB.
S3: you can enable crosss-region replication as well as encryption, but make sure it is used wisely (e.g. files are served to the client from bucket in closest region)
You can set up your own SSL on the server and it does not require ELB. However, you can use ELB with one webnode only.
I do NOT suggest to use Beanstalk because despite it really makes the first steps more easier you may have trouble trying to configure something non-standard in the future (unless you're very well familiar with EBT, of course).
To add efficiency you may want to add CDN (either AWS ot another vendor).
Make sure your environment configuration is really secure. You may need for your team someone who is familiar with AWS because every topic can be converted to a separate article.
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.
Hi We have built a java based web services project with using jboss server. How do I host this application with Amazon cloud? This web services act as back end for a mobile android app.
I am looking for PaaS option of Jboss server and Postgres database. I could create a postgres database. But could not find Jboss server.
My understanding is in PaaS, Jboss and Postgres should be able to scale up itself as per demand.
Another option provided by Amazon is EC2 as far as I have understood. But if I go with EC2, I will have install and set up jboss and postgres on my own. Then does it scale up by itself as per demand?
Please guide.
If you want to deploy your web application to AWS and ensure its scalability, you have basically two options:
EC2 instance [IaaS] - The disadvantage is, as you mentioned in your question, that you have to configure everything manually. Some external mechanism for scaling has to be used. Amazon provides its AutoScaling service which can be configured to launch new EC2 instances based on utilization or some other metric.
Elastic Beanstalk [PaaS] - This service has the auto-scaling already built in and manages the EC2 instances with your application on its own (it takes care about launching them, deploying the app etc). The disadvantage is that JBoss server is not support at the moment (you would have to switch to Tomcat).
There is a way, how to make JBoss work on Elastic Beanstalk, however. ELB has newly added the support for Docker so if you make your JBoss API run in Docker, you can deploy it to ELB and scale it without much effort and configuration.
As for the database, mentioned in your question, Amazon has plenty of choices, Postgres included, in their RDS service.
I am trying to set up an Amazon Server to host a dynamic website I'm currently creating. I have the domain bought on GoDaddy.com, and I believe that what I've done so far has linked the domain to my Amazon account.
I followed this tutorial : http://www.mycowsworld.com/blog/2013/07/29/setting-up-a-godaddy-domain-name-with-amazon-web-services/
In short, this walked me through setting up and Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) and Amazon Route 53. I then configured the DNS Servers, and my website now launches properly on the domain.
I'm not sure on the next step from here, but I would like to set up:
-A database server
-Anything else that might be necessary to run a dynamic website.
I am very new to hosting websites, and semi-new to web development in general, so the more in depth the better.
Thanks a lot
You have two options on AWS. Run an EC2 server and setup your application or continue to use the AWS managed services like S3.
Flask apps can be hosted on Elastic Beanstalk and
your database can be hosted on RDS (Relational Database Service). Then the two can be integrated.
Otherwise, spin up your own t2.micro instance in EC2. Log in via ssh and set up the database server and application like you have locally. This server could also host the (currently S3 hosted) static files too.
I have no idea what your requirements are, personally I would start with setting up the EC2 instance and go from there as integrating AWS services is without knowing what you need is probably not the easiest first step.
Heroku might be another option. They host their services on AWS and give you an end to end solution for deploying and running your python code without getting your hands dirty setting up servers.