Preface
The main focus of this book is to cover cloud concepts followed by design, development, and deployment of scalable, available, and secure applications on AWS. We will introduce you to the fundamental AWS building blocks such as compute instances, storage, security, and networking. We will start by helping you to set up your AWS account and then explain the wide variety of AWS service offerings, cloud environments, and costing models.
This book will not only guide you through various design decision trade-offs and ideas but will also illustrate the implementation of popular use cases, frameworks, and application architectures to get the most out of AWS services. You will also understand the guiding principles and best practices for using AWS services to implement cost-efficient application architectures.
We will explain high-availability, scalability and auto-scaling, security, serverless computing, and Infrastructure as Code concepts on AWS. We will also cover disaster recovery, production deployments and application monitoring techniques in real-world AWS applications. Finally, we will cover the design, implementation, and deployment of emerging applications such as big data analytics, real-time streaming and machine learning applications on AWS.
By the end of this book, you will be well versed with various services that AWS provides and you will learn to design and build scalable, highly available, and secure AWS applications. More specifically, we will cover key architectural components and patterns in large-scale AWS applications that architects and designers will find useful as building blocks for their own specific use cases.
Who this book is for
If you are a developer, engineer, or an architect new to AWS environment, then this book is for you. You will also find this book useful, if you have some prior experience designing and building on-premise applications and are now considering migrating or refactoring your applications to run on AWS cloud. Additionally, if you are keen to explore newer AWS services to build big data, real-time streaming, and machine learning applications on AWS, then you will find the last three chapters specifically covering these topics in detail. Some previous to Java and/or Python programming is all you need to get started with this book.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Cloud 101 – Understanding the Basics, describes basic cloud concepts, including the public, private, and hybrid cloud models. It explains and compares the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) cloud service delivery models. Finally, the next generation of applications being deployed on the cloud, including streaming applications, machine learning pipelines, and deep learning applications are discussed.
Chapter 2, Designing Cloud Applications, describes familiar and not-so-familiar architectural best practices in the cloud context, including multi-tier architecture, multi-tenancy, scalability, and availability. This chapter introduces design considerations for cloud-based big data applications, batch and streaming architectures, and ML pipelines. It also provides guidelines for estimating cloud-computing costs.
Chapter 3, Introducing AWS Components, introduces AWS components such as EC2, S3, RDS, DynamoDB, SQS Queues, and SNS. It discusses strategies to lower AWS infrastructure costs and their implications on architectural decisions. It explains the typical characteristics of the development, QA, staging, and production environments on the AWS Cloud.
Chapter 4, Designing for and Implementing Scalability, provides guidance on how to define your scalability objectives, and then discusses the design and implementation of specific strategies to achieve scalability.
Chapter 5, Designing for and Implementing High Availability, provides guidance on how to define availability objectives, discusses the nature of failures, and explains design and implementation of specific strategies to achieve high availability. In addition, this chapter describes the approaches that leverage the AWS features and services for disaster-recovery planning.
Chapter 6, Designing for and Implementing Security, provides guidance on how to define security objectives, explains security responsibilities, and then discusses the implementations of specific best practices for application security.
Chapter 7, Deploying to Production and Going Live, provides guidance on managing infrastructure, deployments, support, and operations for your cloud application. In addition, it offers some tips on planning production go-live activities.
Chapter 8, Designing a Big Data Application, introduces the design principles and best practices for using services such as Kinesis, EMR, and Lambda to design AWS-based big data applications.
Chapter 9, Implementing a Big Data Application, implements several popular AWS-based big data use cases using AWS services such as Kinesis, EMR, Lambda, Glue, and Spark.
Chapter 10, Deploying a Big Data Application, introduces CloudFormation templates to deploy several popular big data stacks on AWS, including streaming and machine learning applications.
To get the most out of this book
This book primarily requires an AWS account for the hands-on sessions contained in each chapter. For the sample applications, we require Eclipse Java IDE (latest version) and Python 2.7 or 3.6. Maven builds takes care of all other dependencies.
Hardware and OS specifications includes laptop or desktop with an internet connection, and Windows, Linux, or macOS X (preferably the latest versions).
Download the color images
We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/LearningAWSSecondEdition_ColorImages.pdf.
Conventions used
There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.
CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "Mount the downloaded WebStorm-10*.dmg disk image file as another disk in your system."
A block of code is set as follows:
public class KMSClient{
private String keyId = "arn:aws:kms:us-west-2:450394462648:key/1cd0e2d5-61e1-4a71-a6b2-b9db825c9fce";
private AWSCredentials credentials;
private AWSKMSClient kms;
public KMSClient(){
credentials = new BasicAWSCredentials(accessKey, secretKey);
kms = new AWSKMSClient(credentials);
kms.setEndpoint("kms.us-west-2.amazonaws.com");
}Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
mkdir a1electronicsBold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "From the EC2 navigation pane, click on Instances to view all your EC2 instances."
Note
Warnings or important notes appear like this.
Note
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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