Deploying and Managing Infrastructure at Scale
- CloudFormation is a declarative way of outlining your AWS Infrastructure, for any resources (most of them are supported).
- For example, within a CloudFormation template, you say:
- I want a security group
- I want two EC2 instances using this security group
- I want an S3 bucket
- I want a load balancer (ELB) in front of these machines
- Then CloudFormation creates those for you, in the right order, with the exact configuration that you specify
- Infrastructure as code
- No resources are manually created, which is excellent for control
- Changes to the infrastructure are reviewed through code
- Cost
- Each resources within the stack is tagged with an identifier so you can easily see how much a stack costs you
- You can estimate the costs of your resources using the CloudFormation template
- Savings strategy: In Dev, you could automation deletion of templates at 5 PM and recreated at 8 AM, safely
- Productivity
- Ability to destroy and re-create an infrastructure on the cloud on the fly
- Automated generation of Diagram for your templates!
- Declarative programming (no need to figure out ordering and orchestration)
- Don’t re-invent the wheel
- Leverage existing templates on the web!
- Leverage the documentation
- Supports (almost) all AWS resources:
- Everything we’ll see in this course is supported
- You can use “custom resources” for resources that are not supported
- Example: WordPress CloudFormation Stack
- We can see all the resources
- We can see the relations between the components
AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK)
- Define your cloud infrastructure using a familiar language:
- JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Java, and .NET
- The code is “compiled” into a CloudFormation template (JSON/YAML)
- You can therefore deploy infrastructure and application runtime code together
- Great for Lambda functions
- Great for Docker containers in ECS / EKS
Developer problems on AWS
- Managing infrastructure
- Deploying Code
- Configuring all the databases, load balancers, etc
- Scaling concerns
- Most web apps have the same architecture (ALB + ASG)
- All the developers want is for their code to run!
- Possibly, consistently across different applications and environments
Typical architecture: Web App 3-tier
AWS Elastic Beanstalk Overview
- Elastic Beanstalk is a developer centric view of deploying an application on AWS
- It uses all the component’s we’ve seen before: EC2, ASG, ELB, RDS, etc…
- But it’s all in one view that’s easy to make sense of!
- We still have full control over the configuration
- Beanstalk = Platform as a Service (PaaS)
- Beanstalk is free but you pay for the underlying instances
- Managed service
- Instance configuration / OS is handled by Beanstalk
- Deployment strategy is configurable but performed by Elastic Beanstalk
- Capacity provisioning
- Load balancing & auto-scaling
- Application health-monitoring & responsiveness
- Just the application code is the responsibility of the developer
- Three architecture models:
- Single Instance deployment: good for dev
- LB + ASG: great for production or pre-production web applications
- ASG only: great for non-web apps in production (workers, etc..)
- Support for many platforms:
- Go
- Java SE
- Java with Tomcat
- .NET on Windows Server with IIS
- Node.js
- PHP
- Python
- Ruby
- Packer Builder
- Single Container Docker
- Multi-Container Docker
- Preconfigured Docker
Elastic Beanstalk - Health Monitoring
- Health agent pushes metrics to CloudWatch
- Checks for app health, publishes health events
AWS CodeDeploy
- We want to deploy our application automatically
- Works with EC2 Instances
- Works with On-Premises Servers
- Hybrid service
- Servers / Instances must be provisioned and configured ahead of time with the CodeDeploy Agent
AWS CodeCommit
- Before pushing the application code to servers, it needs to be stored somewhere
- Developers usually store code in a repository, using the Git technology
- A famous public offering is GitHub, AWS’ competing product is CodeCommit
- CodeCommit:
- Source-control service that hosts Git-based repositories
- Makes it easy to collaborate with others on code
- The code changes are automatically versioned
- Benefits:
- Fully managed
- Scalable & highly available
- Private, Secured, Integrated with AWS
AWS CodeBuild
- Code building service in the cloud (name is obvious)
- Compiles source code, run tests, and produces packages that are ready to be deployed (by CodeDeploy for example)
- Benefits:
- Fully managed, serverless
- Continuously scalable & highly available
- Secure
- Pay-as-you-go pricing – only pay for the build time
AWS CodePipeline
- Orchestrate the different steps to have the code automatically pushed to production
- Code => Build => Test => Provision => Deploy
- Basis for CICD (Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery)
- Benefits:
- Fully managed, compatible with CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, Elastic Beanstalk, CloudFormation, GitHub, 3rd-party services (GitHub…) & custom plugins…
- Fast delivery & rapid updates
- CodePipeline: orchestration layer
- CodeCommit => CodeBuild => CodeDeploy => Elastic Beanstalk
AWS CodeArtifact
- Software packages depend on each other to be built (also called code dependencies), and new ones are created
- Storing and retrieving these dependencies is called artifact management
- Traditionally you need to setup your own artifact management system
- CodeArtifact is a secure, scalable, and cost-effective artifact management for software development
- Works with common dependency management tools such as Maven, Gradle, npm, yarn, twine, pip, and NuGet
- Developers and CodeBuild can then retrieve dependencies straight from CodeArtifact
AWS CodeStar
- Unified UI to easily manage software development activities in one place
- “Quick way” to get started to correctly set-up CodeCommit, CodePipeline, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, Elastic Beanstalk, EC2, etc…
- Can edit the code ”in-the-cloud” using AWS Cloud9
AWS Cloud9
- AWS Cloud9 is a cloud IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for writing, running and debugging code
- “Classic” IDE (like IntelliJ, Visual Studio Code…) are downloaded on a computer before being used
- A cloud IDE can be used within a web browser, meaning you can work on your projects from your office, home, or anywhere with internet with no setup necessary
- AWS Cloud9 also allows for code collaboration in real-time (pair programming)
AWS Systems Manager (SSM)
- Helps you manage your EC2 and On-Premises systems at scale
- Another Hybrid AWS service
- Get operational insights about the state of your infrastructure
- Suite of 10+ products
- Most important features are:
- Patching automation for enhanced compliance
- Run commands across an entire fleet of servers
- Store parameter configuration with the SSM Parameter Store
- Works for both Windows and Linux OS
How Systems Manager works
- We need to install the SSM agent onto the systems we control
- Installed by default on Amazon Linux AMI & some Ubuntu AMI
- If an instance can’t be controlled with SSM, it’s probably an issue with the SSM agent!
- Thanks to the SSM agent, we can run commands, patch & configure our servers
Systems Manager - SSM Session Manager
- Allows you to start a secure shell on your EC2 and on-premises servers
- No SSH access, bastion hosts, or SSH keys needed
- No port 22 needed (better security)
- Supports Linux, macOS, and Windows
- Send session log data to S3 or CloudWatch Logs
AWS OpsWorks
- Chef & Puppet help you perform server configuration automatically, or repetitive actions
- They work great with EC2 & On-Premises VM
- AWS OpsWorks = Managed Chef & Puppet
- It’s an alternative to AWS SSM
- Only provision standard AWS resources:
- EC2 Instances, Databases, Load Balancers, EBS volumes…
- Chef or Puppet needed => AWS OpsWorks
OpsWorks Architecture
Deployment - Summary
- CloudFormation: (AWS only)
- Infrastructure as Code, works with almost all of AWS resources
- Repeat across Regions & Accounts
- Beanstalk: (AWS only)
- Platform as a Service (PaaS), limited to certain programming languages or Docker
- Deploy code consistently with a known architecture: ex, ALB + EC2 + RDS
- CodeDeploy (hybrid): deploy & upgrade any application onto servers
- Systems Manager (hybrid): patch, configure and run commands at scale
- OpsWorks (hybrid): managed Chef and Puppet in AWS
Developer Services - Summary
- CodeCommit: Store code in private git repository (version controlled)
- CodeBuild: Build & test code in AWS
- CodeDeploy: Deploy code onto servers
- CodePipeline: Orchestration of pipeline (from code to build to deploy)
- CodeArtifact: Store software packages / dependencies on AWS
- CodeStar: Unified view for allowing developers to do CICD and code
- Cloud9: Cloud IDE (Integrated Development Environment) with collab
- AWS CDK: Define your cloud infrastructure using a programming language
Other Compute Section 
List Global Infrastructure 