First Technology Transfer
Digital Embedded and Information Systems Training and Consultancy
Web Technologies Training and Consultancy

Course CLD104
Building Cloud Computing Applications Using Amazon Web Services

Duration: 5 Days

Course Synopsis

This 5 day course aims to teach attendees the concepts and techniques necessary to develop cloud solution applications based on Amazon Web Services. It covers

• Data storage and persistence using Amazon S3, RDS and SimpleDB
• Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) configuration and customization
• Deploying and hosting of Web applications using AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Amazon CloudFormation
• Data protection and security via use of the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

Course Outline

Cloud computing - an intensive overview of the key concepts and technologies

• Introduction to Amazon cloud
• Creating accounts
• Cost breakdown analysis
• Service Level Agreement (SLA) Evaluation
• Console command line tools and the command line API

Amazon Cloud - Computing Architecture Overview

• EC2
• S3
• EBS
• Beanstalk
• RDS
• VPC
• CloudFront
• MapReduce
• SQS
• CloudWatch

Getting started with Amazon Cloud

• Setting Up Your Environment
• Choosing Geographic Location, Regions, and Availability Zones
• Choosing an Architecture
• Creating a Rails Server on EC2
• RDS Database
• S3/CloudFront
• Making Backups of Volumes

Scaling applications - with S3, ELB, Auto Scaling, and RDS

• S3 and File Uploads
• Elastic Load Balancing
• Auto Scaling
• Scaling a Relational Database
• Elastic Beanstalk

Data storage

• Persisting off-instance storage with EBS volumes
• Creating backups with snapshots
• Long term durable storage with Simple Storage Service (S3)
• Using Buckets to organise information
• Handling the transmission of large data volumes into or out of the Amazon cloud
• Using SimpleDB for high-availability access to nonrelational data with SimpleDB
• Working with relational databases using the Relational Database Service (RDS)s
• Scaling applications
• Decoupling applications using Simple Queue Service (SQS)
• High performance content delivery using Edge cacheing and CloudFront
• Delivery of static and streaming content

Monitoring, Management, Performance and Configuration

• Managing Downtime, Improving Uptime and Managing the Decoupled System
• Key issues
• Measurement
• Downtime minimisation strategies
• Customising virtual machines
• Modifying existing images
• Creating new images by cloning running instances
• Importing and exporting existing virtual machines
• Persisting an AMI to S3
• Sharing images
• Use case scenarios for cloud setup
• Monitoring - both from inside the cloud and from outside
• CloudWatch and Visualisation of utilisation metrics
• Setting alarms to send and receive notifications
• Accessing AWS via the AWS API
• Scaling and load balancing
• Understanding Elastic load balancing - and distribution of incoming traffic
• Dynamically adding and removing instances with Auto Scaling
• Specifying capacity thresholds

Application Hosting - Using Elastic Beanstalk

• Platform as a Service (PaaS) concept
• Deploying applications in an AWS cloud
• Launching and selecting an application environment
• Configuring and customising platform stacks
• CloudFormation and the provisioning of application resources

Security

• Setting up account security
• Access credentials
• MultiFactor authentication
• Identity Access Management (IAM)
• Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs)
• Provisioning isolated AWS resources
• Bridging EC2 instances to an internal network with a VPN
• Multitenancy issues and how to avoid them
• Launching an EC2 instance on a dedicated hardware platform