10 Things You Should Know About AWS

Authored by Chris Fregly:  Former Netflix Streaming Platform Engineer, AWS Certified Solution Architect and Purveyor of fluxcapacitor.com.

Ahead of the upcoming 2nd annual re:Invent conference, inspired by Simone Brunozzi’s recent presentation at an AWS Meetup in San Francisco, and collected from a few of my recent Fluxcapacitor.com consulting engagements, I’ve compiled a list of 10 useful time and clock-tick saving tips about AWS.

1) Query AWS resource metadata

 

Can’t remember the EBS-Optimized IO throughput of your c1.xlarge cluster?  How about the size limit of an S3 object on a single PUT?  awsnow.info is the answer to all of your AWS-resource metadata questions.  Interested in integrating awsnow.info with your application?  You’re in luck.  There’s now a REST API, as well!

Note:  These are default soft limits and will vary by account.

2) Tame your S3 buckets

 

Delete an entire S3 bucket with a single CLI command:  

aws s3 rb s3://<bucket-name> --force

Recursively copy a local directory to S3:

aws s3 cp <local-dir-name> s3://<bucket-name> --region <region-name> --recursive

3) Understand AWS cross-region dependencies

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Cloud Bursting between AWS and Rackspace

Cloud bursting is an application deployment model in which an application runs in a private cloud or data center and bursts into a public cloud when the demand for computing capacity spikes. The advantage of such a hybrid cloud deployment is that an organization only pays for extra compute resources when they are needed. ([Definition by SearchCloudComputing])

Neal Sample the former CTO - X.commerce at eBay gave an interesting talk last year on the economic benefit of Cloud Bursting. Neal pointed out eBay traffic statistics and showed some real numbers of the business impact of bursting peak load activities using on-demand cloud resources as presented in the diagram below.

In order to use cloud bursting effectively we need to address the following set of challenges:

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Designing applications for cloud deployment

During the last two years, I was involved in several projects deployed on the Amazon cloud. Being a relatively early adopter was a fantastic experience that provided lots of opportunities to burn my fingers and learn from mistakes. It also seriously challenged my view of scalable software architectures. I spoke about key lessons learned at CloudCamp London last week – here is the summary of that presentation.

http://gojko.net/2010/01/25/designing-applications-for-cloud-deployment/