AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Part VII: ELB & Auto Scaling

 

  • 1. Configuring Elastic Load Balancer (ELB)
    • a. Characteristics
      • i. Region wide load balancer
      • 1. Deploy to multiple availability zones
      • ii. Fully managed load balancer
      • iii. Can be used internally or externally
      • iv. Layer-7 functionality
        • 1. SSL termination and processing
          • a. Important because if its not done at the ELB it will happen on the instances
          • b. If the instances have to do this then it takes more processing away from the instances
      • v. Cookie-based sticky sessions
        • 1. AWS recommends using a database to do sticky sessions
      • vi. Integrates with auto scaling
      • vii. ELB EC2 health checks / Amazon CloudWatch
        • 1. Ability to have advanced metric based load balancing
          • a. CPU / memory / etc.
      • viii. Integrate with Route 53 (cloud based DNS)
    • b. Redundancy
      • i. You can setup redundant ELB for failover but may not be helpful because ELB is a software service. If there is a bug or an issue it will likely effect both.
    • c. Setup
      • i. Listener Configuration
        • 1. What protocol/port you want to listen to and what protocol/port you want to forward to
      • ii. You need to check a checkbox to make it internal
      • iii. You can add additional subnets specified within all availability zones you want to distribute load across
      • iv. SSL Certificates
        • 1. Upload the SSL cert once, you can keep reusing the certificate later…
      • v. Health Check
        • 1. Protocol: HTTP/HTTPS/etc
        • 2. Ping Port: 80
        • 3. Ping Path: /index.html
          • a. This could be a blank page or a dynamic page to verify that its doing something (maybe even a smoke test)
        • 4. You can also control the frequency of the check and thresholds to determine whether its unhealthy
      • vi. Enabling Cross-Zone Load Balancing is a checkbox check
      • vii. Connection Draining
        • 1. Gracefully getting users off servers going down for updates
      • viii. Create a CNAME using your domain record to give it a more friendly domain name
      • ix. Enable alarms through CloudWatch
  • 2. Auto Scaling
    • a. Features
      • i. Elasticity – grow and shrink your environment based on performance metrics
      • ii. Bootstrapping / dynamic configuration
        • 1. AMI to setup the base OS
        • 2. Also use chef / puppet to augment the provisioning of the new instance with the new version / configuration of your software
      • iii. CloudWatch or manual schedule
        • 1. If one instance hits 90% cpu utilization deploy 1-2 instances
        • 2. Always have a minimum / maximum
        • 3. Manual schedule
          • a. Based on time of year / time of month
      • iv. Notifications
        • 1. Orders are going through the SQS, if a number of orders hits a maximum then the SQS can also trigger auto-scale
      • v. It’s free!
    • b. How it works
      • i. Auto Scaling Groups
        • 1. Apply policies across multiple instances
      • ii. Launch config
        • 1. Gold image à AMI base image and augment with dynamic configuration
        • 2. Used as the mechanism to provision each new instance
      • iii. Scaling Plans
        • 1. How to provision new instances and terminate them
    • c. Setup
      • i. First Step: Create Launch Configuration
        • 1. Need to select an AMI or your own custom AMI
        • 2. Select an instance type (size)
        • 3. Name, purchasing option, IAM role, enable monitoring w/ CloudWatch
        • 4. Specify whether you want public IP addresses or not
        • 5. Add volumes / storage
        • 6. Select a VPC and security group to place the new instance in
        • 7. Key pairs,
          • a. If you know that you’ll never access them via RDP à you don’t need a key pair!
      • ii. Next: Create Auto Scaling Group
        • 1. Name, size (# of instances), target VPC and subnet
        • 2. Integrate with ELB but you can use 3rd party load balancers (netscalar, etc.)
      • iii. Next: Setup Scaling Plans
        • 1. Min + Max
        • 2. Increase Group Size policy
          • a. Trigger / alarm that monitors the instances
          • b. Actions
            • i. Can have steps like this:
              • 1. 70 – 80 % CPU utilization: add 1 instance
              • 2. 80-90 % CPU utilization: add 2 instances
              • 3. >90% CPU utilization: add 3 instances
            • ii. You can also use % of group instead of constant numbers
            • iii. You can ‘add’ or ‘set’ instance count
            • iv. Warm up time: allows instances to boot up and start handling load so you can let the environment settle first before scaling up further
          • c. Step size (how many instances to add)
        • 3. Decrease Group Size Policy
          • a. Works just like the increase group policy but designed to step down the size based on declining resource usage
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One thought on “AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Part VII: ELB & Auto Scaling

  1. Pingback: AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Exam: Study Guide | Sky Cliffs

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