AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Part IX: IAM, CloudWatch and RDS High Availability

 

  • 1. IAM
    • a. Domain
      • i. Users
        • 1. Represents a specific set of credentials tied to the identity of a specific user
      • ii. Groups
        • 1. Group of users that can have permissions or roles associated
        • 2. You can’t nest groups
      • iii. Roles
        • 1. Defines a set of permissions for a specific resource
        • 2. Rather than assign permissions to specific users / groups. You assign permissions to a role and then associate a user/group to a role.
        • 3. No longer have to manipulate group membership to grant / revoke permissions
      • iv. Policies
        • 1. Apply policies to users, groups, and roles
    • b. Best practice:
      • i. Never use the root account
      • ii. Create a new user, grant access to it and then delete the root account
    • c. Setup
      • i. IAM users sign-in link (to the AWS console)
      • ii. You can access the console from an easier more friendly aws dashboard link
      • iii. Access Keys are used by developers (API key basically)
    • d. MFA
      • i. Google Authenticator for multiple mobile OS platforms
      • ii. Scan a barcode that is generated by AWS
    • e. Signed certificates
      • i. SSH is supported
    • f. STS
      • i. SAML
      • ii. OpenID Connect
      • iii. Integrate with on premise directories
  • 2. CloudWatch
    • a. Characteristics
      • i. Monitoring for AWS cloud resources
      • ii. Collect and track metrics / custom metrics
      • iii. Collect and monitor logs
        • 1. CloudWatch log agent needs to be installed on each instance
      • iv. Set Alarms
        • 1. Create within the metric you’re looking at or start from scratch without the context of the metric
        • 2. Actions can be triggered when an alarm takes place
        • 3. Types of alarms
          • a. Billing
            • i. If my bill exceeds $, do something
          • b. EC2
            • i. Actions can be trigged by alarms:
              • 1. Recover
              • 2. stop
              • 3. terminate
              • 4. reboot the instance
          • c. Databases (RDS, DynamoDB)
          • d. EBS
    • b. Trusted Advisor
      • i. Big brother looking over your shoulder, giving you best practices and recommendations
      • 1. Cost
      • 2. Performance
      • 3. Security
      • 4. Fault Tolerance
  • 3. RDS High Availability & Load Sharing
    • a. Characteristics
      • i. Multiple Availability Zone deployment options
      • ii. On-demand and reserve instance pricing
      • iii. Magenetic, GP-SSD, or PIOPS
    • b. Failover
      • i. When deploying to multiple AZ, designed for HA
      • ii. Synchronous replica in secondary AZ
      • iii. Standby replica is invisible to you
      • iv. Snapshots are taken against the standby database
        • 1. Instead of affecting the master you do it to the standby
        • 2. If something happens to the master, you can failover to the standby since it is synchronized
      • v. Read replica can offload that load from the master since most databases are very read-intensive
        • 1. You can have as many read replicas as you want
        • 2. They will never be written to
        • 3. Created from a snapshot off the master instance
        • 4. Asynchronously replicate
        • 5. Read-only disaster recovery
          • a. It can still service users if both the master and standby databases are down you can still provide read-only access
          • b. Some database types can promote the read replica to be the master
    • c. Backups
      • i. Automated backups
        • 1. Backup window
          • a. Start time
          • b. Duration
      • ii. Manual backups
  • 4. Backup Options
    • a. EBS
      • i. Point-in-time snapshots to S3
      • ii. Snapshot scan be used to:
        • 1. Resize volumes
        • 2. Copy volumes and move them to different regions
        • 3. Share volumes
      • iii. Deleting snapshots only removes the data not needed by another snapshot
    • b. Additional backup options
      • i. VP / Direct Connect
      • ii. Agent-based backup
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One thought on “AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Part IX: IAM, CloudWatch and RDS High Availability

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

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