DEV Community: Wilfredo Pérez

30 Days Of AWS (Day 12)

Wilfredo Pérez — Thu, 20 Jun 2019 23:55:26 +0000

Welcome back guys, Another update in this crazy challenge. I have good news I finished this course :D

So, the last topic was Lambdas. I know about this service because at work we use it a lot, but every time you can learn new things.

Lambdas

From the official's docs "AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the underlying compute resources for you. You can use AWS Lambda to extend other AWS services with custom logic or create your own back-end services that operate at AWS scale, performance, and security. AWS Lambda can automatically run code in response to multiple events, such as HTTP requests via Amazon API Gateway, modifications to objects in Amazon S3 buckets, table updates in Amazon DynamoDB, and state transitions in AWS Step Functions".

Some benefits of using lambdas:

You can build your own backend code, you are the owner and you deploy in the language that you want.
You can connect lambdas with another like SQS, SNS or something.
Automatic scaling, AWS Lambda invokes your code only when needed and automatically scales to support the rate of incoming requests without requiring you to configure anything.
You can coordinate multiple AWS Lambda functions for complex or long-running tasks by building workflows with AWS Step Functions.
AWS Lambda allows your code to securely access other AWS services through its built-in AWS SDK and integration with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). AWS Lambda runs your code within a VPC by default.
With AWS Lambda you pay only for the requests served and the compute time required to run your code.

AWS Lambdas in the real world

You can use lambdas in thousands of different ways, but let me show you how I can use it at work, It's the basic one.

So, when the user requests our endpoint API GW invokes the lambda but how the process is asynchronous, the user gets a response. At the same time, the lambda is processing the information sent by the user, when it finishes, it sends a message to an SNS and another lambda to process with another business logic.

As you can see, the business logic is distributed in the lambdas, because we have conditions and other stuff, that can awake a lambda depending on the condition.

So that was all that this course offers related to lambdas, I know (Thanks to my every day) that I can use lambdas for a lot of things, also it's a great idea when you are using CloudWatch to monitor the health of your service.

The next post will be something like a checkpoint, because this challenge has changed a little bit, besides to clarify a couple of things related to the certification.

That's all for today, thanks for reading I really appreciate that.

for any doubt or suggestion leave a comment.

Thank you.

30 Days Of AWS (Day 11)

Wilfredo Pérez — Mon, 17 Jun 2019 22:36:04 +0000

Welcome back guys, Another update in this crazy challenge. I almost finish this course, It has taken more time than I expected but I'm excited about all the thing that I've learned.

Today I was studying about Load Balancing, Elasticity, and Scalability, these topics are interesting because I don't know a lot about ELB (Elastic Load Balancer) and Autoscaling, important topics in the certification and the real life.

Elastic Load Balancer (ELB)

ELB is a service that allows you to distribute the traffic between EC2 that are associated with it.

As its name says it's a load balancer that let you distribute the incoming traffic across multiples EC2 instances in different availability zones. One important thing about the ELB is that increase the fault tolerance of your applications, detecting unhealthy instances and redirecting to healthy instances.

The image above you sees the ELC in the middle of our infrastructure, trying to balance all the request across our EC2 instances.

Auto Scaling

From the docs "AWS Auto Scaling monitors your applications and automatically adjusts capacity to maintain steady, predictable performance at the lowest possible cost. Using AWS Auto Scaling, it’s easy to setup application scaling for multiple resources across multiple services in minutes."

In other words, auto scaling is a process to add or remove EC2 instances based on the traffic that your app is getting.

For example, imagine that your application doesn't have ELB and Autoscaling, so the maximum users that support your EC2 are 3 when the user number four uses our application, this could be crashed or the service will be denied.

But using autoscaling, when the maximum of users reached, automatically the EC2 will scale up:

Autoscaling is free nevertheless, will be charged for the resources auto-scaling provisions, For instance, any EC2 provisions that go beyond the free tier.

Route 53

Route 53 is where you manage and configure web domains for websites or applications you host on AWS.

It has 3 main functions:

Domain registration: Amazon Route 53 let you register a domain.
DNS Service: Amazon Route 53 translate your domain like www.mypage.com into IPs 192.160.10.0.
Health checking: It verifies whether your domain is reachable, available or functional.

So that's all for today, I completed the lab and I passed the exam today, only I have one topic left in this course.

Thanks for reading.

30 Days Of AWS (Day 10)

Wilfredo Pérez — Sat, 15 Jun 2019 16:48:07 +0000

Welcome back guys, this week has been a little bit crazy, a lot of work, but I've studied a lot, let's talk about.

The Day Ten I studied Management Tools, CloudWatch and CloudTrail, how the course is about the essentials this topic wasn't covered deeper.

CloudWatch

It's a service that allows you to monitor services in your AWS account.

From the official docs "Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and management service built for developers, system operators, site reliability engineers (SRE), and IT managers. CloudWatch provides you with data and actionable insights to monitor your applications, understand and respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health"

Basically, it's a dashboard where you can monitor the services as the following image shows us:

You can use it to set up alarms about:

CPU Utilization.
Service Status.
Disk Read and write.
The number of object in our S3 Buckets.
Your cost in the AWS account.

Benefits

At work, we are using CloudWatch and we have thousands of benefits like:

Infrastructure monitoring and troubleshooting: We have created graphics that let us visualise the application and infrastructure. So we compare the metrics and logs to get root cases of different issues.

Thanks to that we have been able to identify issues not visible easily.
Resource optimization: That is helpful when you need to identify whether one process is not scaling pretty good, so we fix our scalability rules.
Application monitoring: This is one of the most used at work, we have created several alarms to monitor our lambdas (Serverless apps) and improve our process.

Besides to complete this day, I was practising creating alerts to identify problems. It's very difficult to show you something related to that.

The result of today's exam.

That's all for today.

Thanks for reading.

30 Days Of AWS (Day 8 and 9)

Wilfredo Pérez — Sun, 09 Jun 2019 20:31:32 +0000

Hello guys! I've come back. I'm so sorry the last 3 days, I was sick but now I feel ready to share what I've studied those days.

Day 8 - Resume.

I was practising a lot in the console using different services, VCP, S3, EC2 and RDS. Besides I was reading about in AWS papers. It's important to mention that this challenge is part of my preparation to AWS Solution Architect Certified, I know that when you study to accomplish something like that, you should check more information than an essentials course.

Once I will have done this first course I gonna take another course specialized to this certification. Thank you to Andrew Brown that has been suggesting to me what other content I should study and he shared with me early access to his platform. Besides, Walter Seun Shared with me one page to practice the test. Thank you all.

Day 9 - SNS.

Today I was learning about SNS, although it's one service I'm using every single day. Because we have a lot of notification, about, billing, health check and between lambdas (I gonna explain later).

SNS.

From the Docs "Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) is a web service that coordinates and manages the delivery or sending of messages to subscribing endpoints or clients. In Amazon SNS, there are two types of clients—publishers and subscribers—also referred to as producers and consumers. Publishers communicate asynchronously with subscribers by producing and sending a message to a topic, which is a logical access point and communication channel. Subscribers (i.e., web servers, email addresses, Amazon SQS queues, AWS Lambda functions) consume or receive the message or notification over one of the supported protocols (i.e., Amazon SQS, HTTP/S, email, SMS, Lambda) when they are subscribed to the topic."

By default, the maximum number of SNS topics per account is 100,000 and By default, the maximum number of subscriptions per topic is 12,500,000.

Real world example.

The following image is a diagram about how we are using the SNS, It couldn't be the best example but you can have an idea about how to use it.

Ok, the first service that we have is an API Gateway, immediately when the user makes a request, we send a response back to notify that the request has been processed. One thing that we are doing is to use the lambdas function as a microservice because our workflow has several possible options with different output.

Once the lambda function called Process A processes the message, we notify to an SNS. This will send a message to 2 different services, Process B and D. Here you can think why do you need to send the message to 2 different lambdas? Because we need the same info to different propose and each lambda should have its function.

After the lambda Process B processes the message, it has 2 different ways, If it's ok it will be sent a message to other lambdas and if it is not ok, it will be sent an email. So Basically what we are doing is to use the SNS to notify to other services depending on the case we have different output.

Besides I've taken a small exam about SNS And above the result.

OK, guys, that's all for today.

Thanks for reading.

30 Days Of AWS (Day 7)

Wilfredo Pérez — Thu, 06 Jun 2019 02:35:42 +0000

Today I studied about Databases on AWS, this topic was awesome for me although you should know about VCP, Networking and security and If you read the older post It's not my strength.

Databases

AWS has 2 types of databases available, SQL or relational DB (RDS), and NoSql Non-relational DB (DynamoDB).

RDS

RDS is a SQL Database that provides huge options for different engines. Here you will see Amazon Aurora, Mysql, Postgres, Oracle and Microsoft SQL server.

DynamoDB

DynamoDB is a NoSQL Database service. Nowadays AWS doesn't have another NoSql option in its catalogue. One way that you can accomplish that is that you create an EC2 instance and install it MongoDB or Oracle NoSql.

Comparation

Practice

Today I was practising a lot creating DB basically to understand much better VPC and Security. Here you can check the official tutorial about How to create an RDS.

That's all for today, I'm sorry for this short post but that was planned for today.

30 Days of AWS (Day 6)

Wilfredo Pérez — Tue, 04 Jun 2019 01:13:58 +0000

Welcome back, guys the sixth day is here. So this challenge is more difficult than I expected but here I am.

Ok, this day I've studied S3 the famous Simple Storage Service, but I'm out of credit in Linux academy I wasn't able to do any quiz there. The practice that I did, it was done in my AWS account.

S3

From the docs "Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. This means customers of all sizes and industries can use it to store and protect any amount of data for a range of use cases, such as websites, mobile applications, backup and restore, archive, enterprise applications, IoT devices, and big data analytics".

S3 is the primary storage service that AWS provides. There you can store any kind of files.

The components that you can see in any S3 are the following:

Buckets: It's the place that you use to save your files, those are like a folder but Amazon called it Buckets. The name of this will be unique in the entire AWS world. By default it's private but you can set up a public, the only problem is that every time that you create a public bucket, all the internet will be able to access.

The image above you can see that wilfredo3testcourse is like a folder that inside you'll have another object like folders or files.

Objects: These are the files/folders stored in a bucket.

In the image, you can see one folder that it's empty and one image stored in my S3 bucket.

Here you can see a full diagram about how S3 components work.

S3 storage clases

The storage class represents the classification to each object in S3, it could be Standard, Standard_AI, OneZone_IA, Glacier. Each Storage class has its cost and availability.

Standard Storage: It's the default option, design for general purpose. It has 99.999999999% of object durability. It's 99.99% object availability. It's the most expensive option because the resource it's always available.
Standard_AI: It is designed for the object that you don't access frequently, but you need that it will be immediately available when you need it. It's less expensive than standard storage. It's 99.5% object availability. And It has 99.999999999% of object durability.
OneZone_IA: It's designed for non-critical objects. It's less expensive than other options. It's 99.5% object availability.
Glacier: It's designed for long term archive storage. It takes several hours for the objects stored in the glacier to be retrieved. It has 99.999999999% of object durability. It's low cost.

S3 versioning.

It's a feature that let you track of and store all the version of an object that you have stored in any bucket. You can check the older version whatever you want. It can be turned on/off at any moment.

Well, guys, that's all for this day. I hope tomorrow continue updating this adventure.

Thank for reading.

30 Days of AWS (Day 5)

Wilfredo Pérez — Sat, 01 Jun 2019 02:49:00 +0000

Hey, welcome back to another post. I've been disconnected because I was pretty busy doing things, medical appointments and others.

So I continue my studying learning about EC2, AMIS and EBS. This topic is my current weakness because I failed the demo exam provides but I have exampro to practice this topic again.

EC2

It's a simple computer/server that Amazon provides to us. An EC2 instance has several parts and those are:

AMIS

An Amazon Machine Image provides the information required to launch an EC2 instance, which is a server in a cloud. In other words, it's an OS (Operative System), packages and another require stuff.

There we have 3 different types of AMIS:

Community AMIS:
1. Free to use.
2. With this AMIS you are selecting the OS that you want, It has a pre-setup
AWS Market place AMIS:
1. Pay to use.
2. It's licensed software.
My AMIS:
1. AMIS created by yourself.

Instances type

This is the CPU that you want for your instance.
Here we have another config that is important when you are creating one instance type:

CPU: The number of virtual CPU's that you will need to use.
Memory: The amount of RAM that you need to your instance.
Storage: The instance storage volume, in other words, the HD (Hard drive)
Network Preference: Bandwidth capability, Security groups and other stuff related to networking.

EBS (Elastic Block Store)

It's a hard drive that will have our EC2 instance. provides persistent block storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances in the AWS Cloud. Each Amazon EBS volume is automatically replicated within its Availability Zone to protect you from component failure, offering high availability and durability. Amazon EBS volumes offer the consistent and low-latency performance needed to run your workloads. With Amazon EBS, you can scale your usage up or down within minutes – all while paying a low price for only what you provision.

Security Groups

The security groups are very similar than NACL ( I talked about in the last post) Allow or deny traffic depending on the rules that you've provided.

There we have another configuration, I think that this topic wasn't cover in deep, In fact, as I mentioned above I fail the exam so I need to read more about.

So that's everything for today tomorrow I'll study about EC2 again, and I'm gonna try to move to S3 topic.

Thanks for reading, and enjoy learning.

30 Days of AWS (Days 3 and 4)

Wilfredo Pérez — Wed, 29 May 2019 01:39:30 +0000

First, of all, I'm sorry that yesterday I didn't publish my post although I studied I felt pretty tire to write down about it.

I have focused these days to study about VCP, Internet Gateway (IGW), Route Tables, Network Access Control List, Subnets and Availability Zones.

IGW

from the AWS docs "An internet gateway is a horizontally scaled, redundant, and highly available VPC component that allows communication between instances in your VPC and the internet. It, therefore, imposes no availability risks or bandwidth constraints on your network traffic.

An internet gateway serves two purposes: to provide a target in your VPC route tables for internet-routable traffic, and to perform network address translation (NAT) for instances that have not been assigned public IPv4 addresses".

So In other words, IGW is a combination of hardware and software that provides your private network with a route to the internet.

Route Tables

It's a set of rules called routes, that are used to determine where network traffic is redirected.

NACL

It's one optional layer of security for your VPC, it's like a firewall. The following image will explain to you what are route tables and NACL:

The NACL has inbound rules and outbound rules, by default all the traffic is allowed (for both) but you can set rules allowing specific routes, ports or whether it's HTTP or SSH and other.

Subnets

It's a word that AWS uses to say subnetwork, each subnet must reside in one availability zone, and you can add one or more subnets to one availability zone.

In the image above you can see how we split the subnets into different availability zones, and also is a good practice divide your EC2 and Databases into different subnets.

Availability Zones

All the AWS resources that you launch like EC2 /RDS must be placed in VPC subnets and any subnet must be located in an Availability Zone.

Something important to mention is that you can use multiple Availability zones to create a redundancy architecture providing high disponibility and fault tolerance.

For example, if something happens to the Availability Zone A, automatically will be switched to the B, granting you website or system alive and save.

To the end, I did a practice integrating all the topic described above, and I took a test that I passed with 83% / 100%.

Besides, I want to say thank you to Andrew Brown because he was giving me many thoughts about the cloud practitioner certification. Also he gave me early access to his platform, it's pretty cool but when I finish the actual course I'll study from there.

That's all for today, tomorrow another post.

Thank you all.

30 days of AWS (Day 2)

Wilfredo Pérez — Sun, 26 May 2019 23:51:24 +0000

Hello guys! Today I was studying something that I've confused me a lot VPCs.

Basically, this topic was very difficult for me because it's related to network, IPs and connectivity, and to be honest I'm pretty bad on these things.

Today I didn't finish the topic because I needed to watch the videos twice, took a lot of notes, and read the officials docs, but let me share with you what I've learned.

1. Overview of the network services that AWS provides and Global infrastructure: Here I read about what is an availability zone? what is an AWS region? and what is a data centre?

AWS region: A group of AWS resources located in a specific geographical location. The main Idea is that every customer or user can select a location closest to them, preventing latency.

Availability zone (Az): It's a geographically isolated zone within a region that house AWS resources. Basically, those are different datacenter. Multiples Az in each region provides redundancy for AWS resources in that region.

Datacenter: It's physical hardware.

2. VPC Basics: from the Amazon Docs "Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) enables you to launch AWS resources into a virtual network that you've defined. This virtual network closely resembles a traditional network that you'd operate in your own datacenter, with the benefits of using the scalable infrastructure of AWS." If you wanna read more about press here.

Here in the course provides one example that let me clarify a lot, the VPC structure first let's see this diagram.

They say that a VPC is like the internet connection that we have at home something that it's true and I didn't see before, see the image below:

So if you see, our laptops or mobile phones are like EC2 instances. The firewall is like Network Access Control List (NACL). The router or switch is like AWS Table Route. And our modem is like the Internet Gateway (IGW). This comparison is pretty good because if you disconnect one part you won't have internet also you'll be disconnected from the world, the same thing will happen to your app if you will switch off one piece described above.

Ok, so today my progress was slow but I don't care because I'm learning a lot. Tomorrow I will continue studying about VPC World.

Thanks for reading.

30 Days of AWS (Day 1)

Wilfredo Pérez — Sun, 26 May 2019 00:07:50 +0000

Hello everybody that is following this crazy adventure, I really appreciate it.

Today I was exploring What's IAM in AWS. Although I already knew about it was pretty awesome to study again. I watched all the section about this topic in the course that I'm doing on Linux Academy, besides reading the official docs.

Topics Covered today in my hour and a half studying

What's IAM service (From the official docs): AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a web service that helps you securely control access to AWS resources. You use IAM to control who is authenticated (signed in) and authorized (has permissions) to use resources. If you wanna learn more about press here
IAM Initial setup and configuration: this part I was already done when I created my AWS account. Basically here I was covering the 5 steps that should have complete to keep your account secured.
Creating IAM users and policies: Here I was practising about how to create users and policies.
Creating IAM groups and policies: So here I was practising creating different groups and add policies to these groups.
Doing the Quiz: At the end of the topic they have a quiz that you can take buying it with gems, I spent 7 gems and I got 80% / 100% So I think that today was a productive day

So, this is the end of this day, Tomorrow I will continue with this course AWS Essentials.

Thanks for reading.

30 Days of AWS (Day 0)

Wilfredo Pérez — Fri, 24 May 2019 00:37:41 +0000

Prologue

Today I was looking for any resource to start to study AWS because I didn't have any point to start. I was exploring the Jayendra Patil's blog It was recommended in several forum and pages every time that someone asked about resources to Study. This blog you can see the different topics that you need to get ready for the AWS certifications, besides I was checking the AWS official info to match that everything is correct.

After that I analyzed all the content that I should study, I saw that Linux Academy will be great because there you'll have all the content necessary to get prepared. Also, I don't but I've been getting a lot of ads from this platform so I decided to start with a free account and I'll pay If I need it.

My first course to take will be AWS Essentials because it covers the basics thing about this, they also have more advanced courses and I can use an AWS free tier account to test everything or at work I have one env that we use for testing features (It's the test server, it's a separate account). Besides, I followed two guys here Helen Anderson and Frank Rosner they have a lot of post about AWS platform my intention will be read one post written by them, obviously, that cover any point that I would be studying.

At the end of the day, I watched the getting started and the Account basic setting up everything. Today I spent more time than I expected but I have spare time so I thought let's study more time.

So that's all for today, I can't wait for tomorrow to start in the deep AWS world. You can follow me on Twitter as @DevWilfredo to get notified when I publish here.

30 Days of AWS

Wilfredo Pérez — Wed, 22 May 2019 20:37:35 +0000

Warning: This is my first post in English, It could have grammatical errors, please help me to improve.

Motivation.

One year ago I started to work using AWS and immediately I fall in love with this platform. In fact, one-year later since this first day I love to understand more and more things about and improve the stuff that we have there.

Back in October 2018, I was talking with my boss and I expressed my interest in getting a certified as AWS developer or Solution architect, I know that a lot of people are against that one certification doesn't prove your knowledge in any topic but in my case is one motivation to keep on studying and improving. But for different reasons I've delayed the day to start seriously to study because although I work almost every single day with AWS, it has dark corners that I don't know or I couldn't imagine that it exists.

So I decided that I've 3 months as a deadline to get ready and take the exam, so I decided to start this 30 days of AWS.

The challenge.

Right now I'm doing many things, as run 3 times per week at least 5km/run, Study English 2 times per week, I have 2 jobs and I'm daddy of 2. Yes I know I'm a pretty busy man but I like living on the edge.

Personal rules for this challenge:

1.) 30 Days will be the initial challenge because I gonna test my time and commitment.
2.) I will try to share my progress every day.
3.) The minimum time to study per day will be 1 hour/day.
4.) I could skip for 3 days because I'm pretty busy.

So If you want to follow me on this adventure please stay tuned. This will be a month with work hard but I'm sure that I will enjoy it.