DEV Community: Joshua O. Berkoh

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT AMAZON ROUTE 53

Joshua O. Berkoh — Sun, 29 May 2022 15:30:46 +0000

Amazon Route 53 is a Domain Name System offered by Amazon. Domain Name System is a hierarchical and decentralized naming system used to identify computers reachable through the internet or other internet protocol networks. Simply put, it is the phonebook of the internet.
Route 53 is Amazon's highly available and scalable domain name system that provides secure and reliable routing of requests, both for services within AWS and infrastructure that is outside of AWS. Route 53 is able to provide this service through its global network of authoritative DNS servers that reduce latency and can be managed via the management console.
Amazon Route 53 effectively connects user requests to infrastructure running in AWS such as Amazon EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancing load balancers, or Amazon S3 buckets and can also be used to route users to infrastructure outside of AWS. You can use Amazon Route 53 to configure DNS health checks, then continuously monitor your applications’ ability to recover from failures and control application recovery with Route 53 Application Recovery Controller.
Some of the components used within Amazon Route 53 are;
Hosted Zone- A hosted zone is a container that holds information about how you want to route traffic for a domain registered within Aws. Route 53 supports Public and Private hosted domains

A picture of the hosted zone dashboard

Domains supported within the service - these are domains supported by Amazon Route 53. It supports the [dot]com, [dot]net, [dot]org, and many more.

A picture of the domain registration page

Traffic Flow - this section allows you to make a traffic policy for your resources using existing routing types such as failover and geolocation.

A picture of the traffic flow dashboard

Resolver - Use the Resolver feature of Route 53 for your Virtual Private Clouds (VPC) which integrates easily with DNS on your network. To get started, configure endpoints for DNS queries into and out of VPCs that you created with Amazon Virtual Private Cloud(VPC).
DNS Firewall- this is a managed firewall service for queries that originate in your Virtual Private Clouds.
Application Recovery Controller - The application Recovery Controller allows you to check whether your resources are ready for recovery. It can be done by checking if an application in a region is ready for recovery or checking the status of each resource type across regions. You can also use the Application Recovery Controller to manage failovers by using routing controls integrated with health checks.

Some benefits of Route 53 are;

It is highly available and reliable
It is flexible
It is designed for use with other AWS services.

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT AMAZON RELATIONAL DATABASE SERVICE (RDS)

Joshua O. Berkoh — Tue, 17 May 2022 18:30:44 +0000

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is a collection of managed services that makes it simple to set up, operate, and scale databases in the cloud. Amazon RDS gives the user the options to choose from many RDS Engines such as Amazon Aurora, MYSQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and Microsft SQL Server. Amazon RDS also gives users a wide variety of computing instances to run their databases on. The users need to choose these instances according to their work needs and load. Some of these instance types are Amazon Ec2 Mac Instances powered by Mac computers (with Intel Core i7-8700 processors) and built on the AWS Nitro System, T4g powered by Arm-based custom-built AWS Graviton2 processors, and many more. If you wish to know more about the instance types, visit Amazon EC2 Instance Types - Amazon Web Services. An RDS instance can be hosted in a single availability Zone and Multisite Availability zones depending on the user's needs. Multi-site Az’s offers users resiliency and high availability benefits. It typically takes the database application 60 to 120 seconds to switch to the secondary instance when there is a failure and it happens automatically. The failover process can happen in the following scenarios; If patching maintenance has been performed in the primary instance, if the instance of the primary database has a host failure, if the availability zone of the primary database fails, if the primary instance was rebooted with failover, and if the primary database instance class on the primary database is modified.
In making sure, your database instance is able to meet the growing demands of your workloads, it is advisable to use a feature called Autoscaling. Most of the engines supported by Amazon RDS use Elastic Block Storage. Those engines are MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and SQL Server.

Amazon RDS IN Graphics (source - AWS)

FEATURES OF AMAZON RDS
Amazon RDS has the following features which the users can benefit from.

Security and Compliance
Performance and Scalability
Automated Patching and Upgrades
Data durability and Redundancy
Monitoring and alerting
Backup and recovery

If you want to learn more about Amazon Relational Database Service, visit Fully Managed Relational Database - Amazon RDS - Amazon Web Services

WHY YOU SHOULD JOIN THE AWS COMMUNITY BUILDERS PROGRAM

Joshua O. Berkoh — Sat, 30 Apr 2022 08:41:51 +0000

The AWS community Builders program is open to everyone around the globe. It is a community that comprises beginners, intermediaries, and advanced users of AWS Services. This community is full of activities that will enable you to learn more about AWS services, and how to apply an AWS service in your field of work. you get the opportunity to share and teach other people as well. This community will give you access to technical materials, mentorship opportunities from AWS employees, and opportunities to meet and make new friends and share ideas to make AWS services better.

MY Experience

I joined the community builders program this year and I have really benefited a lot. From meeting new AWS enthusiasts to having direct contact with AWS employees in the field of security to being part of amazing sessions where I get to learn how to use AWS services in certain fields of cybersecurity. I had the opportunity of expanding my knowledge of AWS services by taking courses on Cloud Academy. Participating in Tabletop exercises has broadened my horizon on certain topics in Cybersecurity and it has helped me in my career. It is the early days yet, the best part of being a community builder is having the opportunity to share what you learn and learn from what other people have shared as well. If my experience has moved you to join the community then visit AWS Community Builders Website** and add your name to the waitlist**. Can't wait to see you all join the program in the next quarter.

STEPS IN CREATING DASHBOARDS IN CLOUDWATCH

Joshua O. Berkoh — Sun, 17 Apr 2022 12:37:15 +0000

CloudWatch is an amazon service that is used to monitor your AWS resources. To be able to use CloudWatch effectively, you should have a resource in place, for instance, an Ec2 instance. In this demonstration, we will be creating a dashboard to monitor our Ec2 instance.

The steps involved are as follows

Log in to your AWS console
Use the search bar to search for CloudWatch and click to open the CloudWatch console.

On the left pane of the console, click on the dashboard

Click on create Dashboard to create a new Dashboard

Name your dashboard and click on create Dashboard.

Select a widget to add to your widget. (for the purposes of demonstration we will be selecting pie as our widget.

Select the data source for your Widget. ( for demonstration purposes we will be using metrics)

Then go ahead to select any of the metrics. ( I will be selecting Ec2 for this demonstration and go ahead to select Pre instance metrics)

Select any instance as your Widget data source.

Click on create Widget and save Dashboard after that.

In the Next writeup, I am going to explain the use alarms in cloudWatch and how to set them up.

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE AMAZON CLOUDWATCH

Joshua O. Berkoh — Sun, 10 Apr 2022 19:10:04 +0000

Amazon cloudWatch is a service that lets you have insight into the health and operational performance of your instances or applications. This helps in monitoring your instances and making sure they are ready for business.
CloudWatch gives you the opportunity to set up automated responses which are triggered when a condition is met. The function of this service presents an opportunity for users to minimize incidents, errors, or outages of the infrastructure or instances.
This service is mostly used by personnel in charge of operations and site engineers.
Amazon cloudWatch can be used for the following;
Collect and store logs.
Amazon cloudWatch allows you to store logs from vended logs, logs published from AWS resources, and Amazon CloudTrail.
Collect and aggregate container metrics.
Aws CloudWatch collects and aggregates metrics from compute performance such as CPU, memory, network, and disk information.
Monitor operational view with dashboards.
The dashboard feature of Amazon CloudWatch allows you to visualize your cloud resources and create a reusable graph to understand their performance.
Providing Application Insights:
This feature provides you with the possibility of setting up automated observation of applications to have an idea of their performance.

To learn more about the features of the Amazon cloudWatch, visit Amazon CloudWatch Product Features - Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Below are some of the graphics highlighting how the features involved in creating CloudWatch.

This graphics indicate creating a dashboard in cloudWatch

This graphic shows the addition of widget to the dashboard

This graphic shows the final dashboard after adding the
widgets and source points for the data.

In the next write up I will be demonstrating how to create a dashboard and alarm in cloudWatch.

All you need to know about AWS Snowball for Data Transfer

Joshua O. Berkoh — Sat, 26 Mar 2022 12:47:21 +0000

This is a service by AWS to securely transfer large amounts of data to and from Amazon s3. Sizes of data can that require this service can range from terabyte to petabyte. The snowball service comes in the form of a storage device either of 50 TB or 80 TB depending on the region the organization is in.
The reason an organization may opt for this service is the speed involved in transferring data to and from the AWS S3. AWS Snowball is highly noted for transferring large amounts at a high-speed rate.
All data transferred through this medium are encrypted with 256-bit encryption keys generated from AWS key management service. Wondering if your data with this storage medium could get lost? Don't because there is end-to-end tracking using an E-link shipping label which makes it possible for the snowball to land at your doorstep. Tracking of the device can be done using AWS SNS (simple notification service) with text messages.

Features of AWS Snowball

Fast data transfer
Snowball Clustering
GPU Storage
Block Support
Data Encryption

AWS Snowball can also be used in the following instances;
Content Distribution - that is if you want to share content or data with others without worrying about breaches
Tactical Edge Computing - AWS snowball have powerful computing, flexible storage, security, and ruggedization which helps federal teams focus on their work
Machine Learning - Snowball allows you to deploy and run machine learning models, such as document classification and image bulling.

The Necessary Components to consider when creating an EC2 Instance

Joshua O. Berkoh — Wed, 16 Mar 2022 11:02:37 +0000

Ec2 is a compute service that allows you to deploy virtual service within the AWS environment. there are several components that comes up to make an existing Ec2 instance a whole. The are;

Operating Systems and Software
Networking
Storage
Cost and Capacity Optimization
Global Infrastructure

I will be delving deeper into Operating Systems and Software, breaking the components of this feature and what to consider when setting up.

OPERATING SYSTEMS AND SOFTWARE
Primary is comprised of the Amazon Machine Images(AMIs). AMIs comprises of Images(operating systems) which mainly includes Microsoft Windows and Linux Distributions.

For Research and Testing Purposes
when a user wants to test or research an idea with creating an Ec2 instance, there are free tier images that can utilized. This means you can use this images without incurring any cost. The following are some of those images with their specifications.

a. Amazon Linux 2 AMI (HVM) - Kernel 5.10, SSD Volume Type - 64-bit(x86)/64-bit(Arm).
under this image,

The free eligible family type is t2 micro
Which has 1 vCPUs, 1Gb of memory
Amazon Elastic Block Store(EBS) only instance storage (EBS stores volumes that available to the instance)
Does not support EBS optimization
Has low data transfer rate and supports IPv6

b. Microsoft Windows Server 2019 Base (64-bit-x86).
under this image,

The free eligible family type is t2 micro
Which has 1 vCPUs, 1Gb of memory
Amazon Elastic Block Store(EBS) only instance storage (EBS stores volumes that available to the instance)
Does not support EBS optimization
Has low data transfer rate and supports IPv6

Other free tier images include

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 (HVM), SSD Volume Type
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP3 (HVM), SSD Volume Type
Ubuntu Server 20.04 LTS (HVM), SSD Volume Type
Debian 10 (HVM), SSD Volume Type
Microsoft Windows Server 2019 Base with Containers

and they all have similar specifications to the ones listed above.

In the next part of the series, I will be looking at the purpose of Lightweight businesses.