DEV Community: Opeyemi Jokanola

Walkthrough on AWS Simple Notification Service(SNS)

Opeyemi Jokanola — Fri, 03 Jan 2025 19:30:28 +0000

Have you ever wondered how one single message is received by millions subscribed to a service? The magic lies in one of AWS's services called SNS. This can be directly integrated for email notification, fraud service, shipping service, SQS queue. Subscribers to this service will get all the messages at once and one topic can reach up to 12 million subscribers. With SNS- emails, SMS, and mobile notifications can be sent directly. In addition, messages can be sent to Lambda, SQS, Kinesis Data Firehose and HTTP endpoints. SNS integrates seamlessly with other AWS services such as AWS budgets, CloudFormation, Cloudwatch alarms, ASG, S3 etc.

There are two ways you can use the SNS;
-Topic publish using SDK by creating a topic, subscription and publishing to the SNS topic
-Direct publish for mobile Apps SDK which involves creating platform application and platform endpoint, then publishing to platform endpoint.

In terms of security, SNS uses in-flight encryption, at-rest encryption using KMS keys, and client-side encryption.

Let's take a practical approach to SNS
-Navigate the console to the SNS service to create a topic, then click on the next step.

-Topic can either be standard or FIFO, we are using standard, then click create topic.

-Create subscription

-We are going to create an email subscription

-The subscription was sent to the endpoint email and I needed to confirm the subscription.

-To test if it works, we are going to publish a message

-Going back to my email, lets see what we got

This validates that the SNS is working as intended.

Till you read from me again, don't forget to clean up your resources.
Cheers!!!

Walk through on AWS Global Accelerator

Opeyemi Jokanola — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 23:51:43 +0000

Deploying a solution with global users has constraints as users from around the world are trying to access it. This even becomes more difficult as the application is deployed in one region. Users from Europe, America, Africa etc trying to access an application over the internet will experience latency due to many hops through the router. Going through these hops can create the risk of lost connection. Users around the world need to access the content as quickly as possible and not experience latency. The solution lies in going through the Amazon infrastructure, using the AWS Global Accelerator. The AWS Global Accelerator leverages Anycast IP(this means that all servers hold the same IP address and the client is redirected to the closest one).

The AWS Global Accelerator works by leveraging the AWS internal network to route to the Application using Edge location, accessing the Application load balancer. The AWS Global Accelerator works with Elastic IP, EC2 instances, ALB(Application load balancer), and NLB(Network load balancer), which can either be private or public. The Global Accelerator ensures consistent performance, health checks, and security. The use case for the AWS Global Accelerator includes gaming, IoT, VoIP, and HTTP that require static IP addresses globally and fast failover.

Let us see how the Global Accelerator works (NB: this is not a free AWS service).

We need to first create our application by going to the EC2 Instance service

-Launch Instance

-Choose the free tier

-Create Security Group and Launch Instance

-Launch another EC2 instance in a different Region following the same process as above. Test if both instances are working by copying Public DNS in a browser(should get the Hello World prompt)

-Navigate the AWS console to AWS Global Accelerator

-Create Listeners

-Add End Point and Health checks for both Instances

-Then add End Point Group afterwards

-Create Accelerator

-Copy the DNS name, and paste into a browser to test it. I got this below as it is the closest and fastest Region to me.

-To test if this works, I used a VPN to change my location to Singapore.

-To see if the Global Accelerator can serve content all over the world, we will make the 2nd EC2 instance(Mumbia) unhealthy by deleting the security group.

-We can see the EC2 instance has become unhealthy. To test if the Global Accelerator works, we need to refresh the page.

Viola, we got a response from eu-east-1.

That's it folks, everything works perfectly as expected.
Till you read from me again, don't forget to clean up your deployed resources. Cheers!!!

How to use CloudFront to distribute content using Amazon S3 as Origin

Opeyemi Jokanola — Sun, 18 Feb 2024 22:37:04 +0000

CloudFront is a content delivery network that helps improve the read performance of your content by caching it at different edge locations around the world. This improves the user experience by reducing latency and providing faster access to content. CloudFront has a global network of more than 600 Points of Presence and 13 regional edge caches in over 100 cities spanning 50 countries. With global distribution, CloudFront provides DDoS protection for content, as AWS Shield and AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) are integrated to work together seamlessly. The availability and reliability of your files are also enhanced since copies of your content are cached in multiple edge locations worldwide.

How CloudFront Works
When using CloudFront, you need to specify the origin servers, which can either be an Amazon S3 bucket or your own HTTP server, containing the files you want to distribute. These files will be transported from the origin servers to CloudFront edge locations scattered across the world.
The origin server holds the original and definitive version of your objects. The next thing is to upload your files to your origin servers. These files can be anything that can be served over HTTP, including web pages, images, and media files.
We are using Amazon S3 bucket as our origin server, which has the option of making the objects in the bucket publicly readable. Anyone with the CloudFront URLs for your objects can access them. Alternatively, these objects can be kept private and regulate who has access to them.
Once the origin servers have been specified, a CloudFront distribution can be created. This distribution will inform CloudFront which origin servers to retrieve your files from when users request the files through your website or application.
After creating a new distribution, CloudFront will assign a domain name to it, which can be seen in the CloudFront console.
CloudFront sends your distribution's configuration to all of its edge locations, or points of presence (POPs). These are collections of servers in geographically dispersed data centres where CloudFront caches your content.

How to set up CloudFront
We need to create S3 bucket for starters.

We are going to upload our files into the bucket created.

Then we open up CloudFront and create origin access control

We also need to update our S3 bucket policy, and then disable WAF protection because we do not need them for this hands-on.

The default root object should be "index.html", then click Create distribution

We have successfully created a new distribution. The S3 bucket policy needs to be updated and we can copy it from the CloudFront console.
.
We go back to the S3 bucket created, click permissions, scroll down to Bucket policy, and then Edit. Paste the copied S3 bucket policy from CloudFront.

Then we go back to the CloudFront console, copy the distribution domain name then paste it into a browser.

Well done for coming thus far. We have been able to successfully distribute the files using CloudFront.

That's it, folks.
Till I break down more AWS services, catch you soon.

How to host a static website using Amazon S3

Opeyemi Jokanola — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 19:20:57 +0000

One of the reasons I like the S3 service is its versatility. We will be exploring one of the use cases of Amazon S3 which is using it to host a static website.

Static websites are the simplest form of web presence, composed of fixed, pre-built HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. Static websites deliver the same content to every visitor, making them faster to load and easier to host.

Features of Static websites

1-Simplicity: Static websites are straightforward, consisting of plain HTML pages that are served directly to the user's browser without any server-side processing.

2-Performance: Static websites don't require server-side processing, they load quickly, making them ideal for delivering content with minimal latency.

3-Security: With no backend server or database to manage, static websites have a smaller attack surface, reducing the risk of security vulnerabilities.

4-Cost-effectiveness: Hosting static websites is more affordable compared to dynamic websites, as they can be served from simple storage solutions.

5-Scalability: Static websites can handle large amounts of traffic with ease, as they are typically served through content delivery networks (CDNs) that distribute content globally.

Some of the use cases of static websites

1-Brochure Websites: Static websites are commonly used for showcasing business information, portfolios, or personal blogs where the content doesn't change frequently.
2-Documentation Sites: Technical documentation and user manuals are often presented as static websites due to their simplicity and ease of maintenance.
3-Landing Pages: Campaign-specific landing pages benefit from the speed and security of static websites, ensuring a seamless user experience.

While static websites lack dynamic features, they offer unparalleled simplicity, performance, and security. They are an excellent choice for projects where content remains relatively static and where fast loading times and low hosting costs are essential.

The static website hosted in the S3 bucket can be accessible via the internet, however, public reads must be enabled in the S3 bucket.
Let us get started on how to go about this.

First, we are going to create a S3 bucket and give it any name we like.

We also need to enable public access

Then create bucket

Click on create bucket.

Click on Properties and scroll down to Static website hosting, then click on "edit"

Click Enable static website hosting, click on Host a static website and specify the index document as "index.html", then save changes.

Then go back to objects and upload the HTML file. This is a copy of the file I used for this tutorial which is a simple e-commerce website.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
    <title>My E-Commerce Store</title>
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="styles.css">
</head>
<body>
    <header>
        <h1>My E-Commerce Store</h1>
        <nav>
            <ul>
                <li><a href="#">Home</a></li>
                <li><a href="#">Shop</a></li>
                <li><a href="#">About</a></li>
                <li><a href="#">Contact</a></li>
            </ul>
        </nav>
    </header>

    <main>
        <section class="products">
            <h2>Our Products</h2>
            <!-- Product cards will be dynamically generated here -->
        </section>
    </main>

    <footer>
        <p>&copy; 2024 My E-Commerce Store. All rights reserved.</p>
    </footer>

    <script src="scripts.js"></script>
</body>
</html>

Head back to properties and scroll down to the static website hosting and copy the endpoint.

Then paste on a browser. If you get the 403 error, then you will have to enable bucket policy(you can learn how to in this article)

This is our simple static website.

That's it, folks...
Let's keep learning and growing together.

A Walk Through On Amazon S3

Opeyemi Jokanola — Sat, 18 Mar 2023 14:33:33 +0000

Hi folks,
Been a while you read from me, I have just been heating up the stove.
Today I will be writing on one of the most popular and exciting cloud computing services offered by Amazon, The Amazon S3. The S3 is also known as Simple Storage Service and it is one of the services used by Netflix to store videos and deliver content to users round the world(before building their own CDN).
S3 is one of the main building blocks of Amazon web services and it is known for its infinity scaling storage. Most website use the Amazon S3 at its back bone. The S3 is known for its reliability, scalabity and avalability.

Use cases of Amazon S3

1-Popular for its storage and backup
2-Disaster recovery purposes
3-Archieving and retrieving of files
4-Hybrid cloud storage
5-Application hosting
6-Media hosting
7-Data lakes & big data analytics
8-Hosting of static website

Lets take a deep dive with Amazon S3
The S3 was built to allow people store files into what is known as buckets which is seen as top level directories. The files stored in the S3 buckets is known as objects. When creating and naming buckets in S3, the name of the bucket must be a globally unique one(i.e it must be named differently from what anyone has used before). The S3 is a global service, however, the buckets are created in a region.
There are things to consider when naming a S3 bucket
1-No use of special character such as underscore, capital letters
2-The name must start with a lower case or number
3-The name is usually between 3-63 characters long

The S3 object files contain what is called key which are very long names with slashes and are made up of prefix+object name. The maximum object size that can be uploaded to the S3 bucket is 5TB.

I will be showing you how to make use of the Amazon S3 through this hands on project, follow along.

-Navigate to the S3 icon and click

-Click create bucket

-Name your bucket and leave it at default

-Click create bucket

Yipee, we have successfully created our bucket

I am going to be uploading one of my favourite animated movies to the S3 bucket

-Click add file, and upload whatever file you want

-Click upload

-To get more details about the file uploaded, click the file

See as shown below

To view the file recently uploaded, you can click open

Taada, we are able to see and view the file uploaded. However, the file uploaded is not for public consumption.
To make it accessible to the public, I need to change the permission(note that sensitive data should never be made public).

-Click edit

-Uncheck the box and click save changes

-Moving on to create bucket policy, click edit

-Click on policy generator

-Select the policy type to S3 policy, change principal to "*".
Action should be "Getobject"
Put "/*" after the ARN name
Add statement and generate policy

-Copy the generated policy and paste it, then save changes

Access is now public and this can be viewed on any web page

-Copy and paste the URL into any browser to test

Now you can share this URL with anyone on the internet.

That's it folks...

I will be taking a deeper dive in the part two of this series..
Stay tuned..

How to Provision Application Load Balancer in AWS

Opeyemi Jokanola — Fri, 02 Sep 2022 07:59:39 +0000

When building on the cloud, one of the advantages of cloud computing is High availability which means that people can always access your application about 99.99% of the time without worrying about downtime of your application/website. The tenets of High availability dictate that you run your application/system in at least 2 Availability Zones.
Load balancers are servers that forward internet traffic to multiple servers (EC2 Instances) downstream. If one of your servers is down or unhealthy, the load balancer helps to direct traffic to the available server to ensure no downtime. Load balancers ensure organisations can maintain the performance and availability of their applications which helps them stay a step ahead of the competition. Load balancers are super helpful for sudden traffic spikes where application load balancers effectively split network load to the cloud, boosting availability and scalability.

Why do we use a load balancer
-Load balancer helps to spread the load across multiple downstream instances
-Expose a single point of access (DNS) to your application
-Seamlessly handle failures of downstream instances
-Do regular health checks on your instances
-Provide SSL termination (HTTPS) for your websites
-Enforce stickiness with cookies
-Separate public traffic from private traffic
-High availability across zones

Types of load balancer
There are 4 types of Load balancers in AWS
1-Classic Load Balancer (v1 - old generation) – 2009 – CLB (soon to be phased out)
Supports HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, SSL (secure TCP)
2-Application Load Balancer (v2 - new generation) – 2016 – ALB
Supports HTTP, HTTPS, WebSocket
3-Network Load Balancer (v2 - new generation) – 2017 – NLB
Support TCP, TLS (secure TCP), UDP
4-Gateway Load Balancer – 2020 – GWLB
Operates at layer 3 (Network layer) – IP Protocol

We will be focusing on Application Load Balancer today
Application load balancer is Layer 7 (HTTP) which balances the load to multiple HTTP applications across target groups. The application load balancer handles load balancing to multiple applications on the same machine (e.g containers). It supports HTTP/2, WebSocket and redirects traffic from HTTP to HTTPS.
Application load balancer enable routing tables to different/multiple target groups. They are a great fit for microservices & container-based applications (e.g Docker & Amazon ECS). It has a port mapping feature to redirect to a dynamic port in ECS. Application load balancers usually have a fixed hostname (e.g Application-LB-506567568.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com) and the application servers don’t see the IP of the client directly.

Now let’s get our hands dirty in provisioning an Application Load Balancer

-Login to your AWS Console

-Then navigate or type in the search bar EC2

-Click on Instances

-Click on launch instance

-We are going to be creating two EC2 instances. Let us name our first instance “Webserver1”

-Make sure you are on the free tier

-Create a “Keypair” and give it any name you like

-Create a new Security group that allows SSH traffic

-Expand Advanced details, scroll down to user data and input the script below:

#!/bin/bash
# Please make sure to launch Amazon Linux 2
yum update -y
yum install httpd -y
systemctl start httpd
systemctl enable httpd
echo "<h1>Hello World from Webserver1</h1>" > /var/www/html/index.html
echo "<h1>Healthy</h1>" > /var/www/html/health.html

-Then click Launch Instance
-Click view all Instances

As I mentioned earlier, we are creating two EC2 Instances. Follow the same process to create another EC2 instance with the name Webserver2.
-A keypair and a public IP address.
-Security group that allows SSH traffic
-Expand Advanced details, scroll down to user data and input the script below:

#!/bin/bash
# Please make sure to launch Amazon Linux 2
yum update -y
yum install httpd -y
systemctl start httpd
systemctl enable httpd
echo "<h1>Hello World from Webserver2</h1>" > /var/www/html/index.html
echo "<h1>Healthy</h1>" > /var/www/html/health.html

-Click Launch instance
-Click view all Instances
-We have our two instances running now

Great you have made it thus far. Next for us is to create a Target Group.
-Look at the left pane on your EC2 Instance dashboard and scroll down to Target group, then click Create Target group

-Give it the name "WebserverTG"
-Leave everything as default
-Ensure to select the same VPC used when creating the Instances
-Under Health checks path paste: "health.html"
-Then click Create

-Select the created Target group, click the Actions drop-down and click Register and deregister instance/IP targets

-Select the instances created and click Add to registered, then click Save.

-Still on the left pane of your EC2 Instance dashboard click Load Balancers
Click Create Load Balancer

-Select Application Load Balancer and click Create

-Give it the name "Application-LB"
-Leave it as internet facing and IPv4

-Select your VPC and all your public subnets

-Click the Security Group created with the first instance to the ALB

-Under Configure routing--> select the Existing target group “WebserverTG”

-Review and Create load balancer

Great job. We are almost there
-Go to the Security Group of each of the instances created and modify the Inbound rule

-Edit inbound rule allowing All Traffic from the Security Group of your load balancer

-Click Save rules

Alas, we got to the finish line.Yipeee!!!
-Navigate on your Instance dashboard to the Load balancer. Copy the DNS name and paste in a browser.

-This is what you get

-Refresh the browser to confirm the load balancer is directing traffic to the other EC2 Instance

-On the web browser where you pasted the DNS name of the Application LB, add “/health.html” at the end of the URL to confirm if the EC2 Instance is Healthy

That’s it folks…

Do not forget to clean up your resources (i.e delete everything you have provisioned)

Please drop a comment in the chat box and let me know if you find this helpful.

AWS Serverless Computing

Opeyemi Jokanola — Fri, 08 Jul 2022 09:10:13 +0000

What is Severless Computing?

Serverless computing is a cloud computing model that involves the cloud provider to allocate compute resources on demand, manage servers on behalf of their customers. "Serverless" is a misterm in which case servers are still used by cloud service providers to execute code for developers. In addition, “serverless” doesn’t mean that there are no servers involved: it just means that the servers, the operating systems, the network layer, and the rest of the infrastructure have already been taken care of so that you can focus on writing application code.
However, Engineers building serverless applications are not bothered with capacity planning, configuration, management, maintenance, fault tolerance, or scaling of containers, VMs, or physical servers. Serverless computing does not hold resources in volatile memory; computing is rather done in short bursts with the results persisted to storage. When an application is not in use, there are no computing resources allocated to the application. Pricing is based on the actual amount of resources consumed by the application. It can be a form of utility computing.

Some of the Severless computing offered by AWS includes:

AWS Lambda

The AWS Lambda was launched in 2014 , the most popular serverless compute platform out there used to solve real-life production problems. It allows you run your code without provisioning or managing any server. You get to pay for only the compute time used and there are no charges when your code is not running.
With AWS Lambda, you can virtually run code for any type of application or backend service, all with zero administration. You only need to upload your code and Lambda takes care of everything required to run and scale your code with high availability. AWS Lambda is an awesome offering, you provide the code, AWS handles the infrastructure and execution for you. Codes run within (VPC) Virtual Private Cloud by default in the AWS Lambda, and it is performed in reaction to events in AWS services such as adding/deleting files in an S3 bucket, making an HTTP call to the Amazon API gateway, and so on.
Instead of managing operating system (OS) access control, OS patching, right-sizing, provisioning, scaling, and other tasks, the AWS Lambda function allows you to focus on your core product and business logic.

Some of the core concepts in Lambda includes:
Functions — Program that processes events passed by Lambda
Runtimes — Allows functions in languages, matches your language and configures functions as well
Event Source — A service that helps in the execution of logic
Lambda Layers — Manages development functions and important distributions of things like libraries
Log Streams — Sequence of log events from the same source

Users of AWS Lambda create functions, self-contained applications written in one of the supported languages and runtimes, and upload them to AWS Lambda, which executes those functions in an efficient and flexible manner. The Lambda functions can perform any kind of computing task, from serving web pages and processing streams of data to calling APIs and integrating with other AWS services.
Some of the large cooperates that uses Lambda includes Netflix, Nike, Audible Inc, JP Morgan Chase, etc. The AWS Lambda has become popular because as it minimizes maintenance.
The use cases of Lambda include: building serverless website, authentication, mass emailing, real-time notifications, chatbots, media transformation, real-time data processing, custom workflows, change data capture, Alexa, image recognition engine, text-to-speech, efficient monitoring, and personalized content etc.
A lot of people may wonder if the Lambda service is free due to its robust architecture, I’m happy to inform you that there is a free tier available, and users get one million requests per month and 400,000 GB-seconds per month for free as well. Otherwise, there are costs incurred according to the compute you use. You can find overall pricing information here:

AWS Fargate

The AWS Fargate is a purpose-built serverless compute engine for containers. Fargate scales and manages the infrastructure required to run your containers. AWS Fargate makes it easier for you to focus on building your applications. Fargate removes the need to provision and manage servers, lets you specify and pay for resources per application, and improves security through application isolation by design.
AWS Fargate is a technology that allows you to use containers as a fundamental compute primitive without having to manage the underlying compute instances. The Fargate technology works on Amazon ECS & Amazon EKS and allows users to run containers without having to manage servers or clusters. You can Run Docker containers without provisioning the infrastructure and Serverless offering (no EC2 instances).

AWS Storage Services Part 1

Opeyemi Jokanola — Thu, 07 Jul 2022 19:44:31 +0000

What is Cloud Storage?

A cloud storage service is a business that maintains and manages its customers' data and makes that data accessible over a network, usually the internet.
Cloud storage is based on a utility storage model. It offers flexible, pay-as-you-go pricing and scalability. It also provision for unlimited growth and the ability to increase and decrease storage capacity on demand.
The use cases for a cloud storage service include backup, disaster recovery, collaboration and file sharing, archiving, primary data storage and near-line storage.
Let’s do a walkthrough of some of the storage services offered by AWS.

1-EBS(Elastic Block Store) Volume

An EBS (Elastic Block Store) volume is a network drive you can attach to your instances while they run. It allows your instances to persist data, even after their termination. They can only be mounted to one instance at a time. An EBS volume is bound to a specific availability zone. You may want to think of the EBS as a “network USB drive”. In AWS, for the Free tier, you get 30 GB of free EBS storage of General Purpose (SSD) or Magnetic type per month. See the EBS as a network drive (i.e. not a physical drive) which uses the network to communicate with the instance, which means there might be a bit of latency. The EBS can be detached from an EC2 instance and attached to another one quickly (like a USB device). One of the key features about EBS volume is that it is locked to an Availability Zone (AZ) i.e An EBS volume in us-east-1a cannot be attached to us-east-1b. Also, in EBS, in order to move a volume across, you first need to snapshot it.
EBS Snapshots
This helps to make a backup (snapshot) of your EBS volume at a point in time. It is not necessary to detach a volume to do snapshot but recommended. You can also copy snapshots across Availability Zone or Region. Some of the EBS Snapshots features include;
A) EBS Snapshot Archive
-Move a Snapshot to an “archive tier” that is 75% cheaper
-Takes within 24 to 72 hours for restoring the archive
B) Recycle Bin for EBS Snapshots
-Setup rules to retain deleted snapshots so you can recover them after an accidental deletion
-Specify retention (from 1 day to 1 year)

2-EFS – Elastic File System

The Elastic File System is a managed NFS (network file system) that can be mounted on 100s of EC2. Elastic File System works with Linux EC2 instances in multi-Availability Zone. EFS is highly available, scalable, expensive (3x gp2), pay per use, and no capacity planning. It is built to scale on demand to petabytes without disrupting applications, growing and shrinking automatically as you add and remove files, so your applications have the storage they need, when they need it.

2A-EFS Infrequent Access (EFS-IA)
This is a storage class that is cost-optimized for files not accessed every day. It offers up to 92% lower cost compared to EFS Standard. The EFS will automatically move your files to EFS-IA based on the last time they were accessed. You need to enable EFS-IA with a Lifecycle Policy E.g move files that are not accessed for 60 days to EFS-IA. It is made transparent to the applications accessing EFS.

3-Amazon S3

Amazon S3(Simple Storage Service) is one of the main building blocks of AWS. It’s advertised as ”infinitely scaling” storage. A lot of websites use Amazon S3 as its backbone. Many AWS services use Amazon S3 as an integration as well.
Amazon S3 Overview
Amazon S3 allows users to store objects (files) in “buckets” (directories). The Buckets must have a globally unique name (across all regions all accounts). Buckets are defined at the region level. The S3 looks like a global service but buckets are created in a region.
The Objects (files) have a Key. The key is the FULL path: E.g s3://my-bucket/my_file.txt or s3://my-bucket/my_folder1/another_folder/my_file.txt . The key is composed of prefix + object name i.e s3://my-bucket/my_folder1/another_folder/my_file.txt . In addition, there’s no concept of “directories” within buckets (although the UI will trick you to think otherwise). Object values are the content of the body i.e Max object size is 5TB (5000GB), If uploading more than 5GB, then you must use multi-part upload.

S3 Storage Classes

There are different types of storage classes in Amazon S3 and these include;
A)S3 Standard – General Purpose
It has 99.99% Availability and used for frequently accessed data. One of its characteristics is low latency and high throughput. It can sustain two concurrent facility failures. The use cases include: Big Data analytics, mobile & gaming applications, content distribution etc.
B) S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA)
Used for data that is less frequently accessed but requires rapid access when needed. It has lower cost than S3 Standard, and it has 99.9% Availability. The use cases include: Disaster Recovery, backups etc
C)S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (S3 One Zone-IA)
It has High durability (99.999999999%) in a single AZ and 99.5% Availability. The use cases include: Storing secondary backup copies of on-premise data, or data you can recreate.
D)S3 Glacier Storage
It is a low-cost object storage meant for archiving / backup with its pricing which includes, price for storage + object retrieval cost
i)S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval
It boasts of millisecond retrieval and great for data accessed once a quarter with minimum storage duration of 90 days
ii)S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval (formerly Amazon S3 Glacier):
Data can be retrieved by Expedited (1 to 5 minutes), Standard (3 to 5 hours), Bulk (5 to 12 hours) and the minimum storage duration is 90 days
iii)Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive
Used for long term storage and data can be retrieved by Standard (12 hours), Bulk (48 hours) with minimum storage duration of 180 days
E)S3 Intelligent-Tiering
It moves objects automatically between Access tiers based on usage and there are no retrieval charges in S3 Intelligent-Tiering. It offers automatic cost savings for data with unknown or changing access patterns.

Some of the use cases of S3 includes;
i)Backup and storage
ii)Disaster Recovery
iii) Archive
iv)Hybrid Cloud storage
v)Application hosting
vi)Media hosting
vii)Data lakes & big data analytics
viii) Software delivery
ix) Static website

I trust I have been able to breakdown Cloud storage on AWS. Watch out for the second part. Till you read from me again, stay jiggy.

What you need to know about AWS VPC

Opeyemi Jokanola — Wed, 06 Jul 2022 11:06:00 +0000

While studying and preparing for my AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam, one of the recurring concepts was AWS VPC, which I tried my best to understand the networking technology. You may ask or wonder what VPC is, I will attempt to break it down.
A virtual private cloud (VPC) is a virtual network/private network to deploy your resources (regional resource). All new AWS accounts have a default VPC and new EC2 instances are launched into the default VPC if no subnet is specified. Default VPC has Internet connectivity and all EC2 instances inside it have public IPv4 addresses. VPC is logically isolated from other virtual networks in the AWS cloud. VPC allows the user to select IP address range, create subnets, configure route tables, internet gateway, NAT gateway, security group and network access control list (NACL). There can be multiple VPCs in an AWS region, usually a maximum of 5 per region. You can imagine the AWS Cloud to be a well-architected Estate which contains several blocks of flats. A VPC is like one block of flat in that Estate that is well furnished. In a furnished apartment, some gadgets can be arranged in the living room while some in the bedroom. When expecting a visitor in this case a packet from the internet. This means that there can be a private network in AWS that allows you to provision resources such as applications, databases and servers. The concept of VPC components is thus further broken down:

Internet Gateway

This can be likened to the landline in your apartment, and it is the one means by which you can be reached if you have visitors visiting your apartment in the Estate. Think for a minute the landline is unavailable, and nobody can reach you or your apartment. Only residents within your apartment can communicate with one another. In AWS, this specifies that the default route to the internet which enables the resources in the VPC to communicate with the internet. An Internet gateway scales horizontally and is also a highly available and redundant VPC component that allows communication between EC2 instances in the VPC and the internet. The Internet gateway is usually created separately from a VPC and one VPC can only be attached to one Internet gateway and vice versa. It is worthy of note to state that Internet gateway on their own does not allow internet traffic and route tables must be configured to do so. An Internet gateway has two functionality A) To provide a target in the VPC route tables for Internet-routable traffic B) To perform network address translation (NAT) for instances that have not been assigned public IP addresses.

Subnets

Subnets are logical segmentation of your resources which can be likened to the gadgets in your flat. The gadgets arranged in the living room are public subnets, and every visiting friend can see or use them such as the television, sound system, PS5 etc. In AWS, servers are deployed in the public subnets, public users can access them and can be reachable via the internet. Think of gadgets in your bedroom as private subnets, they are only accessible to members of your household, that is, only members of your family can make use of them. Relating that to AWS Cloud, database servers are mostly provisioned in private subnets of the VPC because they are only reachable within your VPC network.
Subnets are tied to a single Availability Zone which are distinct locations designed to be isolated from failures and cannot span across Availablity Zones. A subnet can be configured with an Internet gateway to allow communication over the internet, or a virtual private gateway (VPN) connection to enable communication within your private network. EC2 Instances within the Public Subnet should be assigned a Public IP or Elastic IP address to be able to communicate with the internet. Subnets not connected to the Internet, but have traffic routed through the Virtual Private Gateway is known as VPN-only subnet. Subnets can also be configured to enable the assignment of the Public IP address to all the EC2 instances launched within the Subnet by default, but you can also manually assign subnet during the creation of the Instance.
Each Subnet is attached to a route table which controls the traffic. Subnet security is configured using Security groups and Network ACLs. Security groups function at the instance level, while Network ACLs function at the subnet level.

NAT Gateway

Think about your apartment and the residents. The residents in your apartment can meet visitors in your living room. Imagine you as the owner of the apartment is in the bedroom, and you have a visitor you need to welcome but a bit busy in the bedroom. You can use your mobile phone to speak with the visitor and you will need to initiate the call request to welcome your guest. In AWS, the NAT Gateway allows resources deployed in the private subnets to have access to the internet and it is principally used for upgrades and software patches for database servers or to enhance the security level of the system. NAT Gateway device enables instances in a private subnet to connect to the internet or other AWS services but prevents the internet from initiating connections with the instances. NAT Gateway devices do not support IPv6 traffic, use an egress-only Internet gateway instead. NAT Gateway is managed by AWS with higher bandwidth, high availability, and no administration. You get to pay per hour for usage and bandwidth and it is created in a specific Availability Zone which uses an Elastic IP.

Network Access Control List

These are the security guards guarding your home, they will check the visitors, to either grant access to your apartment or not. If they are granted access to your apartment, they also check the visitor and confirm clearance before they are granted access to leave your apartment.
Network ACL are like a firewall which control traffic packet from and to subnets. One Network ACL per subnet, and new subnets are assigned to the default Network ACL. In AWS, this serves as a security measure at the subnet level for your VPC network to deny or allow inbound and outbound traffic. At default, it allows both inbound and outbound traffic. Network ACL are a great way of blocking a specific IP address at the subnet level.
Inbound traffic: User's request entering the VPC
Outbound traffic: User's response leaving the VPC
It is also deemed stateless at it does not store the signature of incoming traffic and will always verify each time.

Security Group

You have a bouncer at the door who checks the visitors before they can come in for your party. If the guests have an invite tag, they will be granted access to your house party. When the guest is leaving, he/she would not be subjected to another check. In AWS, this is a security measure at the instance level, which only allows inbound traffic, and it is stateful which means once the traffic is allowed in, automatically the traffic will be permitted out. Security group supports allow rules only which can be attached to multiple instances and all inbound traffic is blocked by default same with all outbound traffic is authorised by default.

Route Tables

Route table defines rules, termed routes, which determine where network traffic from the subnet would be routed. To define access to the internet and between subnets, Route tables can be used. Each VPC has an implicit router to route network traffic which must be configured to route traffic from private subnets to the NAT Instance. Route tables must be edited to add routes from subnets to the Internet gateway, VPC Peering Connections, and VPC Endpoint. Each VPC has a main Route table and can have multiple custom route tables created. Each Subnet within a VPC must be associated with a single route table at a time, while a route table can have multiple subnets associated with it. Subnet, if not explicitly associated with a route table, is implicitly associated with the main route table. Every route table contains a local route that enables communication within a VPC which cannot be modified or deleted. Route priority is decided by matching the most specific route in the route table that matches the traffic. You must update route tables in each VPC’s subnets to ensure EC2 instances can communicate with each other.

I hope I have been able to break down VPC. Let me know your thoughts in the comment session.
See you soon..Cheers!!!

How I Aced my AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (AWS CCP) in 2 Weeks

Opeyemi Jokanola — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 12:16:15 +0000

One of my goals for 2022 is to acquire a Technical skill as I am always looking for ways to give myself an edge, and demonstrate that I have the ability to learn new things quickly and effectively. Due to the fact that AWS is one of industry-leading Cloud Services Provider, I decided that the AWS CCP was a good place to start.

The Certification

It is worthy of note to mention that this certification demonstrates a foundational understanding of Cloud principles, AWS Services, and other aspects of the Infrastructure as a Service platform that AWS offers, including billing, pricing, and security. It is also the first step in achieving higher certifications, such as the Solutions Architect Associate, which is my next target. There are no requirements for taking the exam in terms of prior certifications or experience — you only need to put in the time and effort, and pay the $100 fee, to write the exam. You can learn more about AWS Certifications here.

Preparation

I decided to go all in. I studied for about 5–6 hours everyday over the course of 2 weeks in order to prepare adequately for the exam. One thing I realised about the exam is that you either understand the question and know the answer, or you don’t. Guessing can be difficult at times,but it doesn’t hurt to do that when you are stuck.
I did some research and found some resources which I will share. In addition, kudos to the ANUG Community (AWS Nigeria User Group) for organising tutorials for those writing the CCP exam. The sessions I attended assisted me to reinforce my learning (still ongoing). I also came across Mukhtar Kabir Telegram group where he posts daily quizzes. PS: I don’t recommend taking the exam on such a short time frame, as it is stressful and overwhelming. There are lot of information to consume, and it takes a while to digest.

Resources

•Exam Prep:AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
•AWS CCP Official Practice Test(Free)
•AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Training Full Course
•AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner by Stephane Maarek
•Whizlabs Practice Test(Free)
•Mukhtar Kabir Telegram Group

What to Focus On

There is so much to learn and digest when it comes to understanding Cloud Computing and how AWS provides what is known as “Infrastructure as a Service.” The CCP exam is highly focused on definitions, acronyms, and distinguishing between different offerings. With lots of acronyms, you can become lost very quickly.
The exam requires high attention to detail. This is due to the fact that there lot of services AWS offer, and some of them overlap. It is important to eliminate the options into reasonable choices — don’t just click the first answer that you see and assume that you’re good. Read the question more than once and go back again if you’re not sure.

Study Techniques

As with many things in life, studying for this exam comes down to one thing — iteration and reinforced learning. Watch as many tutorials and walkthroughs as you can, jot down as much as you can, and take as many practice exams as you can.

What to Expect

I decided for convenience, to take the exam from home through PSI. The exam is 120 minutes in duration (65 questions) and can be taken from any room where there is reliable internet, reliable power supply, great lightning and good webcam. You will also have to provide a valid means of Identification, no one else should be in the room, no wristwatch, mobile phone, ear pods and any other thing the virtual proctor deems inappropriate. It took me about 45 minutes prior to the exam to go through the security checks and receive clearance from the proctor. You will have to restart your system and close all application before your exam can launch.
Once I started the exam, I tried my best not to second-guess myself, and completed the exam as fast as I could. I flagged some questions that I wanted to review and came back to it once I was done.
You will not receive the certificate immediately, as the proctors must review the recording of the exam to ensure that there was nothing dishonest taking place. Then, you will receive an email, a PDF, and a nice badge to post to LinkedIn to verify the credential.

Last Minute Tips

Here are some tips to keep in mind before taking the exam.
-Make sure that you are doing practice exams so that the concepts are fresh.
-If you answer incorrectly during a practice exam, mark the question and the answer for later review.
-Take study breaks. Some of the material is dense, so it helps to get away from it for a few hours.
-Make sure that your workspace is prepared — no notes, no monitors, no open windows, and no leaving the room. You don’t want to lose $100 because PHCN decided to cut power in the middle of a particularly difficult question on the difference between AWS RDS and AWS Aurora.
-Make sure that you go into the exam energized and focused.
-Don’t second-guess yourself.

The Final Thought

The AWS CCP exam was certainly more difficult than I had anticipated. Learning more about AWS, and Cloud Computing in general, has given me a newfound appreciation for the mind-blowing progress that has been made in technology, and how fast things move in the industry. Passing the AWS CCP is just the tip of the AWS Glacier (You get it?).

How to create a Virtual Machine using Microsoft Azure

Opeyemi Jokanola — Thu, 27 Jan 2022 11:53:33 +0000

As someone who is just starting out in Azure or Cloud computing, learning how to create a Virtual Machine(popularly known as VM) is one of the fundamental skills or knowledge that should be in your arsenal.
In layman terms, a virtual machine is a program that runs on a computer which behaves like a separate computer inside the main desktop computer. It is an easy way of running more than one operating systems on the same computer. A very powerful server can be split into several smaller virtual machines for better use of its resources.

How do I go about creating a Virtual machine?

As a beginner, you may think this is a herculean task; however I can assure you that it is easier than you imagine.
First, you create an Azure account: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/
Once created, look for Virtual machines on the dashboard(2nd icon from the right), click on it and then click create.

Follow me as I walk you through the step by step process. Get on your system and follow through.

Subscription should be left at Default - Azure subscription 1
(See image above for reference)

Create a new resource group, click "Create new".

Name the resource group- I will be using "VMserver"

Next is Region , leave this as the default region recommended(depending on your region, its best you choose somewhere close to your region)

Go to Availability options, set as No Infrastructure redundancy required.

Move on to Image, set as Windows server 2019 Datacenter-Gen2

Next is Size, choose Standard_DS1_v2-1 vcpu,3.5GiB memory(please note if you didn't see this, make use of the closest size in the standard section)

Then you set your Username and password (Ensure the username and password that meets the requirement and it is something that can be easily remembered).

Now move have to select inbound Ports - Select the following;
HTTP(80) HTTPS(443) RDP(3389)
Next is licensing – check the box here.
Click on Review + create

Then you click Create.

Your deployment will be in progress( give it time).

Once this is completed, you will see a notification page that will show your "Your deployment is complete"

You made it this far, Yippe… Sip Coffee

Click on the "Go to Resource" button

Next is click Connect and select RDP.
To connect with RDP:
IP address: use Public IP address (102.37.116.142).
Port number: 3389

Click on Download RDP file and open the file, then connect.

Enter the login details initially created within the Azure Portal (Username and password).Depending on the network you may need to click on other account and enter \iisadmin as the username and the password you setup.

Click connect and yes to accept the certificate

Now Login and Server Manager should be open

Next is to Click the Add roles and features, ensure to follow the default settings, keep clicking next until Server Roles.

Server Roles **, select Web Server (IIS) as shown in the diagram below. Select Include management tools (if applicable) then Click **Add features

Click Next >
The minimal features should already be selected and adequate.
Click Next >
Scroll down, select IIS Management Console in Management Tools, then click Next >.
Select Restart the destination server automatically if required, then click Install. Once the installation has completed, click Close.

Go to the search box of your computer and search for Internet Information Services Manager(IIS)

Click on the > to the top left of opevm (opevm/iisadim) to open up the options pane.
Make sure to click the arrow next to **Sites **to access the default website.

Click the drop down for Sites.
Click Manage website.
Click Advanced settings.
Look for the physical path which should be this %SystemDrive%\inetpub\wwwroot.
**
Then go ahead to Open **File Explorer.

Click on the Windows(C:)
Search for "ineptub" folder and click to open

Click on the wwwroot folder to open it.

Right click **on the empty space and select **New Text Document and proceed to open the Text document.

Enter the following text into text document.
Welcome to my initial web page
Click File and save as index.html. (Ensure to change the Save as type as All Files).
Click Save
Open a browser and enter the public IP address: (102.37.116.142), then search

Yaay..You have done it.

Now, that’s how you create a VM and Webserver on Azure.

Till you read my next post..Cheers!!!!