Essentials for a Quick Reliable Infrastructure in AWS Cloud

Sakin Deborah — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 06:19:51 +0000

One of the 4 well architected pillars in AWS is Resilience. This translates to how your infrastructure performs without failures and interruptions.
In this article, we quickly summarize what makes a solution quickly reliable.
Below is the architecture of a reliable 3-tier infrastructure using EC2 instances distributed across three Availability Zones.

To practically do the lab, find it here

A simple implementation of the project would be comprised of an instance and the dynamo db table.
The service makes an API call from the dynamo db and serves it to the instance to be visible on a web server.

Best practices for reliability present

The infrastructure contains an autoscaling group, with parameters having a minimum and maximum number of instances to scale to. This ensures that demand is met while keeping costs low with a maximum cap.
Autoscaling groups also contain a feature where health checks of instances are performed and upon detection of a failure, unhealthy instance is replaced, automating the remediation process.
Having the instances spread out over three availability zones increase reliability since the service is less prone to down-time. When one zone isnʼt available, traffic is directed to the instances that are up.
The elastic load balancers distribute traffic to the instances to help alleviate stress on an instance while others are less busy. This also decouples the infrastructure as the service is not dependent or fixated on a particular instance.

How to Set-Up AWS CLI: Quick Guide

Sakin Deborah — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 13:21:03 +0000

Using AWS Programmatically is a good to have skill. In this first tutorial, we begin by setting up authentication on our terminal.
We will work with YAML files for automation for future use cases but wonʼt be covered here.

Terminal Set-up CLI
Open terminal, I will be using visual studio terminal on Mac.
Create folder for your project.
mkdir aws_project cd aws_project create gitignore file -> .gitignore

Open terminal and run the following command for mac.
curl "https://awscli.amazonaws.com/AWSCLIV2.pkg" -o "AWSCLIV2.pkg" sudo installer -pkg AWSCLIV2.pkg -target /

To get the instructions for other OS check out. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/getting-started-install.html

Create IAM user

Navigate to your aws console and search for IAM. We will be creating an admin user to authenticate to aws from terminal.

Click on users in the left panel and create user

Use a descriptive name for the username and click next.

It is the best option to add user to a group instead of attaching policy directly. Create a group with a descriptive name as well.

Attach the AdministratorAccess policy to the group since we will use this user to create multiple resources. For future users, adopt the principle of least priviledge and provide fine-grained access to actions and resources

Then create the user

Click on created user and navigate to Security credentials. We will create an access key to make programmatic calls from terminal. Click on next.

Now we have created a user with required policy attached and have the secret values needed to identify from terminal. This credentials are long lived but can be rotated manually incase needed.

Configure Credentials in Terminal

Next we set the environment variables, replacing the examples shown with values retrieved from console.

export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG/bPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY export AWS_DEFAULT_REGION=us-west-2

To confirm that you are successfully authenticated run the command
aws sts get-caller-identity

To confirm if successful, list buckets present in account
aws s3 ls

DEV Community: Sakin Deborah

Essentials for a Quick Reliable Infrastructure in AWS Cloud

How to Set-Up AWS CLI: Quick Guide