Chapter 9 PUBLIC CLOUD LABORATORY. Sucha Smanchat, PhD. Faculty of Information Technology. King Mongkut s University of Technology North Bangkok

Transcription

1 CLOUD COMPUTING PRACTICE 82 Chapter 9 PUBLIC CLOUD LABORATORY Hand on laboratory based on AWS Sucha Smanchat, PhD Faculty of Information Technology King Mongkut s University of Technology North Bangkok

2 CLOUD COMPUTING PRACTICE Introduction Among major cloud providers, Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is the first commercial cloud provider, is one of the most advanced providers with many different types of services in all three cloud service models. The AWS services that are commonly used to implement websites, such as Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Elastic Beanstalk, are explained in this chapter. In addition, for students to gain the hand on experience in using cloud services from Amazon Web Services, the qwiklabs [6] website is employed. This website provides free and paid cloud laboratories based on AWS cloud. 9.2 AWS Global Infrastructure Availability Zone (AZ) and Region. 9.3 Amazon Web Services Simple Storage Service (S3) The Amazon S3 is available as a global service meaning that the objects stored in S3 are shared and visible to all regions and availability zones Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Elastic Block Store (EBS) Elastic Load Balancer (ELB)

3 CLOUD COMPUTING PRACTICE AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Elastic Beanstalk Relational Database Service (RDS) 9.4 The qwiklab AWS Laboratories In this exercise, we will use the qwiklabs [6] online laboratories based on AWS. It can be accessed at The website provides several laboratories for learning Amazon Web Services with step by step guides based on real use cases. The working environment is the actual AWS provided through the qwiklabs account on AWS. Most of the more advanced laboratories require payment, however, several introductory laboratories are available for free. All the qwiklabs are listed on the URL on the Labs tab. In this chapter, the following seven free qwiklabs introductory laboratories will be explored: 1) Simple Storage Service, 2) Elastic Compute Cloud, 3) Elastic Block Store, 4) Elastic Load Balancing, 5) Identity and Access Management, 6) Elastic Beanstalk and 7) Relational Database Service. Each laboratory has a set of instructions to be followed. It is recommended to explore the AWS environment while progressing through the instructions to gain better understanding of the services. Once started, the laboratory will provide connection information including AWS account, username and password for the active laboratory. Additional information may be available in some laboratories. A command reference file containing the necessary commands in text file may be provided in some laboratories for copy andpaste. Instructional video is also available.

4 CLOUD COMPUTING PRACTICE 85 Users must make sure not to upload any irrelevant material onto the qwiklabs environment and ensure to end the laboratory once it is completed Introduction to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) This laboratory introduces the simple object store on AWS, which is the central object storage for all AWS services. The laboratory covers creating a bucket (i.e. folder), adding an object (e.g. file) into a bucket, viewing objects in a bucket and deleting an object in a bucket. The estimated time on this lab is 15 minutes. The laboratory environment will be accessible for 30 minutes. The username and password are provided upon starting the laboratory. The instructional video is available for this laboratory. Steps 1 5: logging into AWS Management Console. Steps 6 10: creating a bucket in S3. Steps 11 16: uploading a file to S3 bucket. Steps 17 23: uploading a folder to S3 bucket3. Steps 24 28: downloading files from S3. Steps 29 35: moving objects between buckets. Steps 36 39: deleting objects and bucket. Steps 40 44: read the following before ending the laboratory. Once an object (file or folder) is uploaded to an S3 bucket, users can perform several actions on the object. These actions can be done by right clicking on the object or clicking on the Actions button as shown in Figure 9 1. Making the object public (Make Public) allows the object to be downloaded from a URL provided by AWS in the object Properties. The object Properties can be viewed by clicking on the Properties menu item in the action menu shown in Figure 9 1, or the Properties button on the right panel shown in Figure 9 2.

5 CLOUD COMPUTING PRACTICE 86 Figure 9 1 Available actions for objects in S3 Figure 9 2 Example of properties of object in S Introduction to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Amazon EC2 is the primary compute infrastructure that supports other AWS services. This laboratory introduces the basic usage of EC2 virtual machine service on AWS. The laboratory covers configuring and launching a new virtual machine from a machine image and accessing the virtual machine through SSH key based authentication.

6 CLOUD COMPUTING PRACTICE 87 The estimated time on this lab is 15 minutes. The laboratory environment will be accessible for 30 minutes. The username and password are provided upon starting the laboratory. The command reference file and the instructional video are available for this laboratory. Steps 1 6: logging into AWS Management Console. Steps 7 22: configuring and launching a new virtual machine instance. Steps 23 35: accessing the new virtual machine instance from Microsoft Windows through Secure Shell (SSH) key based authentication. Steps 36 40: accessing the new virtual machine instance from a Linux machine through Secure Shell (SSH) key based authentication (these steps should be skipped). Steps 41 44: ending the laboratory. During the steps for accessing the created virtual machine, the private key for SSH authentication via PuTTY software is provided from qwiklabs. However, in the real case, the key must be created and downloaded from EC2 Console before launching a new virtual machine as shown in Figure 9 3. This key cannot be downloaded again and must be kept securely for further accesses to the virtual machine instance. Figure 9 3 EC2 Console interface for creating a key pair

7 CLOUD COMPUTING PRACTICE Introduction to Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) A block store can be considered as a virtual hard disk, which can be attached to a virtual machine, similar to installing a real hard disk on a personal computer. This laboratory covers the operations of block store on AWS including creating a block store volume, attaching the block store to an EC2 virtual machine instance, taking a snapshot of the block store volume and configuring the block store for performance. The estimated time on this lab is 15 minutes. The laboratory environment will be accessible for 30 minutes. The username and password are provided upon starting the laboratory. The instructional video is available for this laboratory. Steps 1 6: logging into AWS Management Console. Steps 7 11: creating an EBS volume. Steps 12 17: attaching the EBS volume to a running EC2 virtual machine instance. Steps 18 21: taking a snapshot of the EBS volume. Steps 22 24: increasing the size of the volume and configuring for better Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) performance. Steps 25 29: ending the laboratory Introduction to Elastic Load Balancing A load balancer helps distributing the incoming load such as web traffic to multiple servers. Load balancing is important for a large scale system that expects heavy traffic. This laboratory explains the basic usage of AWS Elastic Load Balancing, which covers creating an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB), configuring system health checks, assigning security groups and reviewing load balancer setting. The estimated time on this lab is 20 minutes. The laboratory environment will be accessible for 40 minutes. The username and password are provided upon starting the laboratory. The instructional video is available for this laboratory.

8 CLOUD COMPUTING PRACTICE 89 Steps 1 6: logging into AWS Management Console. Steps 7 19: creating a load balancer. These steps include naming the load balancer, assigning security group, configuring health check and adding EC2 instances to the load balancer. Steps 20 26: reviewing the load balancer and visiting the load balanced web page. Steps 27 31: ending the laboratory. The load balancer is usually used together with auto scaling group to enable high availability. The qwiklabs laboratory for building high availability system is Maintaining High Availability with Auto Scaling (for Linux), which requires 10 credits Introduction to AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) The first username that is used to subscribe to the AWS is the root user. Similar to traditional system, for security reason, it is recommended not to constantly use the root user. With AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), additional IAM users can be created under the AWS account. This allows multiple users in an organization to work under the same AWS account and use the same resources. This laboratory introduce the management of access and permission including adding users to groups, manage passwords, logging in as IAM users. The estimated time on this lab is 25 minutes. The laboratory environment will be accessible for 45 minutes. The username and password are provided upon starting the laboratory. The instructional video is not available for this laboratory. Steps 1 6: logging into AWS Management Console. Steps 7 14: exploring users and groups Steps 15 19: adding users to groups based on a business scenario

9 CLOUD COMPUTING PRACTICE 90 Steps 20 25: setting passwords Steps 26 27: testing access to Amazon S3 Steps 28 33: testing access to Amazon S3 as Storage Administrator role Steps 34 39: reviewing access of users Steps 40 44: ending the laboratory Introduction to AWS Elastic Beanstalk AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a PaaS service offered by AWS. It is an application container that provides application deployment by automatically handling the underlying infrastructure, which can also be manually configured by the users. AWS Elastic Beanstalk utilizes other AWS services to implement necessary mechanisms such as load balancing, auto scaling and health monitoring. This laboratory shows how to deploy an application using AWS Elastic Beanstalk, modify the environment configurations and monitor the application. The estimated time on this lab is 25 minutes. The laboratory environment will be accessible for 45 minutes. The username and password are provided upon starting the laboratory. The command reference file and the instructional video are available for this laboratory. Steps 1 5: logging into AWS Management Console. Steps 6 7: downloading the sample application for the laboratory. Steps 8 31: deploying the sample application on AWS Elastic Beanstalk. These steps include creating and configuring the application environment, uploading the application to be deployed, and setting permissions and roles. Steps 32 42: adding custom policy to IAM role. These steps include creating a new policy and attaching it to an existing role. Steps 43 48: testing the deployed application once it is active.

10 CLOUD COMPUTING PRACTICE 91 Steps 49 53: read the following before ending the laboratory. AWS Elastic Beanstalk allows users to modify the underlying infrastructure configuration. The setting can be accessed by clicking on the Configuration menu item on the left panel. The users can change the setting for auto scaling, EC2 instance type that runs the application, software configuration, notification via address, updates and deployment, application health check, load balancing, and database options Introduction to Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)(Windows) The Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is a Platform as a Service offering several database management systems such as MySQL (which has become MariaDB), Oracle, and PostgreSQL. This laboratory covers creating an relational database service instance and accessing the created database through an EC2 virtual machine instance. The estimated time on this lab is 25 minutes. The laboratory environment will be accessible for 50 minutes. The username and password are provided upon starting the laboratory. The instructional video is available for this laboratory. Steps 1 6: logging into AWS Management Console. Steps 7 30: creating an RDS instance. These steps include selecting a database system, system setting such as database infrastructure, username, and password, and setting security groups. Steps 31 33: reviewing the EC2 instance for accessing the database. Steps 34 42: connect to the EC2 instance using Remote Desktop Connection on Microsoft Windows (step 34 may be skipped). Steps 43 58: using MySQL workbench to access the RDS instance via Remote Desktop session. Steps 59 63: ending the laboratory.

11 CLOUD COMPUTING PRACTICE Student Research Opportunities Cloud providers, not limiting to Amazon Web Services, enable access to a wide variety of computing resources not available at low price in the past. By familiarizing with cloud services, students will be able to extend their research scope to a new frontier that has been limited by the lack of computing infrastructure. It is advisable for students to further explore qwiklabs and other online tutorials for various cloud providers to learn about how to use cloud services as fundamental building blocks and how to assemble them to create new values of research. 9.6 Summary In this chapter, some of the major cloud services provided by Amazon Web Services are introduced. The qwiklabs online laboratory is used to enable hand on experience using cloud computing services including launching virtual machine instances, implementing load balancer, managing user identities, creating relation database on the cloud and deploying applications on PaaS cloud. At the end of this chapter, students should be able to employ cloud computing to augment their research and class assignments. 9.7 Exercises 1) Complete two additional qwiklabs related to your expertise, or your work or of your interest. It is recommended to try all the free laboratories available.