AWS Let's Take a Tour

AWS - Let's Take a Tour

Gameplan

Get an AWS account.
Get the aws-cli.
Log on to our cloud.
Make your own ec2.
Check out our sample production database.
Make your own database.
Figure out what IAM is.

AWS Dictionary

I'm gonna jot down some terms and definitions here before we get started so you understand what basic words acronyms mean. I'll definitely miss some terms so we're gonna keep this dictionary a work in progress.

RDS - relational database service...y'all should know this by now
EC2 - elastic compute cloud...you know how we ssh onto our unix servers at Cal Poly? This is basically the same thing! Spinning up an EC2 means you're making a server on the cloud. To access your EC2 server, you're gonna have to ssh, and I'll show you how.
Console - the screen you arrive at when you log on to AWS
Services - the suite of things Amazon Web Services offers including RDS, EC2, Lambda, S3...they have a lot
Security group - a virtual firewall...think of it like a gatekeeper. Your job when you hire a gatekeeper is to tell them who can enter and who can't. A security group defines who's allowed to access your stuff and who can't
Region - us-west-2, US East(Ohio)...things that look like this on AWS are regions. AWS basically has these datacenters dispersed among different regions. You don't really have to worry about it but I thought I'd mention it because you'll see it a lot (it's probably at the top right of your screen right now).
AMI - Amazon Machine Image. When you make an ec2 instance, you'll be prompted to select an AMI. An AMI is basically the OS that your cloud server runs on. You can select between various flavors of Ubuntu, Linux, and Windows.
Instance type - this is a set of configurations for a given ec2 instance. The instance type defines things like CPU, memory, and other basic specs for your ec2.
ARN - Amazon Resource Name; everything you make in AWS whether it be an ec2 or RDS or something else entirely will have an ARN. Think of it just like a unique id to distinguish that particular resource among all others on AWS.

Go Get Your Account

You can get your account here. It's gonna involve a phone call and that may throw you off but don't worry just do the steps. Yes, give them your card info, there's a free tier for everything so it'll be fine. Don't think you'll face any roadblocks here...

Get the AWS-CLI (Command Line Interface)

Just like we're developing a CLI for our project, AWS has one so we can interact with their resources without having to open up their console. You probably won't use it much as it'll be more intuitive for you to do it through their console. Anyways, run the following command on your machine to get the aws-cli.

$ brew update
$ brew install awscli
$ aws --version

If the output of your last command is

aws-cli/1.11.180 Python/3.6.3 Darwin/15.6.0 botocore/1.7.38

Good stuff! Moving on...

Log on to Our Cloud

If you read the dictionary, you'd know what an ec2 instance is. Now you're about to jump onto the ec2 I created for our project. Of course, my ec2 instance doesn't just let anyone log on. You need a key. Go to our slack channel and download the ec2rdskey.pem file on the #random channel. Leave it in the ~/Downloads folder. Now follow this command.

$ chmod 600 ~/Downloads/ec2rdskey.pem
$ ssh -i ~/Downloads/ec2rdskey.pem [email protected]

...and that's it. You should see a new prompt as follows. Run a pwd command.

[ec2-user@ip-172-31-35-19 ~]$ pwd
/home/ec2-user
[ec2-user@ip-172-31-35-19 ~]$ exit

This is basically a remote server just like our unix servers at Cal Poly. I've done some work on this ec2 in the home/ec2-user/SQLScripts folder. Don't worry about this stuff for now.

Make-an-ec2-Workshop

Sign into the AWS console. You will now make your own cloud.

In the big search bar under AWS services, search for and navigate to EC2.
Locate and click on the blue button that says Launch Instance.
Select the 64-bit RHEL (Red Had Enterprise Linux) AMI. (AMI is defined in the dictionary)
Then you'll be asked to pick an instance type. (Instance type is defined in the dictionary) Choose the one with the green free-tier elgible banner.
Click the Review and Launch blue button on the bottom right of the screen. There are several other things you can configure like additional storage and security groups, but I'm keeping this tutorial basic.
You'll be directed to a summary page of your ec2 instance. Time to click the blue button that says Launch!
Now in the popup dialog, select Create a new key pair. For the Key Pair Name write "myec2key".
Click the gray button that says Download Key Pair. This key pair that you just made is a .pem (stands for privacy enhanced mail...I don't even know what that is) file, but think of it as a key that opens your ec2. You don't want just anyone to access your ec2, so this is a form of security. What you downloaded earlier from the slack group was the .pem file I created to access my ec2 instance. I hope everything is starting to make sense now.
Now finally click the blue button to Launch Instance.
Launching your instance will take a few minutes. On the bottom right, click the blue button View Instances. This shows you a list of all the ec2 instances you have running. You should now have 1 row in the table. Wait for the Instance State column to be running and the Status Checks column to be 2/2 checks passed. Then move to the next step.
Below the table of ec2 instances, you'll see the Public DNS or the Public DNS (IPv4). If you can't find it just run a cmd+f to find it. Store that DNS somwhere, you'll need it. This public DNS is where your ec2 instance can be accessed from the Internet. If you hosted a website on your ec2 instance, you can access it via this address.
Now hop onto your terminal locally. Follow these commands. Instead of [your public DNS] plug in the DNS from step 11.
```
$ chmod 400 ~/Downloads/myec2key.pem
$ ssh -i ~/Downloads/myec2key.pem ec2-user@[your public DNS]
Something blah blah...Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes
```
You've probably seen the output [something blah blah] before when trying to ssh into Cal Poly unix servers. Don't trip, it's just adding that address to the remote hosts to your known hosts. Just like the way you logged onto the cloud I created earlier, you are now logged on to your own cloud. If you want to give someone access to your cloud, they need your key.

Congratulations, you did it. You are now the proud owner of a cloud.

Check out our sample production database

This next step is going to be miniscule. I just want you guys to know that it exists and the comma. I created a database to mimic a customer's production database. It's an NFL database that stores information about the games of the 2015 season. Basically I made it so we have something to perform captures on. The command below will allow you to access it.

$ mysql -h nfl2015.c7m7t1xyrt7v.us-east-2.rds.amazonaws.com -P 3306 -u nfl2015user -pnfl2015pass NFL 
MySQL [NFL]> show tables;
MySQL [NFL]> select * from Td limit 2;
MySQL [NFL]> exit

That's it! Just a singular command to access our sample production database. If you're not familiar with MySQL, the show tables; command just lists all the different tables in your database.

Not so quick though, take a second and look beyond just copy pasting the command. It looks long and complicated but it's really not. The long link is just the endpoint of the database. 3306 is the port number of the database. Then you are specifying log in information via a username and password. The NFL at the end is just the name of the database. That's it, nothing crazy about it!

The second to last command displays 2 rows of the Td (Touchdown) table. What I've also done is schedule a script on our ec2 instance to run every minute and update the dummy column of the table with the current time. If you noticed the time looks off, don't worry nothing is broken, it's just a different time zone.

Make your own RDS

Just like we walked through making an ec2, I think it'll be an educational experience for you to create your own database. I realize y'all won't really ever have to do this again but it helps you get comforable with the RDS environment and recognize portions of it. I believe it help for next quarter. Sign into the AWS console and let's get started!

In the big search bar under AWS services, search for and navigate to RDS.
Locate and click on the orange (it may be blue) button that says Launch a DB Instance.
It's going to ask you to select an engine. Choose MariaDB.