Deploying to the Cloud with AWS and Azure

Recent years have seen a significant shift from on-premises computing platforms to private and public clouds. In an ever-changing and accelerating world, deploying and running applications in a highly scalable, efficient, and secure infrastructure is critical for businesses and organizations everywhere. On the other hand, the cost and expertise required to maintain the equivalent level of security and performance with on-premises computing resources become barely justifiable compared to current public cloud offerings. Businesses and teams, small and large, adopt public cloud services in increasing numbers, albeit large enterprises are relatively slow to make a move.

One of the best metaphors for cloud computing is application services on tap. Do you need more resources for your apps? Just turn on the tap and provision the virtual machines or instances in any number you require (scale horizontally). Or perhaps, for some instances, you require...

Technical requirements

To complete the tasks in this chapter, you will require the following:

• AWS and Azure accounts if you want to follow along with the practical examples. Both cloud providers provide free subscriptions:
  • AWS free tier: https://aws.amazon.com/free
  • Microsoft Azure free account: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/
• A local machine with a Linux distribution of your choice to install and experiment with the AWS CLI and Azure CLI utilities.
• A modern web browser (such as Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox) for the web-console-driven management tasks for both AWS and Azure. You can access the related portals on any platform.
• A Linux command-line terminal and intermediate-level proficiency using the shell to run the AWS and Azure CLI commands.

Important note

As you proceed, please make sure to shut down your EC2 instances or Azure virtual machines after you finish experimenting with them. Failure to do so may result in relatively high bills being...

Working with AWS EC2

AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a scalable computing infrastructure that allows users to lease virtual computing platforms and services to run their cloud applications. AWS EC2 has gained extreme popularity in recent years due to its outstanding performance and scalability combined with relatively cost-effective service plans. This section provides some basic functional knowledge to get you started with deploying and managing AWS EC2 instances running your applications. In particular, we’ll introduce you to EC2 instance types, particularly how you can differentiate between various provisioning and related pricing tiers, how to use SSH to connect and SCP to transfer files to and from your EC2 instances, and how to work with the AWS CLI.

By the end of this section, you’ll have a basic understanding of AWS EC2 and how to choose, deploy, and manage your EC2 instances.

Introducing and creating AWS EC2 instances

AWS EC2 provides various instance...

Working with Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure, also known as Azure, is a public cloud service by Microsoft for building and deploying application services in the cloud. Azure provides a full offering of a highly scalable Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) at relatively low costs, accommodating a wide range of users and business requirements, from small teams to large commercial enterprises, including financial, health, and governmental institutions.

In this section, we’ll explore some very basic deployment workflows using Azure, such as the following:

• Creating a Linux virtual machine
• Managing virtual machine sizes
• Adding additional storage to a virtual machine
• Working with the Azure CLI

Once you’ve created your free Azure account, go to https://portal.azure.com to access the Azure portal. You may want to enable the docked view of the portal navigation menu on the left for quick and easy access to your resources. Throughout this chapter, we...

Summary

AWS and Azure provide a roughly similar set of features for flexible compute capacity, storage, and networking, with pay-as-you-go pricing. They share the essential elements of a public cloud – elasticity, autoscaling, provisioning with self-service, security, and identity and access management. This chapter explored both cloud providers strictly from a practical vantage point, focusing on typical deployment and management aspects of everyday cloud administration tasks.

We covered topics such as launching and terminating a new instance or virtual machine. We also looked at resizing an instance to accommodate a higher or lower compute capacity and scaling the storage by creating and attaching additional block devices (volumes). Finally, we used CLI tools for scripting various cloud management workloads.

When working with AWS, we learned a few basic concepts about EC2 resources. Next, we looked at typical cloud management tasks, such as launching and managing instances...

Questions

Let’s recap some of the concepts you’ve learned about in this chapter as a quiz:

1. What is an AZ?
2. Between a t3.small and a t3.micro AWS EC2 instance type, which one yields better performance?
3. You have launched an AWS EC2 instance in the us-west-1a AZ and plan to attach an EBS volume created in us-west-1b. Would this work?
4. What is the SSH command to connect to your AWS EC2 instance or Azure virtual machine?
5. What is the Azure CLI command for listing your virtual machines? How about the equivalent AWS CLI command?
6. What is the AWS CLI command for launching a new EC2 instance?
7. What is the Azure CLI command for deleting a virtual machine?

Further reading

Here are a few resources to further explore AWS and Azure cloud topics:

• AWS EC2: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ec2/index.html
• Azure: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure
• AWS for System Administrators, by Prashant Lakhera, Packt Publishing
• Learning AWS – Second Edition, by Aurobindo Sarkar and Amit Shah, Packt Publishing
• Learning Microsoft Azure, by Geoff Webber-Cross, Packt Publishing
• Learning Microsoft Azure: A Hands-On Training [Video], by Vijay Saini, Packt Publishing