Amazon Web Services AWS Cloud Monitoring
Amazon Web Services offers hundreds of services for computing, storage, database, migration, security, compliance and analytics of applications in the cloud. The management of the same, when done on premises comes with a whole lot of difficulties, but this does not happen in the AWS cloud.
Here you create your own Virtual Private Cloud or environment, develop, test deploy and store applications/data as well as manage them with the help of some management tools.
Each user has his/her own management console which displays the services and solutions they are entitled to use. To further simplify the management of services, some of the automated management tools can be used, most of which come with no extra charge from that of the basic service.
This means that you pay only for the compute/ storage capacity you use and not for the tool itself. The AWS tools have made the life of managers easy as they automate the process of security and compliance check, granting of access, fine-grained control and visibility and eventually curb the infrastructure and management cost and time.
Management Tools
Cloud-watch
Cloud Watch is the umbilical cord of AWS management and security. It allows you to manage your entire AWS environment or a specific Virtual Private Cloud from a single dashboard. You get insight into activities in your environment at every second, monitor different types of AWS resources such as EC2, S3, Lambda, Dynamo, assess the machine utilisation, investigate the troubles, get notified about even the minutest odd behaviour and ensure maximum security and optimisation of your applications.
Even better, Cloudwatch can also manage your on-premises environment. The tool is essential to ensure the smooth functioning of your cloud environment and it has no additional charge.
Cloud Formation
The administrator can organise different types of resources and their different sets in a unified manner by submitting a coded simple text file or using a set template from the AWS. By integrating Cloud Formation with AWS Trusted Advisor, the organising of different stacks of resources becomes way easier and automated as compared to when all this had to be done manually. The manual organising of these stacks can come with some loopholes and eventually lead to a hotchpotch, but the automation of the provisioning makes it more manageable. Cloud Formation also helps you create replicas of your previously set resources and test them through different phases of development and deployment of applications. You can easily replicate them, make changes into the copies or close the copies as per the need from time to time.
Cloud Trail
Cloud Trail is a very simple way to track different user activities and API usage. The S3 bucket stores these logs and you can view them on the cloud trail under management tools. You can continuously monitor activities, check history, respond quickly to urgent requests, speed up compliance process by promptly responding to compliance calls and keep the security tight by instantly identifying threats in the trail log.
Config
Config is especially helpful in understanding the connection between different AWS resources. With the clarity of compatibility and configuration, their evaluation, auditing and troubleshooting become better.
The administrator can sieve out non-compliant accounts from different data regions and enforce strict monitoring, identify and address operational issues by viewing API calls and events in the Cloud Trail logs and reverse the disturbing change, understand the resource interdependence and enforce changes in the safest manner, introduce and amend guidelines relating to provisioning, check compliance status, monitor the overall configuration and get notified with AWS SNS (Sub Message Service).
OpsWorks
Chef and Puppet are the two automation codes used to manage servers. OpsWorks allows you to use these codes to configure and manage the servers on your EC2 instances. You can model and layer the applications, patch them and maintain a continuous deployment with the help of OpsWorks for Chef Automate or Puppet Automate.
Service Catalog
AWS service catalogue is used to simplify the governance of products, distribution of application stacks, set them into portfolios, and allow the users to self-service their needs. When using several AWS cloud services, it can be confusing to ensure that everybody gets their right level of access to the services they need.
It becomes important to define different roles and positions and then further define the permissions and access to those roles and groups. Then the administrators have to ensure that everything is up to date, in compliance with mandates and security standards. The service catalogue helps you to let your users create instances and buckets for themselves and deploy the latest marketplace software, without sending the request each time to the root account user. The catalogue also allows you to provision these resources and identify them in specific categories called portfolios. You can restrict the access to these products and portfolios according to the position, region and IP ranges. All the restrictions and constraints work on the MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication) basis.
Systems Manager
Systems Manager makes the organisation and optimisation of EC2 instances and S3 buckets way much easier by automating the starting and stopping of instances, scan them, check for patches, deploy applications through various platforms and identify installations of objects in the S3. The user does not have to login into each console separately and navigate through different services.
He/She can view the entire operation on the single Systems Manager dashboard and can manage the resource groups, layers of applications, development, deployment, software installations, automate actions, customise policies and firewalls. All the data is available in a unified form, from hybrid environments (Windows or Linux OS) and gets much easier and quicker to manage. It also allows the user to segregate code from other data.
Trusted Advisor
AWS trusted advisor is helpful to understand the best practices, increase security and enhance the performance of the user’s AWS environment. It provides guidance in the areas of resource provisioning, limiting permissions, restricting ports, Multi-Factor Authentication management to the root, rotation of the keys and many other aspects impacting security by integrating programmatic access to AWS Support API. The trusted advisor does much of the job of strategic planning for the user and notifies the findings on the Cloudwatch.
