Reality Sets In for Amazon Web Services

Users are lining up to throw all they’ve got at the cloud computing platform.
But is it the golden goose people believe it to be? BY ALAN R. EARLS

EDITOR’S NOTE STAY IN CONTROL DON’T LET AWS THIRD-PARTY

OF THE AWS QUIRKS GET THE TOOLS ASSUAGE
MANAGEMENT BEST OF YOU IMPLEMENTATION
CONSOLE WOES
 EDITOR’S
NOTE

How to Avoid AWS’s Sneaky Surprises

Amazon Web Services offers diverse and at the center of AWS organizational resources,
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scalable capabilities that have users flocking mastering the user interface is key to ensuring
EDITOR’S NOTE to the cloud computing platform. Consumer business processes run smoothly
services, like point-and-click options, secure Next, we list the top four AWS “gotchas,”
STAY IN CONTROL
OF THE AWS mobile applications and speed of services, can with advice on how to control cost and tips
MANAGEMENT
CONSOLE
take most of the credit. on adjusting services to avoid configuration
But not all AWS resources are convenient. build-ups.
DON’T LET AWS
Scalability or functionality limitations can eas- Although AWS offers some great tools and
QUIRKS GET
THE BEST OF YOU ily stop a project dead in its tracks. As with services, it could use some help in instance
any software service, some workaround tips management and monitoring. Fortunately, a
THIRD-PARTY
TOOLS ASSUAGE are necessary. This three-part guide addresses wide range of tools have sprung up to make
IMPLEMENTATION
commonly recognized AWS problems—and using AWS easier. To that end, we close with
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offers solutions. a look at significant third-party management
Because scaling from a small business to tools that are easing concerns about implemen-
a larger one can easily inhibit data access, tation. n
we first discuss how to leverage and manage
AWS resources at all levels of data through Brein Matturro
the Management Console. With the console Managing Editor, SearchAWS

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MANAGEMENT

Stay in Control of the AWS Management Console

The Amazon Web Services’ Management of instances, it will be much more difficult
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Console is a central point for managing all your to identify your target instance.” For example,
EDITOR’S NOTE AWS resources. It’s the place to initiate tasks an innocent mistake by a developer, think-
ranging from deploying new applications to ing he or she is terminating a development
STAY IN CONTROL
OF THE AWS monitoring the health of an application. instance, could disrupt a production
MANAGEMENT
CONSOLE
According to Shlomo Swidler, CEO of con- environment.
sultancy Orchestratus, the console is great for At a larger scale, the console’s limitations
DON’T LET AWS
the beginner because it provides a simple view are again made clear by the resource-centric
QUIRKS GET
THE BEST OF YOU of all AWS resources—like Elastic Compute view it provides. Swidler explained that the
Cloud (EC2) and Relational Database Service console organizes AWS resources according
THIRD-PARTY
TOOLS ASSUAGE (RDS)—and allows you to manipulate them to resource type: EC2 instances on one panel,
IMPLEMENTATION
easily. In fact, he noted, smaller-scale AWS RDS instances on another and load balancers
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users can use it to do just about everything separately. “Your application or service may
they need. As soon as you operate sizable use several of each of these resource types,
deployments in AWS, however, the console’s yet these will be spread across different con-
limitations will begin to chafe. sole views,” he said. It would be much easier
“When you have five or six EC2 instances to manage an application or service if you could
listed in the console, it’s relatively easy to view and control all its component resources
zero in on the one you intend to manipulate grouped accordingly, especially when there are
at that moment,” Swidler said. “But when your multiple applications and services, Swidler
screen lists tens or hundreds or even thousands explained.

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READY, SET, EVOLVE scalability, and as your organization grows

Because AWS is tag-based—categorizing the so then does your number of servers, your
AWS resources in different ways, such as pur- employee headcount and your physical foot-
pose, owner or environment—it’s easy to cre- print,” Bhargava said. These changes mean that
ate a “management mess,” with lots of servers the way that you manage your infrastructure
and inconsistent use of tags for different users, must also evolve. “You can’t dial up your cloud
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explained Raj Bhargava, CEO of JumpCloud, a with AWS and set it and forget it. It must
EDITOR’S NOTE company that provides management capabili- change and adapt as your business does.” A
ties that work with open source cloud data simple somewhat tactical step, which can pre-
STAY IN CONTROL
OF THE AWS management tools Puppet and Chef. “Many vent headaches, is to create separate billable
MANAGEMENT
CONSOLE
organizations don’t understand how to cre- accounts based on business needs, he added.
ate separate islands of servers from an access
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control standpoint. Because of this, many busi-
QUIRKS GET
THE BEST OF YOU nesses built on AWS end up with more permis- DON’T FORGET ABOUT LOCATION
sions than is probably ideal,” Bhargava said. A related issue encountered by Dan Sullivan, an
THIRD-PARTY
TOOLS ASSUAGE Bhargava said other common mistakes are AWS user and a system architect at DS Applied
IMPLEMENTATION
inconsistency in practice and users simply “not Technologies LLC, is managing instances with
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keeping their house in order.” Because of the the best price. “In terms of where I spend most
flexibility of AWS and the relative ease with of my time, it is probably there,” he said. He
which businesses can dial up infrastructure, noted that the console does provide an instance
“folks often become complacent in terms of tab and you can track instance states. That
actively managing and adjusting their setup,” he is also his starting point for monitoring spot
explained. instance pricing. “One thing to keep in mind
Thus, he argued, diligence is really the name is that spot instances are priced differently in
of the game. different regions,” he said. For example, prices
“Many people choose the cloud for its may be lower in the U.S. West than in most of

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the U.S. East for the same instance—so it pays capacity out from under you later if your
to look carefully when you select an instance, bid came in below the offered price, that
he said. rarely happens. “There usually isn’t too much
volatility. If jobs are short or you are running
“You can’t dial up your cloud jobs in parallel, you may be able to justify
with AWS, set it and forget it. bidding low and taking your chances,” Sullivan
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said.
It must change and adapt as
EDITOR’S NOTE A final bit of advice on using the console
your business does.” comes from Swidler, who advises leveraging
STAY IN CONTROL
OF THE AWS
—RAJ BHARGAVA, CEO of JumpCloud AWS OpsWorks, an application management
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CONSOLE
service that makes it easy for DevOps users to
Sullivan said the spot prices provide a way model and manage an entire application from
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to save money. You may win the capacity load balancers to databases. Several third-party
QUIRKS GET
THE BEST OF YOU by bidding low. Although there is some risk alternatives can also help enhance the view
another party could come along and buy the from the console, he said. n
THIRD-PARTY
TOOLS ASSUAGE
IMPLEMENTATION
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 PROBLEM
SOLVING

Don’t Let AWS Quirks Get the Best of You

Amazon Web Services may be the leading Bhargava said. “What may make sense from
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cloud service provider, but that doesn’t make it both a financial and functional standpoint
EDITOR’S NOTE fool-proof. Far from it, in fact. today may not actually make sense tomorrow.”
For all of its capabilities, AWS has its shares For instance, the way servers are provisioned
STAY IN CONTROL
OF THE AWS of “gotchas” and annoyances. But the list of on day one of your business will probably no
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leading offenders is not long, and experts agree longer make sense in six or 12 months, he said.
mastering its peculiarities isn’t all that hard.
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Avoiding accumulating costs is the first
QUIRKS GET
THE BEST OF YOU challenge. “If you are not careful, AWS and NOT THE BE-ALL AND END-ALL
the cloud in general can lead to a spiraling There is a common misperception that AWS
THIRD-PARTY
TOOLS ASSUAGE infrastructure and subsequently a spiraling simply takes care of or outsources all IT needs,
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bill,” said Raj Bhargava, CEO of JumpCloud. Bhargava said. “Don’t get me wrong, what they
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He explained that, while it’s easy and rela- provide is hugely valuable and well-designed
tively cheap to just turn the dial and spin up [Infrastructure as a Service] solution, [but] I
instances on AWS, organizations must carefully think there are a number of folks out there who
manage cost, efficiency and efficacy of this believe that AWS is responsible for things like
flexible infrastructure. security, patching, user management, et cetera,”
“It’s very easy to spin up instances, but the he said. In most cases this is simply not true.
billing can actually get very complicated as “If a business thinks AWS is taking care of
you continue to build out your infrastructure these things and they are not, they are opening
to meet your organization’s growing needs,” the organization up to serious risk.”

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 PROBLEM
SOLVING

Looking at AWS more broadly, Shlomo umbrella of a single master account, showing
Swidler, CEO of Orchestratus, shared what he consolidated usage information and allowing
has found to be the top four most-cited AWS for one payment. Swidler also recommended
gotchas: setting spending alerts on each account to
notify you when spending levels reach impor-
■■ Failing to isolate production from development tant milestones.
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and testing environments. Mistakes in devel-
EDITOR’S NOTE opment or testing should not be able to affect ■■ Keeping up with your changing needs. “It’s
easy
the delivery of your service, but with a single to launch resources in AWS and use them
STAY IN CONTROL
OF THE AWS integrated account for all environments, this long term, but you’d be missing out on one
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isolation can be difficult to enforce, Swidler of the main benefits of cloud: the flexibility
explained. “You’ll also want tight controls to adjust to changing needs,” Swidler said. He
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over your production environment’s configu- recommended re-examining your needs regu-
QUIRKS GET
THE BEST OF YOU ration—which may contain such secrets as larly, at least every quarter. As AWS reduces
payment gateway credentials and [Domain prices and adds new services, you may find
THIRD-PARTY
TOOLS ASSUAGE Name System] passwords,” Swidler said. In that you can meet your needs more efficiently
IMPLEMENTATION
short, use separate AWS accounts for each by changing your resource usage, he added.
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environment.
■■ Depending on traditional data center tools to
■■ Losing Swidler explained that
track of your bill. manage AWS resources. “Data center manage-
as the number of AWS resources across user ment tools are excellent for managing a rela-
accounts multiplies, it can be increasingly tively static set of resources, but the cloud
difficult to audit and track your AWS usage. usage model allows you to dynamically add
Swidler recommends using Consolidated and remove resources to your inventory, a
Billing, an AWS billing feature that allows usage pattern that data center-centric tools
you to collect many accounts under the cannot natively handle,” Swidler explained.

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 PROBLEM
SOLVING

Instead, AWS customers should use “modern simply spinning up a business in the cloud can
tools that are designed to handle dynamism, actually put you at risk,” Bhargava said.
such as Chef, Puppet and RunDeck.” Finally, looking at “end of life” issues, Dan
Sullivan, a system architect at DS Applied
Technologies LLC, reminds users that when
COST CONTROL you start an Amazon instance it comes
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“AWS has a smart business model where they equipped with local storage. When you later
EDITOR’S NOTE want people to buy reserve servers to lock in decommission or deprovision that instance,
the price early on. This is marketing at its best, whatever data is there will be wiped out unless
STAY IN CONTROL
OF THE AWS and it flourishes because people feel like they you find it a home—for example, elastic block
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are getting a deal and that prices will actually storage.
go up,” Bhargava said. This is often not the case. Similarly, he noted, when you create virtual
DON’T LET AWS
“Therefore diligence and education can go [a] machines it is simpler to start with a base
QUIRKS GET
THE BEST OF YOU long way toward getting not only the infra- image, like Ubuntu Linux, and then install
structure that you need, but getting it at the packages for development or production.
THIRD-PARTY
TOOLS ASSUAGE best price possible,” he said. “You probably want to save that for yourself
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Determine what the business needs are, and as your own image, so you don’t have to rebuild
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if it is unclear whether AWS can meet all those that structure every time you want to set up a
needs, ask. “AWS can help you to do a lot of new image,” Bhargava noted. And, if you require
things, but if not properly bolstered by good a rebuild, it’s helpful to employ a tool like Pup-
security and management practices and tools, pet or Chef. n

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Third-Party Tools Assuage Implementation Woes

Although Amazon Web Services comes EXPECTATION VERSUS REALITY

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with lots of “standard features” and a substan- The biggest issue when it comes to managing
EDITOR’S NOTE tial number of extra tools and gadgets, they can AWS is knowing the load you are running at
be exceedingly complex to operate. Fortunately, any given point, said Rick Sizemore, the direc-
STAY IN CONTROL
OF THE AWS a wide range of third-party tools and services tor of the cloud computing practice at Dallas-
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has emerged to make using AWS easier. Indeed, based consultancy Alsbridge. “Managing your
experts say without those add-ons, companies load, especially using something like IBM
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with complex AWS implementations may be in CloudBurst, is actually fairly complex,” he said.
QUIRKS GET
THE BEST OF YOU trouble. Sizemore said a fundamental problem is that
“In general, AWS will help you manage your people look at AWS as just a replacement for
THIRD-PARTY
TOOLS ASSUAGE AWS resources as such, but not at higher levels VMware virtualization, where applications have
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of abstraction closer to your business domain,” already been built or have evolved to take full
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explained Shlomo Swidler, CEO of Orchestra- advantage of the platform. There is an expecta-
tus. As is, AWS can provide you with detailed tion that AWS will be able to deliver the same
performance monitoring for infrastructure- functionality. “To really take advantage of any
level metrics, such as CPU utilization, network extension within AWS, there are about 20 tools
traffic and load balancer latency. What AWS’s under AWS related to storage and computing
standard features won’t provide is an under- that you might need to use. If you don’t, AWS
standing of how your application is performing is just a dumb box,” he said.
and how infrastructure issues influence appli- It is also crucial to have a tool that illumi-
cation performance, he said. nates demand management as well as capacity

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management on an application, Sizemore said. has been reluctant to really go into a customer’s
So when you create an instance on Amazon, private instance, he said.
“You really need a management layer to do “There is a great deal of opportunity to help
that,” he said. Among the tools available, the manage individual server instances and moni-
most established is probably RightScale. “Once tor them from the inside. AWS has done a great
you get everything in a process through a tool job of monitoring through APIs, but you can
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like RightScale, then you end up getting the understand more about what is going on with a
EDITOR’S NOTE benefits you thought you were going to get server from the inside out,” Bhargava said.
from Amazon in the first place,” Sizemore said. Automation is another area of opportunity.
STAY IN CONTROL
OF THE AWS “The nice thing is that with most of the tools “AWS helps you automate the spin-up of a new
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you would use with AWS is that they are fairly server and even through its native OpsWorks
open, so you can use them to manage beyond will let you configure it. Automating the man-
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just AWS and they will usually even integrate agement of those servers is a critical task that
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THE BEST OF YOU into your overall environment,” Sizemore said. AWS has not focused on to date.”
A final area of need is server security. “AWS
THIRD-PARTY
TOOLS ASSUAGE has spent a great deal of time securing their
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ROOM TO GROW infrastructure and cloud but has largely left it
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Raj Bhargava, CEO of JumpCloud, credits AWS up to each individual customer to secure their
for offering some great tools and services, instances,” Bhargava said. “That’s a huge chal-
but he said the company needs to improve its lenge for most customers. Strong products and
instance management and monitoring. Gener- services that help lock down instances are a
ally, AWS has stayed at the cloud layer, but it major opportunity.” n

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 ABOUT
THE
AUTHOR
ALAN R. EARLS writes for several TechTarget sites,
including SearchBusinessAnalytics and SearchData
Management. He has also done freelance work for
publications including The Boston Globe, The
Chicago Tribune and American Cemetery. Email
Reality Sets In for Amazon Web Services
him at [email protected].
is a SearchAWS.com e-publication.
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Scot Petersen | Editorial Director
EDITOR’S NOTE
Jason Sparapani | Managing Editor, E-Publications

STAY IN CONTROL Joe Hebert | Associate Managing Editor, E-Publications

OF THE AWS
MANAGEMENT Jan Stafford | Executive Editor
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Brein Matturro | Managing Editor

DON’T LET AWS Linda Koury | Director of Online Design

QUIRKS GET
THE BEST OF YOU Neva Maniscalco | Graphic Designer

Rebecca Kitchens | Publisher | [email protected]

THIRD-PARTY
TOOLS ASSUAGE Amalie Keerl | Director of Product Management
IMPLEMENTATION [email protected]
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COVER ART: THINKSTOCK

11 REALITY SETS IN FOR AMAZON WEB SERVICES