Amazon AWS – CloudWatch – monitoring

Amazon AWS, Others September 21, 2013

Basic information about Amazon CloudWatch Service:

 

AWS Free Tier availability:

  • 10 Metrics,
  • 10 Alarms,
  • 1,000,000 API requests

 

Developer Resources:

 

Functionality:

  • Monitoring AWS resources automatically (without installing additional software):
    • Basic Monitoring for Amazon EC2 instances: ten pre-selected metrics at five-minute frequency, free of charge.
    • Detailed Monitoring for Amazon EC2 instances: seven pre-selected metrics at one-minute frequency, for an additional charge.
    • Amazon EBS volumes: eight pre-selected metrics at five-minute frequency, free of charge.
    • Elastic Load Balancers: ten pre-selected metrics at one-minute frequency, free of charge.
    • Amazon RDS DB instances: thirteen pre-selected metrics at one-minute frequency, free of charge.
    • Amazon SQS queues: eight pre-selected metrics at five-minute frequency, free of charge.
    • Amazon SNS topics: four pre-selected metrics at five-minute frequency, free of charge.
    • Amazon ElastiCache nodes: twenty-nine pre-selected metrics at one-minute frequency, free of charge.
    • Amazon DynamoDB tables: seven pre-selected metrics at five-minute frequency, free of charge.
    • AWS Storage Gateways: eleven pre-selected gateway metrics and five pre-selected storage volume metrics at five-minute frequency, free of charge.
    • Amazon Elastic MapReduce job flows: twenty-three pre-selected metrics at five-minute frequency, free of charge.
    • Auto Scaling groups: seven pre-selected metrics at one-minute frequency, optional and charged at standard pricing.
    • Estimated charges on your AWS bill: you can also choose to enable metrics to monitor your AWS charges.
  • Submitting Custom Metrics generated by your own applications (or by AWS resources not mentioned above) and having them monitored by Amazon CloudWatch. You can submit these metrics to Amazon CloudWatch via a simple Put API request.
  • Setting alarms on any of your metrics to receive notifications or take other automated actions when your metric crosses your specified threshold. You can also use alarms to detect and shut down EC2 instances that are unused or underutilized.
  • Viewing graphs and statistics for any of your metrics, and getting a quick overview of all your alarms and monitored AWS resources in one location on the Amazon CloudWatch dashboard.
  • Useing Auto Scaling to add or remove Amazon EC2 instances dynamically based on your Amazon CloudWatch metrics.

 

 

 

Resources:

Amazon AWS – ElastiCache – caching

Amazon AWS, Others September 21, 2013

Basic information about Amazon ElastiCache Service:

 

AWS Free Tier availability:

  • 750hrs of Micro Cache Node

 

Developer Resources:

 

Cache engines supported:

  • Memcached – widely adopted memory object caching system.
  • Redis – popular open-source in-memory key-value store that supports data structures such as sorted sets and lists.
    • ElastiCache supports Redis master / slave replication which can be used to achieve cross AZ redundancy.

 

Features:

  • Ease of management via the AWS Management Console.
  • Compatibility with the specific engine protocol.
  • Detailed monitoring statistics for the engine nodes at no extra cost via Amazon CloudWatch

 

Available Node Types:

  • Micro
    • Micro Cache Node (cache.t1.micro):
      • 213 MB memory,
      • Up to 2 ECU (for short periodic bursts),
      • 64-bit platform,
      • Low I/O Capacity
  • Standard
    • Small Cache Node (cache.m1.small):
      • 1.3 GB memory,
      • 1 ECU (1 virtual core with 1 ECU),
      • 64-bit platform,
      • Moderate I/O Capacity
    • Medium Cache Node (cache.m1.medium):
      • 3.35 GB memory,
      • 2 ECU (1 virtual core with 2 ECUs),
      • 64-bit platform,
      • Moderate I/O Capacity
    • Large Cache Node (cache.m1.large):
      • 7.1 GB memory,
      • 4 ECUs (2 virtual cores with 2 ECUs each),
      • 64-bit platform,
      • High I/O Capacity
    • Extra Large Cache Node (cache.m1.xlarge):
      • 14.6 GB of memory,
      • 8 ECUs (4 virtual cores with 2 ECUs each),
      • 64-bit platform,
      • High I/O Capacity
  • Enhanced
    • Extra Large Cache Node (cache.m3.xlarge):
      • 14.6 GB memory,
      • 13 ECUs (4 virtual cores with 3.25 ECUs each),
      • 64-bit platform,
      • Moderate I/O Capacity
    • Double Extra Large Cache Node (cache.m3.2xlarge):
      • 29.6 GB memory,
      • 26 ECUs (8 virtual cores with 3.25 ECUs each),
      • 64-bit platform,
      • High I/O Capacity
  • High-Memory
    • High-Memory Extra Large Cache Node (cache.m2.xlarge):
      • 16.7 GB memory,
      • 6.5 ECU (2 virtual cores with 3.25 ECUs each),
      • 64-bit platform,
      • High I/O Capacity
    • High-Memory Double Extra Large Cache Node (cache.m2.2xlarge):
      • 33.8 GB memory,
      • 13 ECUs (4 virtual cores with 3.25 ECUs each),
      • 64-bit platform,
      • High I/O Capacity
    • High-Memory Quadruple Extra Large Cache Node (cache.m2.4xlarge):
      • 68 GB memory,
      • 26 ECUs (8 virtual cores with 3.25 ECUs each),
      • 64-bit platform,
      • High I/O Capacity
  • High-CPU
    • High-CPU Extra Large Cache Node (cache.c1.xlarge):
      • 6.6 GB memory,
      • 20 ECUs (8 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each),
      • 64-bit platform,
      • High I/O Capacity

 

Note: Each Cache Node Type above lists the memory available to Memcached or Redis after taking System Software overhead into account. One ECU provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor. Enhanced cache nodes are only available with Memcached.

 

 

 

Resources:

Amazon AWS – ELB – Elastic Load Balancing

Amazon AWS, Others September 21, 2013

Basic information about Amazon ELB Service:

 

AWS Free Tier availability:

  • 750 hours of Elastic Load Balancing per month for one year
  • 15GB data processing

 

Developer Resources:

 

Features:

  • distribution of incoming traffic across EC2 instances in a single Availability Zone or multiple Availability Zones.
  • automatic request handling capacity scaling in response to incoming application traffic.
  • when used in a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), you can create and manage security groups
  • when used in a VPC, you can create a load balancer without public IP addresses to serve as an internal (non-internet-facing) load balancer.
  • can detect the health of EC2 instances. When it detects unhealthy load-balanced EC2 instances, it no longer routes traffic to those and spreads the load across the remaining healthy instances.
  • Amazon Route 53 can be configured to perform DNS failover for your load balancer endpoints. If the load balancer or the application instances registered with ELB become unavailable, Route 53 will direct traffic to another ELB or destination.
  • supports the ability to stick user sessions to specific EC2 instances.
  • supports SSL termination at the Load Balancer, including offloading SSL decryption from application instances, centralized management of SSL certificates, and encryption to back-end instances with optional public key authentication.
  • flexible cipher support allows to control the ciphers and protocols that are accepted by ELB in the SSL negotiation for client connections.
  • supports use of both the Internet Protocol version 4 and 6 (IPv4 and IPv6).
  • ELB metrics such as request count and request latency are reported by Amazon CloudWatch.

 

 

 

Resources: