Building a 3S (Scalable, Stable and Secure) AWS Test Environment - Part 2

3.  Building a scalable AWS architecture (ELB, ASG, RDS)

• create your security groups
• create your EC2 keypari
• create your RDS SQL instance
• Bake your amazon machine image
• create your launch configuration
• create your auto-scaling group
• create your elastic load balancer
• test, break, fix, celebrate

3.1 Create your security groups (Firewall)

When you launch an instance in a VPC, you can assign up to five security groups to the instance. Security groups act at the instance level, not the subnet level. Therefore, each instance in a subnet in your VPC could be assigned to a different set of security groups. If you don't specify a particular group at launch time, the instance is automatically assigned to the default security group for the VPC.

Security groups are stateful — if you send a request from your instance, the response traffic for that request is allowed to flow in regardless of inbound security group rules. Responses to allowed inbound traffic are allowed to flow out, regardless of outbound rules.



3.2 Create your EC2 keypari
Amazon EC2 – The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) service enables you to launch virtual machine instances with a variety of operating systems. You can choose from existing Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) or import your own virtual machine images.

Access Amazon AWS EC2 Instances



3.3 Create your RDS SQL instance




3.4 Bake your amazon machine image



3.5 Create your launch configuration

3.6 Create your auto-scaling group

3.7 Create your elastic load balancer

















Images / Snapshot


The major difference is between the type of service referred to. A snapshot is of an EBS volume where you are able to save state and reboot with the same data at a certain point in time.

An AMI is similar, but its for the EC2 instances themselves. You cannot take a snapshot of a non ebs backed instance, but you can create a AMI (system image) of one.

Generally I use EBS snapshots as backup solutions for a database volume and I use an AMI to save instance configuration