AWS Architecture for hosting Web Applications

Summary

This lesson focuses on constructing an AWS-based architecture for hosting a highly available and scalable web application. It outlines the use of Route 53 for DNS, Amazon CloudFront for content delivery, S3 buckets for storage, and EC2 instances with Elastic Load Balancing for handling traffic. Auto Scaling Groups ensure fault tolerance, and RDS in a multi-AZ configuration provides database reliability. The architecture aims to optimize performance and cost-efficiency by scaling resources in response to fluctuating traffic.

Takeaways

• 🌐 **Global Reach**: AWS provides a global infrastructure that can host web applications with high availability and scalability.
• 🔍 **DNS Service**: Route 53 by AWS is used for DNS services, ensuring highly available domain name system for user requests.
• 📡 **Content Delivery**: Amazon CloudFront is utilized for efficient content delivery, routing requests to the nearest edge location for optimal performance.
• 💾 **Data Storage**: S3 buckets are recommended for storing web application resources due to their durability and scalability.
• 🔄 **Load Balancing**: Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) is used to distribute incoming traffic among EC2 instances, enhancing fault tolerance.
• 🖥️ **EC2 Instances**: EC2 instances are deployed across multiple availability zones for redundancy, ensuring service continuity.
• 🔁 **Auto Scaling**: Auto Scaling groups are essential for automatically handling EC2 instance scaling based on traffic demands.
• 🛠️ **AMIs for EC2**: Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) are recommended for EC2 instances to streamline the deployment of web servers with pre-loaded applications and configurations.
• 🔒 **Database Service**: AWS Relational Database Service (RDS) in a multi-AZ deployment ensures high availability for the database layer.
• 🔌 **Elastic Infrastructure**: The architecture allows for elastic scaling to match IT costs in real-time with fluctuating customer traffic.

Q & A

What is the primary purpose of the architecture discussed in the script?

The primary purpose of the architecture is to host a reliable and scalable web application on AWS, ensuring high availability and the ability to scale up or down based on traffic fluctuations.

Why is Route 53 used in the architecture?

Route 53 is used as the DNS service to serve user DNS requests and route network traffic to the infrastructure running in Amazon Web Services.

What role does Amazon CloudFront play in the architecture?

Amazon CloudFront delivers static, streaming, and dynamic content from a global network of edge locations, ensuring content is delivered with the best possible performance to users regardless of their location.

How does storing resources in an S3 bucket benefit the web application?

Storing resources in an S3 bucket provides highly durable storage for mission-critical data, which is ideal for web applications served through CloudFront, as it can be designated as the primary source for content delivery.

What is the function of Elastic Load Balancing in the architecture?

Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic among the hosts of EC2 instances, ensuring seamless load balancing and fault tolerance in response to varying application traffic.

Why are EC2 instances deployed across multiple availability zones?

EC2 instances are deployed across multiple availability zones to provide greater fault tolerance, allowing the infrastructure to handle failures in one zone without affecting the entire application.

What is the significance of using Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for web servers?

Using AMIs for web servers allows for a standardized setup with required applications, patches, and software pre-loaded. This enables Auto Scaling groups to quickly provision new instances with the necessary configurations when needed.

How does the Auto Scaling group contribute to the scalability of the web application?

The Auto Scaling group automatically provisions new EC2 instances when the web servers or EC2 instances fail, ensuring the application can handle increased load and maintain performance during peak traffic.

What is the role of RDS in providing high availability for the database service?

RDS, or Relational Database Service, is used in a multi-AZ deployment with a primary master RDS and a standby RDS in a different availability zone, ensuring high availability and data redundancy.

Why is it important to deploy the architecture in a multi-AZ environment?

Deploying the architecture in a multi-AZ environment ensures fault tolerance. If one availability zone fails, the other can pick up the load, allowing the application to continue operating without significant downtime.

What are the core AWS services required for the architecture mentioned in the script?

The core AWS services required for the architecture are Amazon Route 53, Amazon CloudFront, S3 buckets, Elastic Load Balancing, EC2 instances, Auto Scaling groups, and RDS for the database.

Outlines

00:00

🌐 Building a Scalable Web Hosting Architecture on AWS

This paragraph introduces a tutorial on constructing an architecture for hosting web applications on AWS. It emphasizes the challenges of creating a highly available and scalable web hosting environment, which includes managing traffic fluctuations and optimizing hardware utilization. AWS is presented as a solution that offers reliable, scalable, secure, and high-performance infrastructure. The paragraph outlines the benefits of AWS's elastic capabilities, allowing for real-time scaling to match variable customer traffic. A basic diagram is mentioned, which will be used to guide the audience through the architecture development process.

05:02

🛠️ AWS Infrastructure Components for Web Application Hosting

The paragraph details the components and services involved in hosting a web application on AWS. It starts with Route 53 for DNS services, ensuring high availability and directing traffic to AWS. Amazon CloudFront is introduced for content delivery, leveraging a global network of edge locations for optimal performance. Static and dynamic content is stored in S3 buckets, which are recommended over EBS or EFS for web applications served through CloudFront. Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) is used to distribute incoming traffic among EC2 instances, which are hosted across multiple availability zones for fault tolerance. Auto Scaling Groups are mentioned for automatic provisioning of new EC2 instances in case of failure. Finally, the paragraph discusses the use of RDS in a multi-AZ deployment for database services, with a primary and standby database for high availability.

Keywords

💡High Availability

High availability refers to the ability of a system to remain operational and accessible at all times. In the context of the video, it is crucial for a web application to be highly available to ensure that it can handle peak loads and traffic spikes without downtime. The video mentions using AWS services to achieve this, such as deploying across multiple availability zones and using auto-scaling groups.

💡Scalability

Scalability is the capability of a system to handle a growing amount of work by adding resources. The video discusses building an architecture that can scale out to handle increased traffic and scale down when demand decreases, which is essential for managing costs and maintaining performance. AWS's elastic infrastructure is highlighted as a way to achieve scalable web hosting.

💡DNS Service

DNS (Domain Name System) service is responsible for translating human-friendly domain names into IP addresses that computers use to identify each other on the network. In the video, Route 53 by AWS is mentioned as the DNS service that serves DNS requests and routes network traffic to the AWS infrastructure.

💡CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) service that accelerates the delivery of data, videos, applications, and APIs to users around the world with low latency and high transfer speeds. The video script explains that CloudFront delivers static, streaming, and dynamic content from edge locations, ensuring optimal performance for global users.

💡S3 Bucket

An S3 bucket is a storage resource in Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) used for storing and retrieving any amount of data at any time. The video mentions using S3 buckets to store the resources used by web applications, highlighting their durability and suitability for primary data storage compared to other storage options like EBS or EFS.

💡Elastic Load Balancing

Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances, in the cloud. The video script describes how Elastic Load Balancing is used to handle HTTP requests and distribute traffic among EC2 instances, ensuring that the application can scale to meet demand while maintaining performance.

💡EC2 Instances

EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instances are virtual servers in the cloud that can be used to host applications and services. The video discusses deploying EC2 instances across multiple availability zones for fault tolerance and using auto-scaling groups to automatically provision new instances if existing ones fail, ensuring high availability.

💡Auto Scaling Group

An Auto Scaling group in AWS allows users to automatically adjust the number of EC2 instances in response to demand. The video explains that if a web server or EC2 instance fails, the auto-scaling group can automatically provision a new one, ensuring the application remains highly available and can handle varying loads.

💡Amazon Machine Images (AMI)

An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is a template that contains a software configuration (operating system, application server, and applications) used to launch EC2 instances. The video emphasizes the importance of having an AMI pre-loaded with the necessary applications, patches, and software for web servers, allowing new instances to be quickly provisioned by the auto-scaling group.

💡Relational Database Service (RDS)

Amazon RDS is a managed database service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. The video describes using RDS in a multi-AZ deployment with a primary master RDS and a standby RDS in a different availability zone to provide high availability for the database layer of the web application.

💡Multi-AZ Deployment

A multi-AZ (Availability Zone) deployment is a strategy that involves placing resources in more than one availability zone to provide fault tolerance. The video script mentions deploying RDS across multiple AZs to ensure that if one AZ fails, the standby RDS in another AZ can take over, maintaining the application's high availability.

Highlights

Building a highly available and scalable web hosting architecture can be complex and expensive.

AWS provides reliable, scalable, secure, and high-performance infrastructure for web applications.

Elastic scaling in AWS allows IT costs to match real-time traffic fluctuations.

Route 53 by AWS serves DNS requests for highly available domain name system.

Amazon CloudFront delivers content through a global network of edge locations for optimal performance.

Static, streaming, and dynamic content is served by CloudFront from S3 buckets.

S3 buckets are recommended for web applications used with CloudFront due to their durability and primary data storage design.

Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic among EC2 instances.

EC2 instances are hosted in a multi-availability zone infrastructure for fault tolerance.

Auto Scaling Groups provision new EC2 instances in case of server failure, ensuring high availability.

Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) are recommended for web servers in auto-scaling groups for quick deployment.

Relational Database Service (RDS) in multi-AZ deployment provides high availability for the database layer.

The architecture ensures a seamless load balancing and fault tolerance for web applications.

AWS services required for the architecture include Route 53, CloudFront, S3, ELB, EC2, Auto Scaling Groups, and RDS.

CloudFront provides quick global access for users accessing the web application.

Auto Scaling Groups distribute load to multiple EC2 instances, managing peak traffic effectively.

Elastic Load Balancing is essential for both web and application servers to handle varying loads.

The architecture is deployed in a multi-AZ environment for fault tolerance and load distribution.

Transcripts

hi everybody and welcome to this lesson

on looking at how we can build it up

with architectures and this one is

focused on how we can build an

architecture that's going to be used to

host a web application so building a

highly available and scalable web

hosting can be a very complex and

expensive operation sometimes you have

dense peak periods and wild swings and

traffic patterns which can result in low

utilization of expensive hardware now

AWS provides the reliable scalable

secure and high performance

infrastructure required for web

applications while also enabling an

elastic scale out and scale down

infrastructure to match IT costs in real

time as customer traffic fluctuates

throughout the day throughout the week

or throughout the month now here is a

basic diagram of how we can develop an

architecture of a AWS infrastructure

which can host a reliable and scalable

web application for us so let me walk

you through this step-by-step now first

and foremost we're going to obviously

need a DNS service which is what AWS

does for us through route 53 so the

users DNS requests again will be served

by route 53 which is a highly available

domain name system specifically

developed by AWS network traffic is

going to be routed to the infrastructure

running in Amazon Web Services next we

have something called cloud front now

all the static streaming and dynamic

content will be delivered by the Amazon

CloudFront infrastructure which is a

global network of edge locations so

requests are going to be automatically

routed to the nearest edge location so

content is delivered with the best

possible performance so regardless of

where you are in the globe you will get

the content cached locally in the edge

location of which AWS has around 160

locations throughout the globe so next

the resources instead of content used by

the web application are going to be

stored in a s3 bucket which if you guys

remember is a highly durable storage

infrastructure designed for mission

and primary data storage this will be

our best option as compared to EBS or

EFS which will not really work for a web

application which will be used through

cloud front because with cloud front we

can designate an s3 bucket as its

primary source so in the fourth step the

HTTP requests are 1st handled by the

elastic load balancing which

automatically distributes the incoming

application traffic among the hosts of

ec2 instances that are going to be

running in your infrastructure now as

you guys can see the ec2 instances are

developed and hosted in a multiple

availability zone infrastructure now

what this is going to do is it's going

to enable a greater fault tolerance so

if one of the ACS fails or is down the

other one can pick up the traffic while

the first one is brought up to speed by

AWS so it's basically going to provide a

seamless load balancing capacity needed

in response to incoming application

traffic so next in the first step we

have web servers again in both of the

availability zones hosted on ec2

instances now with ec2 instances what's

recommended is the organization

developed a Mis or Amazon machine images

so for example since they are in an auto

scaling group if one of the web servers

or ec2 instances should fail the auto

scaling group is going to automatically

provision a new one so it's highly

recommended that we have a Mis for the

web servers with the required

applications patches and software's

already pre-loaded in the ami so an auto

scaling group provisions a new ec2

instance it can just grab that ami pop

it on the ec2 instance and it will be

good to go and then in the last step we

have the the core of the application

service which is the database service to

provide the high availability the RDS or

the relational database service is going

to be used in a multi AC deployment

where you have a primary master RDS and

then you have a standby RDS in a

different availability zone so as you

guys can see this architecture provides

an overall infrastructure for you to

operate a web application in a high

available and reliable environment you

have the cloud front which provides the

quick access for the people that are

accessing it globally you have the auto

scaling group which distributes the load

to multiple ec2 instances so if you have

peak traffic it'll be balanced

accordingly and then you have the

elastic load balancing also for the

application service we need the ELB for

both the web servers for the traffic and

the application server so the

application can actually handle the load

also and most importantly this is all

deployed in a multi easy environment so

you have the fault tolerance

if one AC should fail for some reason

the other one can pick up the load while

the first one is brought up to speed by

AWS so this is the basic setup if you

want to host a web application on AWS

and just as a reminder the services in

the architecture that's required is the

Amazon or 53 the Amazon CloudFront the

s3 buckets the load balancing the ec2

instances the auto scaling groups and

then the RDS for the database for the

application server