AWS System Administration

System administration is a complicated topic that requires practitioners to be familiar with an ever-expanding range of applications and services. In some ways, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is just another tool to add to your toolkit, yet it can also be considered a discipline in and of itself. Successfully building and deploying infrastructure on AWS involves a thorough understanding of the underlying operating system concerns, software architecture, and delivery practices, as well as the myriad components that make up Amazon Web Services. Mike runs a DevOps consultancy, helping startups and small businesses reap the benefits of tools and processes that were previously available only to organizations with large teams of system administrators. Many of these businesses do not have a dedicated system administrator, and the development team is responsible for deploying and maintaining the architecture. In working with these clients, Mike noticed patterns in how people were working with AWS. Those who came from a pure development background, without any sysadmin experience, would often build an infrastructure that left out many of the things sysadmins would take for granted, such as monitoring and logging. The lack of monitoring and logging would then make it difficult to track down issues, leading to more downtime than necessary. At the other end of the spectrum were clients with a lot of sysadmin experience, but less or no development experience. This group was more likely to treat AWS as nothing more than a virtual machine hosting provider, simply using EC2 to run a fleet of static instances without taking advantage of any high-availability features such as Auto Scaling Groups and Elastic Load Balancing. This is akin to buying a Ferrari and then using it only to buy groceries once per week: fun, but not very cost-effective. Using AWS requires a fundamentally different mindset than when deploying groups of static servers. You do not simply set up some servers and then periodically perform maintenance. Instead, you use the full AWS toolset (automatic instance replacement, ix