36. Cloud Compute Module Introduction
If you are brand new to cloud, a great place for you to really start considering specializing in would be cloud compute. The reason why I say that is it is often very easy, an easy introduction into the world of cloud because you’re building, initially virtual machines as you learn about cloud compute and building virtual machines is very much like building physical actual machines, and it’s something that we’ve probably already been doing in traditional IT environments. This cloud compute module, though, is really going to be fascinating for us because we’re not just gonna be discussing virtual machines. We’re gonna be discussing the evolution of VM technology, that is container technology. We’ll discuss container orchestration and management systems like Kubernetes and things of that nature. So this is going be really interesting, I hope even for some of you seasoned virtual machine experts out there.
37. Deploying VMs and Using Templates
Let’s face it. Virtual machines are still a key ingredient in clouds today, and of course, in our on-premise environments as well. But notice that we want to focus on the ease of which not only we can deploy virtual machines in a cloud environment, but we wanna take advantage of using templates for this whenever possible. Let’s use AWS as a great kind of proving ground to what we’re talking about here, and the types of issues, or at least not really issues, but the types of configurations that you would wanna make to solve potential upcoming issues.
So once again, let’s use Amazon Web Services as a great look at a very-very typical public cloud implementation, and how it would be to launch a virtual machine instance inside this cloud. So let’s say we wanna launch an instance, and notice there is the step by step that we go through in order to launch a virtual machine instance. I’ll go ahead and launch this latest, greatest Amazon Linux 2 AMI. Notice this is on an SSD volume type by default. We can change that. And this is a Linux variant, yes, indeed, that is made by Amazon. So, yet another variant of Linux as if we didn’t have enough.
And this is tailored towards, of course, doing cloud based stuff with this AWS version, Amazon version of Linux. We’ll do the free tier eligible t2.micro. Notice at this instance type stage, this is where we are deciding, okay, how many virtual CPUs do we need, how much memory do we need, etc. So, this is a very important step. And notice AWS allows you to bring up particular families and generations of technologies as far as their instances go.
Now, next up is the instance details page. This is where the rubber meets the road really, because what we see here is key configuration parameters about what we’re gonna be setting up. Notice, first off, the number of instances. So we have, how many of these virtual machines are we creating? Notice that we can do auto scaling. So we could say that we might want two VMs initially, but if these VMs are beyond a certain threshold of utilization, we would have AWS create more automatically. These are the types of things that the cloud makes possible with ease. Something that we might prove very difficult to do in our on-prem environments.
Notice I’m going into a default virtual private cloud. So, the network this virtual machine is gonna nestle in is the default VPC. There’s no preference on the subnet, and they’ll auto-assign a public IP. So that’s great. I’ll get a public IP so we can connect to this system. We’re gonna use the subnet setting for the host name type. So, it’ll just be named after the IP address. I won’t bother to go through every possible option here. But notice that this is where you can do all kinds of fancy manipulations to the default deployment of your virtual machine. And if you wanted, maybe, some scripts to execute immediately after this machine were to come up, you could put that optional script here down in this user data area.
So, what kind of storage are we gonna have? Well, let’s go ahead and save money on the storage. We’ll go down to magnetic hard disk storage for this entity. And of course, later on in this course, we’re gonna have a lot more to say about these storage tiers. And notice this disk that’s gonna make up this storage for this machine will be deleted when I terminate the machine.
And that’s just perfect. Let me add a tag. I will add a tag called Name. And this Name tag will have a value of… How about cloud_plus_test? So, there we go.
We’ll then look at our security group settings, and notice the default settings are going to be to create a new security group and to allow SSH from anywhere into this device. Now notice this is not a recommended setting. Of course not. But we’ll do it this way just for purposes of the demonstration.
So, now we are gonna go through the review and launch phase. And it says, ‘Okay, look, just so you know, you are getting free 30 gigs of SSD storage. Don’t you want to take advantage of that?’ And I’m gonna say, ‘No, I know what I’m doing. I want to continue with this magnetic storage. And in fact, I’m well past the free tier time anyways. I’m now in the paid membership of AWS.’ So, that wasn’t even really applying to me.
Notice we’re getting a warning here that this device is really open to the world. Someone could SSH in from anywhere. We were lazy, and we left that setting in place. That’s what it’s warning us about. That’s okay. This is just a lab machine, and we’re gonna tear it down in a few minutes anyways.
When we say, ‘Launch,’ it says, ‘Okay, we need to create a new key pair for you,’ or that’s what I’m gonna choose to do. It’ll be an RSA key pairing, and I will give this a name of… How about cloud_plus_keys. And we are going to download this key pair, and you need to make sure you have this in a safe place, and we need to make sure that the security permissions are restrictive on that. Otherwise, we can’t use this key pair to access our device inside of the cloud.
All right. So, that’s that. I go ahead and say, ‘Launch this instance.’ And as you can see, the instance is now launching. What I like to do is kind of start over now and go back to the main EC2 dashboard. And you’ll notice that we have this main display here and this happy refresh button because what I think we’re about to see is we’re about to see, and let me make sure I’m in the correct region, by the way. We should see. And there it is. Look at that. There is that instance that we just spun up that’s finally showing up in the console. And you can see that’s the cloud_plus_test.
Now, certainly we want to connect to this machine, right? So let’s go ahead and select it now and choose this connect button. And what it does is it gives us all the SSH instructions that we would need right here. So, I love it. Notice, we need to go where that key pair file is located and we need to SSH. So, I’m gonna go ahead and copy this. In fact, that button right there will allow you to copy it to the clipboard. And now what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna fire up a command prompt, obviously. Whoops, I don’t need Cortana. Thank you very much. I just need a command prompt.
So, we are gonna fire up a command prompt as you can see, and I am going to get to my downloads folder. So, that would be in One Drive. Yep. No, not One Drive. What am I doing? I literally need to go to the Users’ folder, and then I need to go into my little Terry sample student account, and then I need to go to Downloads. There we go. If I do a directory listing, we have the .pem file in there. That’s perfect cause I need to be in that directory location when I reference that .pem file in the SSH syntax that we’re gonna use to get into the machine that we just spun up. So, it says, ‘Okay, are you sure you want to connect to this machine and cache that information?’ I say, ‘Yes, I do.’ And there we are. We are in that nice new AWS virtual machine that we just spun up. And let me click inside here so we can access it. And this Linux box now is accessible to us anytime that we need access to it, as long as we have of course that key pair file that is providing us access to the machine.
Now, let me emphasize that the way AWS works is, sure, we just spun up this AWS image here, and it is running in our EC2 environment. But understand something, that we are only going to be charged for this device when it is running. So, we can select this device, we can go to the instance state, and we can say, ‘Stop that instance.’ And what’s gonna happen now, of course, is this virtual machine will be shut down, and we will no longer be charged for this virtual machine.
Now what if we needed to create a lot of systems like this? So, there was a whole bunch of systems we wanted to create like this? Well look, that’s why they give us a nice link to EC2 launch templates. And this is really becoming the way of the world, by the way. Get used to this word, template, because you’re gonna see it again and again and again and again, and even again. It is the way of the world. Everything is being done through a templatized approach. And that way, when you create a launch template, that is the way you want your virtual machines to be set up, then you can, of course, launch subsequent systems from that template. So we’re gonna see a templatized approach, if you will, from virtual machines to containers to everything really, that we deal with in information technology now. Templates are the rage. So that you can see that all of those steps I had to go through to spin up our quick little AMI, Amazon Virtual Machine there, running Linux, all of those steps would not need to be duplicated. And so, templates are the way of the world. Thank you so much for watching.
38. Other Cloud Compute Topics
It can be tough for us to remember really that virtual machines, they’re kind of old news when it comes to cloud compute. Let’s give some love to alternatives to virtual machines and let’s talk about some of the services you need to be familiar with in this area.
So, are there more compute services than just EC2 when we look at something like Amazon Web Services? The answer, of course, there is. While EC2 is the primary compute resource, notice, there’s so much else.
First of all, cloud services today tend to offer batch services. This is so neat, and this really was the precursor to the revolution in cloud compute that we are experiencing today with serverless computing. I’ll show you serverless computing in a moment and you can see how it clearly stemmed from something like this batch service. So, what this batch service is all about is you going in, and you uploading some kind of script or some kind of job that you need processed. And so what AWS will do is it will take its compute power that it’s just sitting there not utilized in one of its data centers, and it will run your batch jobs against that. Isn’t this something? So, you have this wonderful, batch job type of environment tucked away in AWS with all this unlimited compute power that’s just waiting for you to take advantage of it. It really is an amazing thing.
Now, this concept helped give rise to the full blown serverless compute service inside of AWS and this is AWS Lambda. So, this is the serverless compute capability inside of AWS. What are you doing here? Well, you are just having functions, they’re called AWS functions and you can see them here, and these are thrown at the compute resources that are part of Lambda. So, imagine this, in fact, a great example of where this is used that I’d like to give you is with Amazon Echo devices. I have them all over the house and when they are processing the voice that I speak and then digitizing that so they can understand it, that’s a classic example of when AWS Lambda is used. So, think about it, your Amazon Echo device, it reaches into the cloud for the processing power that’s in AWS Lambda. What’s the advantage of this? Well, think about it. When you build a virtual machine in the cloud, you are being charged per second of virtual machine usage. Well, what if your virtual machine is just sitting there most of the day, waiting for its opportunity to process something for you? Well, that is when AWS Lambda can shine. You will just throw this computation or whatever function you need processed at AWS Lambda, it will take care of it, and you will be charged for milliseconds of usage of CPU time. AWS Lambda can save you a ton of money and think about it, it can save you a ton of effort. Let’s not forget, when we are in the EC2 service and we are dealing with virtual machines, we have to go in and we have to perform the maintenance in things on these machines, and obviously we’re responsible for this maintenance and stuff, and that is taken away from us when we deal with serverless compute. It’s just an invisible blob of compute resources out there waiting to do all this wonderful stuff for us.
Now, another service that is hugely popular, though, in the area of compute is running containers. And notice that there are so many container services now that that gets its own category inside the list of AWS services. Now, containers are those little applications and any components that might be needed of an operating system in a small little package that can run beautifully and replace VMware functionality, really, not VMware, but VM functionality, right? Remember what a VM is? A virtual machine has an operating system and applications inside it. Well, a container just has the application inside it and whatever it needs to run. So, these are very exciting, and one of the things that we like to have with containers is some kind of management service. Notice, you have two big options now inside of AWS. This is pretty amazing.
It used to be that all we had was the Amazon Elastic Container Service, and this is Amazon’s own way for you to manage your containers. But sure enough, Amazon did not waste any time, let me go back to the services list so you can see this, of adding the Elastic Kubernetes Service. So let’s say your organization already made a commitment to Kubernetes, and that’s how they’re orchestrating, and they are managing, and hosting their wonderful containers. Well, now you don’t have to migrate yourself to the AWS Container Service. You can just use the Elastic Kubernetes Service right inside of AWS. You can leverage your knowledge of Kubernetes and use the Kubernetes as a managed service in Amazon.
So, these are the types of new and exciting compute services that are available for us. And isn’t it amazing to think that the virtual machine is starting to appear very legacy? That’s just amazing, isn’t it? Yeah, the virtual machine is really starting to look like very much a legacy component in the world of cloud compute today.
