Key managed services - Amazon Web Services (AWS) Tutorial

- [Instructor] Amazon provides a number of key managed services that allow you to achieve operational excellence. Some of these services are built in and supported by every service that you'll order. The key service that is integrated with every service at AWS is CloudWatch, the monitoring service. As you order services at AWS, the metrics for that service are enabled in CloudWatch. So having metrics available for our systems, the compute systems, the database systems, storage, and the applications that are running, allow us to actually monitor everything very effectively and be alerted when there are issues. We can also take advantage of CloudWatch logs. This is our repository inside of CloudWatch that holds on to specific information. And once that information is stored in the CloudWatch log, it can be analyzed. And then you can be alerted if there's issues. I might want to know who's authenticating to my AWS account. I may want to know about the different APIs that are being fired in my AWS account. Particularly if this work is being carried out in different regions that I'm not aware of. That's CloudTrail, which tracks all API calls and authentication. It's also integrated with CloudWatch. So you can find out what's going on. Maybe you also want to find out about networking information. You can enable VPC flow logs, the VPC, the virtual private cloud, the private network, where your application is hosted, you can have all the networking information delivered to CloudWatch logs for further analysis as well. In order to analyze even further what's going on in your application stack, you might want to analyze the system logs. What you can utilize is the CloudWatch logs agent. This agent is installed typically on the EC2 instance. And if it's not, you can download and install it. You can also install this agent on on-prem servers, and then you can enable this log to carry out more than its default settings. So if you want to look at the system logs on your compute, this agent can be very helpful. Once it's enabled, you can select specific metrics for CPU, disk and memory utilization on the compute instance. This can be the EC2 instance hosted at Amazon or your on-premise servers. Let's suppose that you've got on-prem servers as part of your solution, maybe for failover. Well, we can use the CloudWatch agent on those systems as well. For developers who want to get a handle on everything that's going on in the application, we can also use something called AWS X-Ray and this will trace the user requests through the entire application hosted at AWS. It works with EC2 instances. It works with the container service. It works with Elastic Beanstalk. It actually even works with the Lambda service, which provides custom functions that you write that can carry out specific tasks integrated with your application. What you have to do is download the SDK and integrate that into your application development, and also make sure you install the X-Ray agent on your compute or container instances. But then you've got a very nice window into how your application is operating from the point of view of the end user.