Amazon Web Services (AWS) is currently the most widely used cloud environment for PaaS (Platform as a Service) and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) applications.

Developers can leverage cloud computing to create scalable web applications without worrying about the costs and skillset typically associated with fulfilling networking, computing and storage provisioning tasks for on-premise data centers. Read on to learn how to leverage key AWS services for efficient web app management.

Web Application Deployment with Amazon EC2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides developers with a scalable and secure cloud computing capacity. Developers have to attach EBS volumes to EC2 instances to host their web apps or websites. Amazon EC2 instances are virtual servers used for running applications on AWS infrastructure.

Amazon EC2 instances allow developers to get full control over their computing resources. They can change the storage capacity according to their needs and pay only for the resources they use. In addition, AWS provides tools for isolating web apps from known failures, such as Elastic Beanstalk, AWS lambda, and Lightsail. EC2 supports a wide range of operating systems, including Windows Server 2012, Amazon Linux, Debian and CentOS.

Get started with web application deployment on Amazon EC2 using the following steps.

  • Create an AWS account and log into it.
  • Create a Virtual Machine by selecting “Launch Instance” in the Amazon EC2 Dashboard.
  • Set up the instance by selecting an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), security group, and instance type.
  • Log into the instance by choosing ‘Create a new key pair’.
  • At this point, the instance is ready. You can now use it to build highly available websites or web app.

Storage and Backup With Amazon S3

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is a highly scalable and secure cloud storage service. Developers can use S3 to host any static components of a web page like images, videos, HTML pages and JavaScript. However, you can’t store apps that are based on server-side scripting languages such as JSP or PHP.

Developers can store and fetch large volumes of data from any location, at any time by using a simple interface. Amazon uses S3 storage to host its own websites. To store data on S3 you have to create buckets.

Each S3 bucket can contain high volumes of data, allowing you to store large amounts of objects. An object contains up to 5 TB of data. To fetch and store objects on S3 buckets you need to use a unique key. The purpose of an S3 bucket is to organize namespaces, recognize the data transfer and storage accounts, and perform as the aggregation unit for usage.

Load Balancing

Load balancing is an essential part of any web app or website. Load balancing allows you to distribute network traffic across multiple resources. Developers can leverage Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) service to distribute traffic across services like Lambda functions, EC2 instances or containers. With ELB, applications run seamlessly even in situations of heavy traffic.

Amazon ELB provides three types of load balancers

  • Classic Load Balancer—ideal for regular workload distribution across EC2 instances. It works for both connections and requests.
  • Network Load Balancer—used to manage the traffic of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), User Datagram Protocol (UDP), and Transport Layer Security (TLS).
  • Application Load Balancer—ideal for HTTP and HTTPS traffic.

Troubleshooting and Debugging

Often, some components and features of a web application might not work as planned, due to bugs or coding errors. Here is a list that reviews dedicated AWS resources, which assist developers to troubleshoot and debug those issues:

Traffic Analysis and Monitoring

Monitoring traffic and analyzing network logs allows developers to get insights on web apps and websites. Amazon provides numerous tools to monitor traffic, such as Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Athena, Amazon Pinpoint and many more.

Developers often use Real-Time Kinesis Data Analytics to track website metrics. This tool provides insights into page views, visitor counts, time spent by visitors, traffic-driving channels and more. It also provides a dashboard for monitoring web servers, which enables developers to view metrics like server performance, average network packet processing, errors and more.

Content Delivery

You can use edge caching to deliver AWS cloud-based content. AWS provides developers with a dedicated tool for content delivery, called Amazon CloudFront. You can use CloudFront to deliver static, dynamic and streaming video content using a global distribution of edge locations.

Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) that automatically routes requests for your content to the nearest edge location. As a result, content is delivered with the best possible performance.

CloudFront is optimized to work with other AWS services like Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2. Additionally, CloudFront works seamlessly with any external server that stores the original versions of your files.

Multiple Availability Zones

Availability Zones are unique physical locations inside an AWS region. Each Availability Zone contains one or more data centers that are designed to be isolated from faults in other Availability Zones. When deploying an application across multiple Availability Zones, you get both high availability and reliability.

Conclusion

Web application management is exhausting. It requires quality technologies and tools. Cloud computing makes things simpler for developers, provides them with all the tools they need to handle and manage the app.