Cloud computing essentials for managers / software engineers Training Course

Virtualization Details

1. Overview of Operating System Concepts: CPU, Memory, Network, Storage
2. Hypervisors
   1. Manager of Managers
   2. "Host" machine and "guest" OS
   3. Type-1 vs. Type-2 Hypervisors
   4. Citrix XEN, VMware ESX/ESXi, MS Hyper-V, IBM LPAR.
3. Network Virtualization
   1. Brief introduction to the 7-Layer OSI Model
   2. Focus on the Network layer
   3. TCP/IP Model or Internet Protocol
4. Focus on a single vertical
   1. Application Layer: SSL
   2. Network Layer: TCP
   3. Internet Layer: IPv4/IPv6
   4. Link Layer: Ethernet
5. Packet Structure
   1. Addressing: IP Address and Domain Names
   2. Firewall, Load Balancer, Router, Adapter
   3. Virtualized Networks
   4. Higher-order abstractions: Subnets, Zones.
6. Hands-on Exercise:
   1. Become familiar with ESXi clusters and the vSphere client.
   2. Create/update networks in an ESXi Cluster, deploy guests from VMDK packages, and enable inter-connectivity between guests within an ESXi cluster.
   3. Modify a running VM instance and capture a snapshot.
   4. Update firewall rules in ESXi using the vSphere client.

2. Cloud Computing: A paradigm shift

1. A fast, cost-effective way to make products/solutions available globally
2. Resource Sharing
   1. Virtualization of virtualized environments
3. Key benefits:
   1. On-demand resource elasticity
      1. Ideate -> Code -> Deploy without requiring dedicated infrastructure
      2. Rapid CI/CD pipelines
   2. Environment isolation and vertical autonomy
   3. Security through layering
   4. Expense optimization
4. On-premise Cloud and Cloud Providers
5. Cloud as an effective conceptual abstraction for distributed computing

3. Introduction to Cloud Solution Layers:

1. IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)
   1. AWS, Azure, Google
   2. Select one provider for subsequent modules. AWS is recommended.
      1. Introduction to AWS VPC, AWS EC2, etc.
2. PaaS (Platform as a Service)
   1. AWS, Azure, Google, CloudFoundry, Heroku
   2. Introduction to AWS DynamoDB, AWS Kinesis, etc.
3. SaaS (Software as a Service)
   1. Brief overview
   2. Microsoft Office, Confluence, SalesForce, Slack
4. SaaS builds on PaaS, which builds on IaaS, which in turn builds on Virtualization

4. IaaS Cloud Hands-on Project

1. This project utilizes AWS as the IaaS Cloud Provider
2. Use CentOS/RHEL as the operating system for the remainder of the exercise
   1. Alternatively, Ubuntu is acceptable, but RHEL/CentOS are preferred
3. Obtain individual AWS IAM accounts from your cloud administrator
4. Each participant must perform these steps independently
   1. The ability to carve out your entire infrastructure on-demand is the best demonstration of the power of cloud computing
   2. Use AWS Wizards (i.e., AWS online consoles) to accomplish these tasks unless otherwise specified
5. Create a public VPC in the us-east-1 Region
   1. Two Subnets (Subnet-1 and Subnet-2) located in two different Availability Zones
      1. Refer to https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/ for guidance.
   2. Create three separate Security Groups
      1. SG-Internet
         1. Allows incoming traffic from the Internet on https 443 and http 80
         2. No other incoming connections permitted
      2. SG-Service
         1. Allows incoming traffic only from the SG-Internet security group on https 443 and http 80
         2. Allows ICMP only from SG-Internet
         3. No other incoming connections permitted
      3. SG-SSH:
         1. Allows SSH:22 incoming connections only from a single IP address matching the public IP of the participant’s lab machine. If the lab machine is behind a proxy, use the proxy’s public IP.
6. Deploy an AMI instance for your chosen OS (preferably the latest RHEL/CentOS version available) and host it on Subnet-1. Attach the instance to the SG-Service and SG-SSH groups.
7. Access the instance via SSH from your lab machine.
8. Install an NGINX server on this instance
9. Place static content of your choice (HTML pages, images) to be served by NGINX (on port 80 over HTTP) and define URLs for them.
10. Test the URL from that machine.
11. Create an AMI image from this running instance.
12. Deploy the new AMI and host the instance on Subnet-2. Attach the instance to the SG-Service and SG-SSH groups.
13. Run the NGINX server and verify that the access URL for the static content created in the previous step works.
14. Create a new "classic" Elastic Load Balancer and attach it to SG-Internet.
    1. Note the differences between Application Load Balancer and Network Load Balancer.
15. Create a routing rule that forwards all http 80 and https 443 traffic to an instance group comprising the two instances created above.
16. Using a certificate management tool (e.g., java keytool), create a key-pair and self-signed certificate, then import the certificate into AWS Certificate Manager (ACM)

5. Cloud Monitoring: Introduction and Hands-on Project

1. AWS CloudWatch metrics
2. Navigate to the AWS CloudWatch dashboard for the instances
   1. Retrieve relevant metrics and explain their variability over time
      1. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/viewing_metrics_with_cloudwatch.html
3. Navigate to the AWS CloudWatch dashboard for the ELB
   1. Observe the ELB metrics and explain their variability over time
   2. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/latest/classic/elb-cloudwatch-metrics.html

6. Advanced Concepts for Further Learning

1. Hybrid Cloud -- combining on-premise and public cloud
2. Migration: From on-premise to public cloud
   1. Application code migration
   2. Database migration
3. DevOps
   1. Infrastructure as Code
   2. AWS CloudFormation Templates
4. Auto-scaling
   1. Using AWS CloudWatch metrics to determine health