Cloud computing essentials for managers / software engineers Training Course

Virtualization Details

1. Overview of Operating System Concepts: CPU, Memory, Network, and Storage
2. Hypervisors
   1. Supervisors of Supervisors
   2. Concept of 'Host' machine and 'Guest' OS
   3. Type-1 Hypervisors vs. Type-2 Hypervisors
   4. Examples: 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. Deep Dive into Specific Layers
   1. Application Layer: SSL
   2. Network Layer: TCP
   3. Internet Layer: IPv4/IPv6
   4. Link Layer: Ethernet
5. Packet Structure
   1. Addressing: IP Addresses and Domain Names
   2. Network Components: Firewalls, Load Balancers, Routers, Adapters
   3. Virtualized Networks
   4. Higher-level abstractions: Subnets, Zones.
6. Hands-on Exercise:
   1. Become familiar with the ESXi cluster and vSphere client.
   2. Create or update networks in the ESXi Cluster, deploy guest instances from VMDK packages, and establish connectivity between guests within the 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 rapid, cost-effective pathway to making products or solutions globally available
2. Resource Sharing
   1. Virtualizing a virtualized environment
3. Key Benefits:
   1. On-demand Resource Elasticity
      1. Ideate -> Code -> Deploy without the need for pre-provisioned 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 a powerful conceptual abstraction for distributed computing

3. Introduction to Cloud Solution Layers:

1. IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)
   1. Providers: AWS, Azure, Google
   2. Select one Provider to proceed. AWS is recommended.
      1. Introduction to AWS VPC, AWS EC2, etc.
2. PaaS (Platform as a Service)
   1. Platforms: AWS, Azure, Google, CloudFoundry, Heroku
   2. Introduction to AWS DynamoDB, AWS Kinesis, etc.
3. SaaS (Software as a Service)
   1. Brief overview
   2. Examples: Microsoft Office, Confluence, SalesForce, Slack
4. Hierarchy: SaaS builds upon PaaS, which builds upon IaaS, which in turn builds upon 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 exercise
   1. Alternatively, Ubuntu is acceptable, but RHEL/CentOS is preferred.
3. Obtain individual AWS IAM accounts from your cloud administrator
4. Each student must complete these steps independently
   1. Provisioning your own complete infrastructure on demand is the ultimate demonstration of cloud computing's power.
   2. Use AWS Wizards and 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. Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/.
   2. Create three distinct Security Groups
      1. SG-Internet
         1. Allows incoming traffic from the Internet on https 443 and http 80.
         2. Blocks all other incoming connections.
      2. SG-Service
         1. Allows incoming traffic only from the SG-Internet security group on https 443 and http 80.
         2. Allows ICMP traffic only from SG-Internet.
         3. Blocks all other incoming connections.
      3. SG-SSH:
         1. Allows SSH:22 incoming connections only from a single IP address matching the public IP of the student’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 versions -- and host it in 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 the machine itself.
11. Create an AMI image from this running instance.
12. Deploy that new AMI and host the instance in Subnet-2. Attach the instance to the SG-Service and SG-SSH groups.
13. Start 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 Balancers and Network Load Balancers.
15. Create a routing rule forwarding all http 80 and https 443 traffic to an instance group containing the two instances created above.
16. Using any certificate management tool -- such as 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 analyze 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 ELB metrics and explain their fluctuations 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 a code
   2. AWS Cloud Formation Template
4. Auto-scaling
   1. Using AWS CloudWatch metrics to determine health