Knowledge Hub

Friday, August 21, 2015

Amazon Web Services: Auto scaling and Cloudwatch

In this blog, we will discuss Amazon Web Services: Auto scaling and Cloudwatch

The question is : What does Auto scaling provides? The answer is:

Linear Horizontal Scaling
HA

Second question is What Cloud watch enables? Cloud watch enables:

monitoring and alerting for resources
Alarms Can fire auto scaling policies, SNS notifications

auto scaling, ELB and Cloud watch makes up what Amazon calls Triangle services

AUTO SCALING SET UP

To set up Auto scaling, we need to do the following things:

Create ELB( Its recommended but not necessary)
Create Instances in 2 or more AZs ( Its recommended but not necessary

a) Create Launch Config: Launch config consists of
1) EC2 instance launch profile
2) Image ID (AMI)
3) Instance Type ( e.g t1.micro or m1.small)
4) key pair ( recommended)
5) Security Group
6) Name

Create Auto scaling Groups: In a auto scaling group you have AZs, Max or Min servers etc
Create Auto scaling Policy: The policy consists of buttons that an API/Scheduled/ cloudwatch can push
Create Cloud watch Alarms: Which can fire policies

CLOUD WATCH

Now we will briefly discuss cloud watch. So what does Cloud watch exactly do? Well, the answer is

Monitors/Alarms on resources
Basic Monitors provided free with most basic services ( EC2, ELB, SQS..etc)
Alarms can fire auto scaling policies or SNS notifications
cloud watch is statistics in , statistics out. below is an example

Cloud Watch alarms trigger when metric statistics goes in( or out ) out of state for specific time

Hope it clears the functionality of cloud watch

Thursday, August 20, 2015

Amazon Web Services- Elastic Load balancer

In this Topic we will discuss Amazon Web services ELB or Elastic Load Balancers

So first question is : What does Load balancers Do? The answer is:

Send Traffic to many Back-end Servers
Attempt to evenly distribute load
Allows yours service to be elastic
It allows for Horizontal Scaling
Grow and shrink on demand

However,

Horizontal Scaling by the ELB in the cloud gives us:

Near Infinite Scaling
Huge cost savings
High Availability
Scaling By Tier

So what is Scaling by Tier?

We can scale up or down web tier independent of APP Tier. This sis called scaling by tier

ELB Auto-scales ( Adds more IPs with increased traffic to the DNS)

ELB can also Terminate SSL, encrypt SSL to the back-end Machines

ELB also supports X-Forwarded-FOR

ELB has deep Integration with Auto Scaling and Cloud watch

Integration with Auto Scaling and Cloud watch

ELB can detect unhealthy Instances

Unhealthy by TCP or HTTP check
It automaticvally removes them dfrom scaling

However, Cloudwatch can add more instances behind ELB

Based on ELB metrics ( RequestCount, Latency and More)
Based on Instance Metrics (CPU. I/O, etc)

Remember,

Load balanced is first by Availability Zone
Then across instance in availability zone
ELB cost is static
ELB scaling is always reactive

Sunday, July 26, 2015

Installing Vertica Analytics and Management Console

In this blog we will learn how to install vertica analytic and management console.

Before we install vertica, we need to understand the cluster configuration for vertica. each node in cluster has unique ip address, they dont share common storage.
Each hosts has a file /etc/hosts so that hosts can identify each other.

there are also dedicated ports that need to be left opened for vertica communications like 5434, 5444,5450...

besides root user, 2 more users need to be created.:
1) dbadmin: for vertica database
2) mcadmin for management console

root users install vertica analytics and management console on each host in the cluster.

on of the host create a directory,to hold vertica database and manaegment console installation files.

On all of the host create a directory for vertica database.

Vertica support following unix OS.
'

To install vertica, you just need to unzip vertica rpm file . Once that is done, it will create a directory /opt/vertica.

The vertica directory contains many sub directory

Now we need to install vertica

here node is the ip address of the different machines. t will install vertica on all hosts. Now hosts become nodes.

for licensing vertica, we now need to login as dbadmin. run the command admintools. a pop will be there for you to define full path of licensing file

Now we will install management console.

run the installation command

Now open the browser and type the URL, https://node1:5450 here node1 is the nodename. accept the license agreement

create administrative user for management console.

and its done.

Tuesday, July 21, 2015

HP Vertica Building Blocks

HP vertica the physical architecture is designed to distribute physical storage and to allow parallel query execution over a potentially large collection of computing resources.

The most important terms to understand are instance, node, cluster, and data:

NODE: a node is a machine configure to run vertica

Instance: Its the vertica instance installed on the node

Cluster: A cluster consists of collection of nodes

data: Data is the data in the vertica database distributed across the nodes

Vertica platform is build ground up. there are 6 important vertica features:

Columnar Orientation: Data is stored in columns instead of rows, thus saving memory and I /O

Advance Compression:Operates on compressed and encoded data delivers superior performance on a smaller storage footprint and reduced capital expense

High availability: Vertica is designed for high availability. to achieve this vertica uses projections or copy of projections stored in different nodes. number of projections are based on K-Safety=1

K-Safety is the measure of fault tolerance of the database. it support values 0,1,2. inorder to enable K-Safety there should be minimum of 3 nodes in the cluster

Automatic Database design: The database designer allows you to optimize, tune and control your database without shutting down the database

Application integration: Using standard SQL, there is seamless integration with robust and ever growing analytical solutions

Massively Parallel Processing:automatic,limitless, linear scaling of peer to peer nodes, each processing an allocated subset of data

Saturday, June 13, 2015

vCAC Identity Service Architecture

In this blog we discuss vCAC Identity service architecture

Below is the vCAC Identity service architecture

Identity appliance should be installed first before authentication and authorization will start working

DNS should have been installed before Identity Appliance is installed

SSL should have been installed before Identity Appliance is installed

NTP should have been installed before Identity Appliance is installed

Active Directory credential should have been before Identity Appliance is installed

Sunday, May 10, 2015

Building Microsoft Private Cloud Using System Center 2012: High Level design

Microsoft have a amazing private cloud solution besides its public cloud (Azure). In this blog we will cover how to build a Microsoft Private cloud. Lets face it, we are so much used to Microsoft.

If we see The picture above, you can clearly see Microsoft difference

Different componennents of System center:

1) Virtual machine manager

2) Operations manager

3) Configuration manager

4) Data protection manager

5) Orchestrator

6) Service manager

7) App controller

The Flow is like below

But the architecture is

Private cloud is automating different stacks of technology. Thats what we are doing here.

for detailed implementation steps please go to link

http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles-tutorials/cloud-computing/building-private-cloud-system-center-2012-part1.html