Autoscaling in AWS Console

Great new addition to the AWS Management console. Can use the API (put in blog posts).

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/12/aws-management-console-auto-scaling-support.html

Here are some other posts on auto scaling and using the auto scaling API:

http://cloudconclave.blogspot.com/2013/12/autoscaling-commands-new-universal-cli.html

http://cloudconclave.blogspot.com/2013/08/auto-scaling-scaling-group-and-policy.html

http://cloudconclave.blogspot.com/2013/05/auto-scaling-based-upon-schedule.html

http://cloudconclave.blogspot.com/2013/05/auto-scaling-script.html

http://cloudconclave.blogspot.com/2013/12/auto-scaling-removing-instances.html

AWS Trend Micro web cast replay

You can view the Trend Micro webinar regarding >Deep Security as a Service to deploy intrusion detection and prevention, anti-malware, anti-virus, integrity monitoring, firewall and web reputation on AWS:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOWcTC45ruw&feature=youtu.be

AWS : Storing Session State

AWS SimpleDB, Memcache and DynamoDB can all be used.  DynamoDB is a good option as there is already a session provider for DynamoDB :

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/09/managing-aspnet-session-state-with-dynamodb.html

For SQL Server, you can also look at session management in SQL server for persistence  and use built in .net session provider modules.

You can also manage session state using AWS RDS for SQL Server, MySQL or Oracle.

Running web application on AWS

In most cases, you will not just be running just an Oracle database on AWS.  You will be running a web based application.  For Oracle focused developers and engineers, running web applications on AWS is not an area of expertise. Here are the best documents, documentation, and diagrams to review for developing web based applications on AWS:

http://media.amazonwebservices.com/architecturecenter/AWS_ac_ra_web_01.pdf

http://media.amazonwebservices.com/AWS_Web_Hosting_Best_Practices.pdf

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/gettingstarted/latest/wah-linux/web-app-hosting-intro.html

Support for session state and database failover when application server goes down are a couple of details that most Oracle folks ask about.  Information can be found here:

Session state: Good blog post here: http://harish11g.blogspot.com/2012/10/web-session-synchronization-aws-ec2.html . The last option is DynamoDB which is the method used most often.

Database failover:

1. Using RDS this is automatic: When automatic failover occurs, your application can remain unaware of what's happening behind the scenes. The CNAME record for your DB instance will be altered to point to the newly promoted standby. Your client library must be able to close and reopen the connection in the event of a failover.
2. Using Oracle on EC2 : You would use Elastic Ips and use this pattern : http://aws.amazon.com/articles/2127188135977316 . You cloud use ENIs so private Ips could be used http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-eni.html#create-a-low-budget-high-availability-solution

EMR : Common use cases

Here are a couple of common use cases for EMR:

1. Creating sessions from weblogs : The sequence of web pages through which

a user navigated is an example of a session. Sessionization is one of the first steps in many types of log analysis and management, such as personalized website optimization, infrastructure operation optimization, and security analytics.

One study used 150 billion log entries (~24 TB) from 1 million users and produced 1.6 billion sessions. 

2. Recommendation engine : The EMR cluster reads a history of movie ratings from multiple users regarding multiple movies. Then, it builds a co-occurrence matrix that scores the similarity of each pair of movies. Combining the matrix and each user’s movie-rating history, the engine predicts a given user’s preference on unrated movies.