Migrating to AWS : Amazon.com

Nice session on how Amazon.com has migrated several different types of workloads to AWS:

1. Rehost - Amazon.com web site : Details on an existing workload migrated to AWS.  'Classic' web site migration of web application to AWS.

2. Rearchitecture  - Database migration : Migrating application data to AWS from a traditional data store to AWS is way to reduce costs.  This use cases uses an Information Lifecycle approach to moving data off of a live production databases to S3. 

3. Replace - Application replacement : Deprecation of an order system, and implementing the new order system on AWS.

4. Green field : Using AWS for development of a new video service used internally at Amazon.

The video goes into details on how AWS can reduce costs, improve development productivity, enable elastic infrastructure, increase scalability, and improve high availability. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f45Uo5rw6YY

Determining Domain Name System (DNS) name server

When setting up a CDN (like AWS CloudFront), you will want to determine if your web site is really being served from CloudFront you can use the following command:
-dig www.pearson.aws.migrating2cloud.com

Route 53 as your DNS service

    Navigate to your Route 53 service.  
     1. Go the Hosted zones page and Click the “Create Hosted Zone” button. Type in any hosted zone name. For example, saponaws.com

       2. After zone is created you will see a page that includes the four domain name services (aka the delegation set).  Select the Delegation set to place into your domain details for your domain on godaddy (in this case saponaws.com)

       3.Go to your domain name registry (in this case godaddy) and launch (godaddy terminology) your domain name to set your Nameservers.  Use the four name services/delegation set retrieved in step 2.

       4.Go to your web site: saponaws.com. Two issues: DNS has not been propagated to the servers on the internet and your domain does not point to anything on Route 53. Let’s take care of the second issue.

       5. Go to create record set for the hosted domain saponaws.com.  Create the record set and point it to your elastic ip, elastic load balancer, or S3 bucket.  In this case, I will use an elastic IP.  This means I have no automatic HA for my web site.  If my EC2 instances goes down, I my web site goes down.  I should either but my web site on S3 (static web pages only) or use an ELB.  I could even point my web site to a private EC2 instance IP. This would be even less resilient than using an elastic IP.  

      6.  Test the web site again.  It will not come up until all internet routing tables have been propagated.  This can take a couple hours.