Installing AWS Command Line Tools from Amazon Downloads

A very well put up Blog on Installing AWS Command Line Tools from Amazon Downloads by Eric Hammond. Some useful extract from the Blog.

When you need an AWS command line toolset not provided by Ubuntu packages, you can download the tools directly from Amazon and install them locally.Unfortunately, Amazon does not have one single place where you can download all the command line tools for the various services, nor are all of the tools installed in the same way, nor do they all use the same format for accessing the AWS credentials.

The following steps show how to install and configure the AWS command line tools provided by Amazon [...]

Prerequisites

Install required software packages:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y openjdk-6-jre ruby1.8-full libxml2-utils unzip cpanminus build-essential

Create a directory where all AWS tools will be installed:

sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/aws

Now we’re ready to start downloading and installing all of the individual software bundles that Amazon has released and made available in scattered places on their web site and various S3 buckets.

Download and Install AWS Command Line Tools

These steps should be done from an empty temporary directory so you can afterwards clean up all of the downloaded and unpacked files.

Note: Some of these download URLs always get the latest version and some tools have different URLs every time a new version is released. Click through on the tool link to find the latest [Download] URL.

EC2 API command line tools:

wget --quiet http://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads/ec2-api-tools.zip
unzip -qq ec2-api-tools.zip
sudo rsync -a --no-o --no-g ec2-api-tools-*/ /usr/local/aws/ec2/

EC2 AMI command line tools:

wget --quiet http://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads/ec2-ami-tools.zip
unzip -qq ec2-ami-tools.zip
sudo rsync -a --no-o --no-g ec2-ami-tools-*/ /usr/local/aws/ec2/

Elastic Detector : Elastic Vulnerability Assessment

 

SecludIT developed a new approach to vulnerability assessment by using the elasticity of IaaS: Elastic Vulnerability Assessment - EVA.

Elastic Detector is Secludit's fully automated security event detection tool for Amazon EC2. 

It helps administrators and users of Amazon EC2-based infrastructures to continuously identify holes on security groups and applications, thus dramatically reducing the risk of external and internal attacks. 

It is Delivered as SaaS or Virtual Appliance (currently only running on US East Region).

In contrary to existing tools, you don’t need to install any additional software, such as agents, and do not need to configure any monitors up-front.

If you want to know more about Elastic Detector, watch the video below or try the service for free under elastic-detector.secludit.com.

AWS Announcement : High Performance Provisioned IOPS Storage For Amazon RDS

 

After announcing EBS Provisioned IOPS offering lately which allows you to specify both volume size and volume performance in term of number of I/O operations per second (IOPS),  AWS has now announced High Performance Provisioned IOPS Storage for Amazon RDS.

 

You can now create an RDS database instance and specify your desired level of IOPS in order to get more consistent throughput and performance.

Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS is immediately available for new database instances in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), and EU West (Ireland) Regions and AWS plan to launch in other AWS Regions in the coming months.

 

AWs is rolling this out in two phases. Read on more the extract from the announcement on AWS Blog by Jeff.

 

 

    

                   We are rolling this out in two stages. Here's the plan:

 

• Effective immediately, you can provision new RDS database instances with 1,000 to 10,000 IOPS, and with 100GB to 1 TB of storage for MySQL and Oracle databases. If you are using SQL Server, the maximum IOPS you can provision is 7,000 IOPS. All other RDS features including Multi-AZ, Read Replicas, and the Virtual Private Cloud, are also supported.
  
  
 
• In the near future, we plan to provide you with an automated way to migrate existing database instances to Provisioned IOPS storage for the MySQL and Oracle database engines. If you want to migrate an existing database instance to Provisioned IOPS storage immediately, you can export your data and re-import it into a new database instance equipped with Provisioned IOPS storage.

We expect database instances with RDS Provisioned IOPS to be used in demanding situations. For example, they are a perfect host for I/O-intensive transactional (OLTP) workloads.

We recommend that customers running production database workloads use Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS for the best possible performance. (By the way, for mission critical OLTP workloads, you should also consider adding the Amazon RDS Multi-AZ option to improve availability.)

Check out the video with Rahul Pathak of the Amazon RDS team to learn more about this new feature and how some of AWS customers were using it:

Responses from AWS customers :

• AWS customer Flipboard uses RDS to deliver billions of page flips each month to millions of mobile phone and tablet users. Sang Chi, Data Infrastructure Architect at Flipboard told us:

"We want to provide the best possible reading and content delivery experience for a rapidly growing base of users and publishers. This requires us not only to use a high performance database today but also to continue to improve our performance in the future. Throughput consistency is critical for our workloads. Based on results from our early testing, we are very excited about Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS and the impact it will have on our ability to scale. We’re looking forward to scaling our database applications to tens of thousands of IOPS and achieving consistent throughput to improve the experience for our users."

• AWS customer Shine Technologies uses RDS for Oracle to build complex solutions for enterprise customers. Adam Kierce, their Director said:

"Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS provided a turbo-boost to our enterprise class database-backed applications. In the past, we have invested hundreds of days in time consuming and costly code based performance tuning, but with Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS we were able to exceed those performance gains in a single day. We have demanding clients in the Energy, Telecommunication, Finance and Retail industries, and we fully expect to move all our Oracle backed products onto AWS using Amazon RDS for Oracle over the next 12 months. The increased performance of Amazon's RDS for Oracle with Provision IOPS is an absolute game changer, because it delivers more (performance) for less (cost)."

 

SOURCE 

AWS Week in Review - September 17th to September 23rd, 2012

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Let's take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week:

Monday, September 17	§   AWS added four new checks to the AWS Trusted Advisor including EC2 Reserved Instance Optimization, VPN Tunnel Redundancy, RDS Backup, and RDS Multi-AZ.
Tuesday, September 18	§   AWS introduced Auto Scaling termination policies to give you additonal control over the scale-down process.
Friday, September 21	§ Developer Andy Chilton released version 0.11.0 of Awssum, a collection of node.js modules for AWS.

SOURCE