Amazon AWS SysOps – AWS Account Management part 3

6. AWS Service Catalog Hands-On

So let’s get started with Service catalog. So I’ll just key clear and say Service catalog. Here we go. So what we are going to do next is click on it and as we can see, we are directly on this UI that is literally a service catalog. So we get the logo AWS service catalog right here and we can get product list, portfolio list, etc, etc. So let’s do something pretty cool at first. We’re going to change things. So we’re going to change your logo. And I want to use the logo of my company. And maybe I want to change also the primary color to something like blue. I’ll just use the blue of my company. Here we go. And apply. So this is literally to show you that it is a service catalog. And so you can brand it however you want.

So for whoever you work for, you can just brand service catalog and make it look like it’s yours. Okay? Now as an admin we’re going to be able to get provisioned products and portfolios. Where there’s a user, we can see the product list and the provision product list. So let’s get started. As an admin, as an admin I’m going to click on Product List and I want to upload a new product. Let me just close these prompts. Here we go. So this product is going to be called My Stack. Whatever you want, it could be whatever you want and say this is an example product provided by so you can say whoever provided this. So it could be an admin, it could be Stefan. And if there is a vendor, you can even set the vendor right here.

But this is not a mandatory field. Click on Next and here we can enter some email contact if you wanted to for support. This is not something you have to do. And then a support link for supporting this product and the support description. But we don’t need this. Finally we need the version details so we can upload a template file. And here I’m going to click on choose File and I will choose so in my code there is a service catalog folder. I’ll select lamp stack. So this is just the stack we’ve launched before in cloud formation which contains just a lamp stack, very quickly made and that’s template constraint from AWS. Okay, the version title will call it V 1. 0 and we can say first version as the description. Click on next.

And now we’re done. We can review everything. So, okay, we have our stack. This is an example product. It’s provided by me. And here is my contact for support. And here is my version source and my version title and everything like this. This is perfect. I’ll create this product. And now we have our first product being created called My Stack. And it will appear after a few seconds. Here it is. Okay, now we have to assign this product to a portfolio. So as an administrator, I’m going to create a portfolio and I’ll call it my web devs. And this is for my web developers and so it’s a portfolio for apps for my web developers and the owner again is going to be myself.

So I click on create and now in this portfolio I’m going to be able to add product to it. So I can click on add product and upload my stack. Click on my stack and add the product to the portfolio. Okay, excellent. So now in this portfolio, my web devs, we start having some products. So if I refresh, as we can see now my stack is there. And here if we wanted to, we could add some users to be able to do stuff on our portfolio. So this is where we can set up some users. We could set up some constraints in the way the products are launched by users, but then more importantly, we can assign user groups and roles to be able to use this portfolio.

So I click on add user group or Role. In here I’m able to say okay, my admins and maybe the users TIFFAN and maybe some roles if you wanted to, are able to access this portfolio. So I click on add access and here we go. Now my users, group and roles can successfully access all the products within this portfolio. Okay, so how does it work now then I have to switch accounts, so I’m going to log in as my users defend. So for this I go to my sign in for my users. Here’s my account ID. I have an Im username that I’ve created from before and the password and I just click on sign in. So I’m now signed in and I can go to my service catalog and in there in my portfolio, just make sure you are in the right region.

By the way, in my product list on the top left hand side, as a user I’m able to see my stack that was assigned as something I can create. So I can basically click launch the product. And here I say okay, what do I want to launch? So let’s say my stack launched and I’ll just not include any spaces. I will select version 1. 0 and I will just launch it as and you can just say whatever option you want. They’re the same as probably because I added twice the same user. Anyway, we’ll just launch this one. Click on next. The parameters is whatever parameter I want to set for my stack. So this is like cloud formation parameters just like before. So here the key name for my EC.

Two instances is going to be a base course. My database password is going to be password. My SS location is going to be from anywhere. My database is my database database user. I’ll call it Stefan and the root password is going to be password. This looks good. And then the instance type is going to be a T, two micro. Here we go. Click on Next and Next here, we could have added some tag options if we wanted to. Next and then next. And here we go. This looks just like cloud formation. And click on next. And here basically what we’ve done is that we’ve provisioned this internal application directly through this self service.

And so this is just like a cloud formation template though it will get launched and what we get as a result is how we can use that product directly. So think of the possibilities that you can have when you have some users who don’t need to know AWS, but just need to access and launch cloud formation templates on demand. This is how they would do it. This is how they would do it through the service catalog. So now I have to wait for my stack to be created. So I’ll just wait a little bit. So now my stack has succeeded, the status has succeeded. And so if we scroll down, we can see that there is a website URL we can access directly. That’s the outputs straight from my confirmation template.

So this is why outputs are super important when you start using service catalog. And here we go. I can start using my lamp stack and do whatever I want with this if I wanted to, but I don’t have to. But that’s if I wanted to. And so that’s it. That’s how service catalog works. And if you wanted to just stop using this application, you would click on Terminate and then it will just go ahead and terminate the entire application stack. So that’s it. You’ve seen service catalog. Just remember it’s literally a service catalog. So you create portfolios and products and then you allow users to provision them and that’s it. I will see you in the next lecture.

7. AWS Billing Alarms

Okay, so let’s just go over the basics and create a billing alarm. So as you know, billing alarm data is stored in cloudwatch US East One. So for all the worldwide AWS cost, all the data will go into the single region of US East One. And it’s for the actual incurred cost, not like a more drill down cost as we’ll see in the future lectures. So it’s for overall cost. And so this will just allow you to set a threshold or an alarm in case your overall worldwide cost go over a certain limit. So let’s go ahead and create a billing alarm together. So for this, we’re going to go to the top right, my billing dashboard, where is all the billing information is, and we’ll explore this in future lectures. But for now, we’ll go to Preferences.

And in Preferences, you can click here to basically receive either feature usage alerts or receive billing alerts. So you can enable these tick boxes if you wanted to have them. And then you click on Manage Billing. Alarms alerts. So this takes you directly into Cloud Watch, and in Cloud Watch, you revisit the dashboard. And on the left hand side, you have a billing alarm. Right here you can click on Billing. I’m going to delete my current one just so I can create one with you. So I’m going to go to billing and then create an alarm. And so this basically shows that when the blue line is over the red line, then a billing alarm will be triggered.

So as you can see, I’m incurring some charges on my account because I’m using it. And so right now, as we can see, if I set an alarm for zero, then it will be automatically exceeded, but I can set an alarm for say, $10. And so now the red line is here. And so as long as my blue dots are not above that $10 bar, then I will not receive an alarm. So this is a great notification. Now I can basically send this to a notification list, so I can basically have a notify me, which sends this to my email directly. And then I click on Create Alarm. And here we go. My alarm has been created. And now I will receive basically an email anytime that billing alarm is breached, which is once per month. So let me show you what that email looks like.

So in case you want to receive a billing alarm, you would get an alarm email saying billing alarm in US East North Virginia. So you can see it’s north Virginia region, and it says, oh, the alarm limit you set was for $0. And it turns out that, well, you’ve exceeded because you have incurred 2. 52 USD as of Saturday, the 1 December. And so this is the kind of email you would receive. See, then there’s more details and it tells you what’s happening. And you can directly click to jump to the console and see the details of this billing alarm. But that’s it. That’s also billing alarm. They’re quite handy. But as we’ll see in the next lecture, there are more powerful tools you can use to have more detailed and more structured control over your costs. So see you in the next lecture.

8. AWS Cost Explorer

Okay, so now we have three costing tools that are kind of neat in the AWS console, and we’ll go see them in three lectures. The first one is AWS Cost Explorer, which as an empty case is a graphical tool to explore, view and analyze your cost and usage. And it’s really nice because you will see we have graphs and so on. And so we can review the charges and costs associated either with our AWS accounts or organization, if we have created an organization. The really cool thing about it is that it can, at scale, forecast your spending for the next three months. So you can evaluate, based on how you’ve been using AWS, what it would look like for the next three months.

On top of it, it can give you recommendations for which EC two reserve instances to purchase. So the guesswork is out of the question. Maybe you have a lot of easy two instances running. And Cost Explorer is the tool to tell you, well, you should purchase this much reserve instance of this type because this will bring you this much cost saving. So you get access to default reports. And there is also an API to build custom cost management applications, which is really, really neat. So let’s go ahead and try this out. Back in my console, I click on Data Kimmy’s courses and my billing dashboard. In there I am able to access Cost Explorer, which, as you can see, is the one on the left hand side, just under Bills.

So I click on Cost Explorer, and now we have to enable it. So we enable Cost Explorer, and now it says the spend data for your account is being populated and it can take up to 24 hours to populate spend data. So it’s not something that we’ll see right away. So 24 hours later, I’m back. And that was quick for you. That was a milliseconds. So let’s go ahead and click on Launch Cost Explorer and we’ll have a very cool view. So this is my account. And as you can see, I don’t use my account a lot. I just use for training purposes for this account. And so, as you can see here, I have my month to date cost and also my forecasted month end cost. So it tells me over time how I’m doing and how much I’m spending.

So we can see is that there is daily cost as a graph. So I can see which day I incurred which cost. And as we can see, on January 3, I incurred a lot of cost. And then you get some trends. So if you were to use your account a lot, the trends would be probably a bit more insightful. But here it says that Kms service usage is up to by 0. 3, which is 40%. Overall cost is up by 374%. And then it also tells me recent usage. So in case one region that I don’t expect as cost increasing that it tells me of all of this right here. So this is nice, but it can do so much more. So the really cool thing, and where the exam will ask you questions is around reservations. It will ask you which service allows you to view the Reservation Summary and also get recommendation on Reserved Instance.

So this is cost explorer. That’s the answer. So if you click on Reservation Summary unfortunately, I don’t have any Reserved Instance purchase from me. But as we can see here, if you had Reserved Instances, they tell you how many reservations you have, the net savings you’ve done by reserving your instance, your inventory and recommended saving opportunities if you can. So this is great, because when you have purchased Reserved Instances, the main answer is the main question for yourself is hey, is this worth it? And this report tells you exactly that. On top of it, if you were to use EC Two instances continuously for a long time, this would get populated and this would say, these are our recommendations, our purchase recommendations for Reserved Instances based on your usage.

And it turns out that based on the filters you have. So if you want to have one year or three years term standard convertible, whether or not you want to pay upfront or not, and how many days of the data you want to use for these estimations, basically, they will tell you everything you need. And all of a sudden they will say, here are the reserved instances for EC Two that we are going to recommend to you, which is really, really cool. But not only EC two. On the top right there is EC. Two RDS. Elastic ache redshirt and elastic search. So these are all the services where you can buy Reserved Instances, by the way. And so you can get really, really good recommendations directly from Cost Explorer.

So not only that, but we can explore the Reservation Utilization. So you could click on this Explore Reservation Utilization and get a nice report, or we can click on Explore Reservation Coverage and also get some information around the on demand cost you have versus the potential savings you could have based on the recommendations. So these are premade default reports. We will also get a Cost and Usage default report, which is really, really cool. So why is it so much better than everything else? Well, it’s really good because first of all, it’s very graphical. You get a nice Csv based on which service, how much you paid each month, or each quarter, which is really, really cool. And the service total over time for a full year, for example.

And on top of it, on the right hand side, you have filters. So if you are only interested inside Athena, you would click on Athena, apply the filter and you would get the cost related to Athena. Or if you’re only interested to S Three or two EC Two, let’s take EC Two, for example. I’ll take EC two instances and EC two load balancing. Apply the filters and I get some information around how much I spent for my instances. Obviously not much right now, we’re not showing much because it’s my course account, so but this gives you an idea of how good it could be. Basically, if you had a full address account, you can slice and dice using all these filters. And when you’re happy, when you’re happy with this filter and these reports, you can save the report. And then this will appear under Saved Reports.

So I’ll just call it Dummy Report, and now my report has been saved. And so if I go to Saved Reports, I can see all the reports that have access to Marketplace Delhi Cost Dummy Report, which is my custom report right here. We also get a bunch of reports credit for you by AWS. So, overall, Cost Explorer is a tremendous tool as a sysaps, if you want to look at your cost and really evaluate where you can have savings and where you’re spending too much and what are the trends. And so the exam will expect you to know that Cost Explorer is the service to access these reports, get more filters, and also get reservations insight and reservation summaries and recommendations. So, hope you liked it. I will see you in the next lecture.