# Day 20: AWS Services for Windows ### Windows on AWS ### Windows Servers on EC2 You can select from a number of Windows Server versions including the latest version, Windows Server 2019. ### SQL Server on RDS You can select from a number of SQL Server database versions. ### AWS Directory Service Lets you run Microsoft Active Directory (AD) as a managed service. ### AWS License Manager Makes it easier to manage your software licenses from software vendors such as Microsoft. ### Amazon FSx for Windows File Server A fully managed scalable storage built for Windows. ### AWS Software Development Kit (SDK) Allows you to write code in your favorite language to interact with AWS API. The SDK supports .NET, a language favorite for Windows Developers. ### Amazon WorkSpaces Allows you to run a virtual desktop. You can launch a Windows 10 desktop to provide a secure and durable workstation that is accessible from anywhere you have an internet connection. ### AWS Lambda Supports PowerShell as a programming language to write your serverless functions. ### AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) for Windows A migration methodology for moving large enterprises. AWS has Amazon Partners that specialize in providing professional services for MAP. --- ### AWS License Manager ### What is Bring-Your-Own-License? (BYOL) The process of reusing an existing software license to run vendor software on a cloud vendor's computing service. BYOL allows companies to save money since they may have purchased the license in bulk or at a time that provided a greater discount than if purchased again. * e.g., License Mobility is for Microsoft Volume Licensing customers with eligible server applications covered by active Microsoft Software Assurance (SA). ### AWS License Manager Features * Makes it easier to manage your software licenses from software vendors centrally across AWS and your on-premises environments. * Manages software that is licensed based on virtual cores (vCPUs), physical cores, sockets, or the number of machines. This includes a variety of software products from Microsoft, IBM, SAP, Oracle, and other vendors. * Works with: * EC2: Dedicated Instances, Dedicated Hosts, Spot Instances * RDS: Only for Oracle databases For Microsoft Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server licenses, you generally need to use a Dedicated Host. --- ### Logging Services ### CloudTrail Logs all API calls (SDK, CLI) between AWS services. * Examples: * Who created this bucket? Detect developer misconfiguration. * Who spun up that expensive EC2 instance? Detect malicious actors. * Who launched this SageMaker Notebook? Automate responses. ### CloudWatch A collection of multiple services: * **CloudWatch Logs**: A centralized place to store your cloud services log data or application logs. * **CloudWatch Metrics**: Represents a time-ordered set of data points. A variable to monitor. * **CloudWatch Events (EventBridge)**: Triggers an event based on a condition, e.g., every hour take a snapshot of the server. * **CloudWatch Alarms**: Triggers notifications based on metrics. * **CloudWatch Dashboard**: Creates visualizations based on metrics. * **AWS X-Ray**: A distributed tracing system. Pinpoints issues with your microservices. See how data moves from one app to another, how long it took to move, and if it failed to move forward. ### AWS CloudTrail * Enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of your AWS account. * Monitors API calls and actions made on an AWS account. * Easily identify which user to monitor API calls and actions made on an AWS account. * Where: Source IP Address * When: EventTime * Who: UserAgent * What: Region, Resource, Action * Logs by default and collects logs for the last 90 days via Event History. For more than 90 days, you need to create a Trail. * To analyze a Trail, you can use: * **Amazon CloudTrail Insights**: Automatically detects and flags unusual API activity. * **Amazon Athena**: Allows you to run SQL queries on your CloudTrail logs for detailed analysis. * Trails are output to S3 and do not have a GUI like Event History. --- ### CloudWatch Services 1. **CloudWatch Alarms** * Set alarms on specific metrics. * Notifies when metrics cross specified thresholds. * Can trigger actions like sending notifications or performing automated actions via AWS Lambda or Auto Scaling. 2. **CloudWatch Metrics** * Collects and tracks metrics for AWS services and custom metrics from your applications. * Provides a unified view of operational health. * Supports aggregation and mathematical transformations of metrics. 3. **CloudWatch Logs** * Collects and stores logs from AWS services, applications, and custom sources. * Supports real-time log monitoring, searching, and analysis. * Can create metrics from log data. 4. **CloudWatch Events (EventBridge)** * Delivers a near real-time stream of system events that describe changes in AWS resources. * Allows you to set rules to match events and route them to targets like AWS Lambda, SNS, SQS, or other AWS services. 5. **CloudWatch Dashboards** * Provides customizable visualizations of your metrics and logs. * Allows you to create dashboards to monitor operational health and performance in real time. 6. **CloudWatch Synthetics** * Allows you to create canaries, configurable scripts that monitor your endpoints and APIs. * Helps detect anomalies and measure performance continuously. 7. **CloudWatch ServiceLens** * Provides a single pane of glass for monitoring and tracing applications. * Integrates with AWS X-Ray to offer end-to-end observability for your application performance and dependencies. 8. **CloudWatch Contributor Insights** * Helps identify the top contributors impacting your system's performance. * Provides insights into high-cardinality data sets. 9. **CloudWatch Container Insights** * Provides monitoring and troubleshooting for containerized applications and microservices. * Integrates with Amazon ECS, EKS, and Kubernetes. 10. **CloudWatch Application Insights** * Monitors and troubleshoots application workloads. * Automatically discovers and sets up monitoring for applications running on AWS resources. --- ### CloudWatch Alarms * Monitors a CloudWatch Metric based on a defined threshold. * When the alarm breaches (goes outside the defined threshold), it changes state. * When it changes state, we can define what action it should trigger. * **Metric Alarm States**: * OK: The metric or expression is within the defined threshold. * ALARM: The metric or expression is outside of the defined threshold. * INSUFFICIENT DATA: The alarm has just started, the metric is not available, or not enough data is available. **Anatomy of an Alarm**: * **Threshold Condition**: Defines when a datapoint is breached. * **Evaluation Periods**: Number of previous periods. * **Data point**: Represents the metric's measurement at a given period. * **Metric**: The actual data we are measuring. * **Networking**: The volume of incoming network traffic measured in Bytes. When using 5-minute monitoring, divide by 300 to get Bytes/second. * **Datapoints to alarm**: 1 data point is breached in an evaluation period going back 4 periods. This is what triggers the alarm. * **Period**: How often it checks to evaluate the Alarm. --- ### CloudWatch Logs - Log Streams * A log stream represents a sequence of events from an application or instance being monitored. * You can create Log Streams manually, but generally, this is automatically done by the service you are using. * **Log Group for a Lambda function**: Log Streams are named after the running instance. Lambdas frequently run on new instances, so the streams contain timestamps. * **Log Group for application logs running on EC2**: Log Streams are named after the running instance's Instance ID. * **Log Group for AWS Glue**: Log Streams are named after the Glue Jobs. **Log Event**: Represents a single event in a log file. Log Events can be seen within a Log Stream. You can use filter events to filter out logs based on simple or pattern-matching syntax. **Log Insights**: * Enables you to interactively search and analyze your CloudWatch log data. * Advantages: * More robust filtering than using the simple Filter events in a Log Stream. * Less burdensome than exporting logs to S3 and analyzing them via Athena. * Supports all types of logs. * Commonly used via the console to do ad-hoc queries against log groups. * Has its own language: **CloudWatch Logs Insights Query Syntax**. * A single request can query up to 20 log groups. * Queries time out after 15 minutes if they have not completed. * Query results are available for 7 days. * AWS provides sample queries to get you started for common tasks, easing the learning of the Query Syntax. A good example is filtering VPC Flow Logs. * You can create and save your own queries to make future repetitive tasks easier. --- ### CloudWatch Metrics * Represents a time-ordered set of data points. It’s a variable that is monitored over time. * Comes with many predefined metrics that are generally name-spaced by AWS Service. ### EC2 Per-Instance Metrics: * **CPUUtilization**: The percentage of allocated EC2 compute units that are currently in use on the instance. * **DiskReadOps**: The number of completed read operations from all instance store volumes available to the instance. * **DiskWriteOps**: The number of completed write operations to all instance store volumes available to the instance. * **DiskReadBytes**: The number of bytes read from all instance store volumes available to the instance. * **DiskWriteBytes**: The number of bytes