Html & CSS help

[Aresden]

Well, it should be intimidating and you want it to be After all, it's a Swiss knife for millions dollars deployment right ?

Let me just give you some heads up. The basic things you want to get started with is the following, go read up on them

• Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
• Relational Database Service (RDS)
• Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
• Security Groups (SG)

Know the few things above would have got you started. Once you get started, you will know what to find out more and what to ask

Let me help you get started with the searching
http://bfy.tw/HeqJ

The first link is a very good start, and then you can ask more questions in this forum. I will help you out, if you also help yourself out

Hope ur still around David, I sent u a pm to ask u some questions, let me know if u prefer to answer it here instead

 

[davidktw]

Hope ur still around David, I sent u a pm to ask u some questions, let me know if u prefer to answer it here instead

It would be good that I answer it here, not unless you don’t feel comfortable about it. So that others reading it can learn a thing or two. What do you think?

After all there could be a lot for me to respond and the PM is rather limited. Let me know how I should proceed.

 

[Aresden]

It would be good that I answer it here, not unless you don’t feel comfortable about it. So that others reading it can learn a thing or two. What do you think?

After all there could be a lot for me to respond and the PM is rather limited. Let me know how I should proceed.

Im more than happy to ask you here.

copied over :

Hey David, first of all this is my basic understanding of EC2/S3 :
S3 - uses buckets that stores objects(file)
EC2 - launches virtual machines(instances)

Objective :I want to host a website that allows me to edit the contents and publish them online. The word "static" is a little confusing to me because it gives me the assumption that contents can never be changed because they are "static" and not "dynamic". However, I did a little research and it seems to mean that "dynamic" website are ones who have more advanced features like an integrated database etc.

Question :
If I want to add more contents(texts,pictures) in my website, am I able to do so even in S3? Is it done by simply changing the revision versions in the S3 buckets?

I haven't tried hosting a website using EC2 yet, but if I stop(halt) my instance, will my website go down as well?

What are the key differences between EC2 and S3 web hosting?


Oh and also, I am halfway into the aws for dummies guide, it gets more and more confusing with the plethora of features and differences. Also, I took abit of break in between reading to prepare for my finals so part of my memory has been washed . Now I am thinking that some hands-on would do me good.

 

[davidktw]

Im more than happy to ask you here.

copied over :

Hey David, first of all this is my basic understanding of EC2/S3 :
S3 - uses buckets that stores objects(file)
EC2 - launches virtual machines(instances)

Objective :I want to host a website that allows me to edit the contents and publish them online. The word "static" is a little confusing to me because it gives me the assumption that contents can never be changed because they are "static" and not "dynamic". However, I did a little research and it seems to mean that "dynamic" website are ones who have more advanced features like an integrated database etc.

Question :
If I want to add more contents(texts,pictures) in my website, am I able to do so even in S3? Is it done by simply changing the revision versions in the S3 buckets?

I haven't tried hosting a website using EC2 yet, but if I stop(halt) my instance, will my website go down as well?

What are the key differences between EC2 and S3 web hosting?


Oh and also, I am halfway into the aws for dummies guide, it gets more and more confusing with the plethora of features and differences. Also, I took abit of break in between reading to prepare for my finals so part of my memory has been washed . Now I am thinking that some hands-on would do me good.

PART 1

It's good you feel open about the whole thing. And here it goes

EC2 is in short for Elastic Compute Cloud. It seems large but it is actually one of the core managed service offered by the much larger Amazon Web Services (AWS)

EC2 basically manage in essence virtual machines or commonly referred to as Instances in cloud providers. Before the concept of Cloud come into play, web hosting companies offered Virtual Private Servers (VPS). Basically these virtual servers are analogous to servers you built yourself from parts you can buy off the shelf, however they are not hosted in your own data centre or your own home. They are hosted in the web hosting companies' data centre. On top of that, they are running in virtual environment running on top of a piece of software called Hypervisor. Some very well known hypervisors currently in the market are Xen, Hyper-V(from M$), QEmu, VMWare ESXi/Workstation/Player, Linux KVM.

Basically these hypervisors are software that allows numerous virtual machines created that run on top of it. All the virtual machines hosted in a single hypervisor will share physical/hardware resources that the hypervisor is running on, normally a single physical server.

So far you follow ?

 

[Aresden]

PART 1

It's good you feel open about the whole thing. And here it goes

EC2 is in short for Elastic Compute Cloud. It seems large but it is actually one of the core managed service offered by the much larger Amazon Web Services (AWS)

EC2 basically manage in essence virtual machines or commonly referred to as Instances in cloud providers. Before the concept of Cloud come into play, web hosting companies offered Virtual Private Servers (VPS). Basically these virtual servers are analogous to servers you built yourself from parts you can buy off the shelf, however they are not hosted in your own data centre or your own home. They are hosted in the web hosting companies' data centre. On top of that, they are running in virtual environment running on top of a piece of software called Hypervisor. Some very well known hypervisors currently in the market are Xen, Hyper-V(from M$), QEmu, VMWare ESXi/Workstation/Player, Linux KVM.

Basically these hypervisors are software that allows numerous virtual machines created that run on top of it. All the virtual machines hosted in a single hypervisor will share physical/hardware resources that the hypervisor is running on, normally a single physical server.

So far you follow ?

Yea I am following fine I guess. What you mentioned immediately made me go find out the key differences between VPS and EC2. But yea I kinda get what you mean.

 

[davidktw]

Yea I am following fine I guess. What you mentioned immediately made me go find out the key differences between VPS and EC2. But yea I kinda get what you mean.

PART 2

So what so different from EC2 offered by AWS cloud provider from VPS ? The key differences is the multitude amount of control and the sheer scale of it. There are a lot to talk about, but I basically just brief you on it since you haven't really touch on it.

You get to control the number of virtual CPU, memory, network speed and some capabilities when you choose. You choose the virtual machines (aka instances) based on Instance Types. Instance Type basically is the tiering of the virtual machines that AWS is selling for it's virtual machine. You also get to choose the number of hard disks, or more generically known as block devices that it offers. It can be magnetic hard disks, or solid state disks, which you can control the capacity and the maximum amount of I/Os it can take per second.

When you create the instances, you can also choose the type of operating system (OS) you can install. It can be the freely available CentOS Linux, Ubuntu Linux, Debian Linux, and other variants of Linux or Unices such as FreeBSD or OpenBSD, or it can be the Microsoft Windows Servers variants. There are also some pre-packages operating system that are created by large vendors which they sell via the AWS marketplace. These could be software appliances which run firewalls, routers, VPN servers, CRM system, SAP system, CMS, and many more.

 

[davidktw]

PART 3

With that, virtual computers don't run alone. You need load-balancers, routers(aka NAT), firewalls, and a lot of other environment facilities. AWS offers them under the umbrella of a managed service which they packaged under EC2.

I can only describe this far, because if I go further, I would rather just write a book, which I don't intend to.

How about S3. S3 is in short for Simple Storage Service. However it is not really that Simple. It's simple if you think of them as objects or files. You might read about folders in S3, but S3 doesn't have folders. Everyhting you store in S3 are single entities, which you can refer to them as objects, or documents. However AWS design S3 to allow you to have objects named as /ABC/DEF/XYZ.EXT and maybe other object named as /ABC/DEF/WXY.EXT. AWS also design the S3 RESTful API to allow you search for objects under the PREFIX of /ABC/DEF/. When you do that, the RESTful API gives you 2 objects namely /ABC/DEF/XYZ.EXT and /ABC/DEF/WXY.EXT. This behaviour gave the illusion of folders.

 

[Aresden]

PART 2

So what so different from EC2 offered by AWS cloud provider from VPS ? The key differences is the multitude amount of control and the sheer scale of it. There are a lot to talk about, but I basically just brief you on it since you haven't really touch on it.
.....

I got it, so AWS has a ton more customizable features and I read that it can also automatically scale according to traffic demand.

 

[davidktw]

PART 4

Now, S3 was later developed to allow serving of static contents. Static here refers to no manipulation of the contents as it was stored. When you retrieve the contents from the S3, S3 serve them the way they are stored by the owner. This is the meaning of static. Dynamic contents are generated dynamically by the server-side, which could be a web server installed with PHP, Perl, or other scripting languages. It could also be software written to retrieve data from the database/file/ldap/crm or any other kind of application and written to the accessor.

Below is a very simple PHP script

<?php

print "HELLO WORLD\r\n";

?>

The script may always return "HELLO WORLD\r\n", but because the output is generated by a scripting language, we consider it DYNAMIC

 

[davidktw]

I got it, so AWS has a ton more customizable features and I read that it can also automatically scale according to traffic demand.

In short "YES". That's the value of mature Cloud Providers, but the devils are in the details.

 

[davidktw]

PART 5

What S3 does offer is because your objects can be served via the HTTP/HTTPS interface, you can access it via the browser. That makes it as-if the S3 is a web server. But of course the S3 is much more than just a web server.

You can create buckets in S3. Buckets are basically containers to group your objects in ways you find them relevant. These buckets can be just containers, or you can configure them to belong to a DOMAIN NAME. For example, I could name the bucket as ABCXYZ.COM. Then you configure it to serve via HTTP/HTTPS, and you have an object named INDEX.HTML in it, you can actually access it via your browser at HTTP(S)://ABCXYZ.COM/INDEX.HTML

 

[davidktw]

PART 6

But what is the catch ? The catch is why would your browser access this AWS S3 bucket just because you name it ABCXYZ.COM right ? If you name it IBM.COM, would it means you would have taken over the IBM.COM domain ? Obviously things are a little more complicated.

In the Internet world, DOMAIN NAME are mapped to IP ADDRESSES. This mapping is performed by DNS registrar, and some well known ones are like GODADDY.COM, NAMECHEAP.COM, DREAMHOST.COM, and in Singapore the well known SGNIC.SG

S3 buckets have a unique domain names given to them and normally also partially associated with your bucket name. Suppose you have a bucket name MYBUCKET. AWS S3 will generate a host name perhaps mybucket.s3-website-ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com, if you create this bucket in the Singapore Region(deployment data centers) located in Singapore.

Once you do that, when you buy the domain ABCXYZ.COM from GODADDY.COM for example, you can configure in GODADDY to map WWW.ABCXYZ.COM to mybucket.s3-website-ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com using CNAME records. When you do that, should anyone type http://abcxyz.com/* in the browser, internally the browser will translate that to http://mybucket.s3-website-ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com/* and then access the objects in your bucket.

 

[davidktw]

PART 7

Of course, you will need to configure your S3 bucket to be publicly accessible by the Internet/World Wide Web, if you want to serve your contents to the world. There is a setting in the AWS S3 web console, attached to each bucket you have in it, to let you do this. Once you do this, it means ANYONE with access to your URL will be able to read objects from your bucket.

This is exactly what it means by using AWS S3 to serve static web sites. For your case, since you intention is to just serve information that is static to what you upload. You can do so with the S3. You don't even need to run a single virtual server to host a web server such as NginX or Apache Web Server or other kind. You don't even need to takecare of the performance or how much CPU or memory you need. AWS S3 is a managed service, which AWS will take care of it itself, and it can cater to a really large load across the globe.

 

[davidktw]

PART 8

When we refer to dynamic websites, we normally refer it to as dynamic from the server side perspective. But these days, with browsers which can interprete Javascript/HTML5/CSS3, commonly known as DHTML or Dynamic HTML, you can actually have the contents when presented to the audience with tons of dynamism. Is this what we called as web frontend dynamism.

And so I will stop here, for you to further enquire. To set your expectation, I will still be answering, but I might not come back as fast having it's late(in fact early) here. So well if you have any enquires, do pour out as much as possible in a post and I will answer when I'm free.

 

[Aresden]

Thanks for all your explainations, i appreciate all of them. I will do more hands-on and play around with the S3