AWS: 4. Lanching an EC2 instance using .NET SDK

It is great to be able to very simply launch an EC2 instance and install the application using nothing but a S3 bucket (with binaries) and a bootstrap script. Imagine if you were able to automate this process.

There are multiple ways to interact with the AWS platform. The AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) and AWS Software Developers Kit (SDK) are one of the few methods. These methods allows developers and system administrators to write scripts to interact with AWS resources. In this post I will be using the AWS .NET SDK to automate the launch process of an EC2 instance.

The AWS .NET SDK has undergone a major restructuring during the last year. Now the .NET SDK is split by AWS service. The NuGet package of a service itself is split into two components, the "Core" dynamic link library (DLL) contains all the plumbing (signature creation etc.) and "Service" DLL contains the supporting classes for the service. The NuGet package that I will be using for this post is "AWSSDK.EC2".

I strongly recommend looking at the AWS .NET blog for updates and tutorials. 

The following .NET code launches a new EC2 instance and does exactly what the manual steps did in one of the previous posts.



The key pieces of information that is of interest are the following.

1. The Amazon Machine Image (AMI) - In this particular case it is the golden image I created.
2. Key pair - The *.pem key use to decrypt the administrator password.
3. Security group - The security group that opens inbound port 88 and Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) port. 
4. The region where the instance will be launched

The above values needs to be obtained from the AWS Console except for the region information. Normally the region information is specified as an attribute in the AWS SDK configuration. In my case I am using "eu-west-1". 

There is tons of best practices around securely storing the AWS credentials so that you reduce the risk of adding it to a public repository like Github. Therefore I suggest you look at this post. 

So far so good. I managed to automate the EC2 launching process and able to horizontally scale the application with manual execution of the above script. In the next stop I am going to look further into automating the launch process. 

A word on passing AWS Solutions Architect - Associate exam

The AWS Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA) exam is a very interesting beast and there is no doubt it is a valuable certification. Last week I managed to pass the exam with 72% which I am quite happy about (wonder where the last 28% went....)

I have worked with two camps of people, some who believe that certification is a fraud made up by vendors to make "more" money, and some who see it as a valuable achievement. I see certification as a nice to have personal goal, but never a replacement to real world experiences.

My advice for SAA exam is pretty simple. Give yourself at least 2/3 months and use the AWS platform as much as possible. Always start with basic tasks such as creating a S3 bucket, and attempt to use features in S3 to "productionise" it. Then think about how the S3 bucket can be compromised, and whether there are any safeguards in the platform that you can use. The AWS documentation is perhaps the best documentation I have ever come across. It is clear, concise and quite easy to understand.

There are number of courses in Udemy and I recommend you follow one of them. The Udemy course covers almost everything you need to know, but remember to understand the concepts. Knowing and understanding are two different things and make sure you follow the documentation to fully understand the concepts. I am not a bright person, and had to spend many hours reading through documentation to understand certain concepts. There are tons of materials on YouTube (AWS Deep Dives) that is extremely useful if you want to understand "how" and "why" certain things work the way they do.

Lastly, if you are taking the exam in the morning, make sure to have a very good breakfast and strong coffee because you will need it. The questions can be very long and you have to concentrate. Read the questions to the end and try hard to understand the question in the first or second go. Passing an exam require practise; what I mean here is not practising on the AWS platform but the good old questions. Find as many questions as you can, and do them many times. Try hard not to remember the answers but the concept. Research the questions; I found this to be very valuable, because it took me to parts of the documentation that I would never have read.

Good luck - you will need it!