Building a Windows IT Infrastructure in the Cloud

Chapter 7. Keeping Your Network Fit, Trim, and Healthy

Setting up your network to work exactly the way you want it to is one thing. Keeping it running smoothly is something different altogether.

In this chapter I’ll walk you through some of the basics of keeping your network running smoothly, and making sure that if a catastrophe hits you’ll still be up and running. All of these topics are important no matter what infrastructure you’re using, though some of the details are specific to the Amazon Web Services cloud.

All of these topics are also highly automatable, so you don’t have to spend valuable time performing them manually.

Regular Backups

If the first rule of real estate is location, location, location, the first rule of IT should be backup, backup, backup.

The good news is that creating backups in the AWS cloud is about as simple as humanly possible. All you have to do is choose an instance and create a snapshot—which is exactly what it sounds like—a perfect copy of your instance at a specific moment in time.

Then you can go in periodically and clean out snapshots you don’t need.

It couldn’t get any easier, right?

Well, actually ... it kind of could.

Figure 7-1. Creating an EC2 snapshot

Automated EC2 Backups

Introducing the EC2 API Command Line Tools introduced some of the really cool command-line tools Amazon provides. One of the things I didn’t tell you was that if you create a server ...