Wednesday, May 31, 2017

New AWS Certifications on Big Data and Advanced Networking

AWS announced AWS Certified Big Data – Specialty and the AWS Certified Advanced Networking - Specialty. These certifications had been in the Beta and had been opened to the public today. The exam guide and the sample questions can be downloaded from the certification home pages mentioned earlier. One of the associate level certifications (1, 2, 3) have to be cleared to take this certification.

There are two online courses for helping getting through the the AWS Big Data Certification (here and here). I am not exactly sure, how much these course covers the various topics around the Big Data certification, but it never hurts to get one of them.

I am comfortable with Big Data and the AWS Cloud, so I am planning to attempt the `AWS Certified Big Data – Specialty` ASAP. I will also update with the tips and my experience with the certifications. I am really excited about this certification.

Best of luck !!!

Friday, May 19, 2017

AWS and Big Data Training

I have been into training line (along with consulting and projects) for a few years, both online and classroom, using a Wacom Tablet which I bought 5 years back. The Tablet helps me to convey the message better and quick, whether the participant is in some other part of world or in front of me. I am really passionate about the trainings, as it helps me think about a particular concept from different perspectives.

So, here is an AWS demo on how to create a ELB (Elastic Load Balancer) and EC2 (Linux Servers) in the Cloud. This particular combination can be used for the sake of High Availability or Scaling Up as more and more users start using your application.


Similar, below is the Big Data Demo on creating a HBase Observer, which is very similar to a Trigger in RDBMS. BTW, those who are new to HBase, it's a NoSQL Database of Columnar type. There are a lot of NoSQL databases and HBase is one of them.


If you are interested in any of these trainings, please contact me at praveensripati@gmail.com for further details. Both Big Data and Cloud are on the rage, so don't miss the opportunities around them.

See you soon !!!

Wednesday, May 3, 2017

Attaching an EBS Disk to a Linux Instance

In the previous blog, we looked the sequence of steps to create a Linux instance and log into it. In this blog, we will create a new hard disk (actually an EBS) and attach it to the Linux instance. I am going with the assumption that the EC2 instance has already been created.


1. Goto the EC2 management console and click on the Volumes in the left pane. And then click on `Create Volume`. Change the volume size to 1GB and click on Create.


2. It takes a couple of seconds, but there will be two EBS volumes. An 8 GB volume (in-use) which was automatically created at the the time EC2 creation. Another 1 GB volume (attached) which was created in the above step.

 
3. Select the 1 GB volume. Click on Actions and then Attach Volume. We have created a Linux EC2 instance and an EBS volume, now we need to attach these two.


4. Move the cursor to the instance box and select the EC2 instance to which the EBS has to be attached and then click Attach. The state of the 1GB instance should change from available to in-use.


5. Get the ip address of the EC2 instance and login to it using Putty as mentioned here.

6. Change to root (sudo su) and get the list of the partition tables (fdisk -l). The commands are mentioned in the parentheses. Note that the device name is /dev/xvdf from the below commands. It may vary, so the previous mentioned commands have to be run.


7. Build the Linux filesystem (mkfs /dev/xvdf), create a folder (mkdir /mnt/disk100) and finally mount the file system (mount /dev/xvdf /mnt/disk100). The commands are mentioned in the parentheses. Note that, I have chosen to create disk100 folder, you can replace with any other folder name.


Now the device has been mounted to /mnt/disk100 folder, the data in this folder will be written to the 1 GB EBS volume which we have created in one of the previous step. Even after stopping the EC2 instance, the data will be still there in the EBS instance. This EBS can be attached to another EC2 instance also.

Note that in the case of AWS, an EBS volume cannot be attached to multiple EC2 instances. But, the same thing can be done in the Google Cloud Platform.

Don't forget to terminate the Linux EC2 instance and delete the EBS volume. In the next blog, we will attach an EBS volume to an Windows EC2 instance, which is a bit more easier.