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Wilson Mar

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Overview

This tutorial, unlike other tutorials which focus on specific vendors, is a multi-vendor comparison of regions.

TODO: Provide an interactive comparison.

I want you to feel confident that you’ve mastered this skill. That’s why this takes a hands-on approach where you type in commands and we explain the responses and possible troubleshooting. This is a “deep dive” because all details are presented.

Like a good music DJ, I’ve carefully arranged the presentation of concepts into a sequence for easy learning, so you don’t have to spend as much time as me making sense of the flood of material around this subject.

Sentences that begin with PROTIP are a high point of this website to point out wisdom and advice from experience. NOTE point out observations that many miss. Search for them if you only want “TL;DR” (Too Long Didn’t Read) highlights.

Stuck? Contact me and I or one of my friends will help you.

Definitions

Each region is a separate geographic area.


Amazon regions

  1. Open the Amazon EC2 console at
    https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2

    Sign-in if you haven’t done so.

  2. Select your default region: from the navigation bar, view the options in the region selector.

    Code Name
    us-east-1 US East (N. Virginia)
    us-west-1 US West (N. California)
    us-west-2 US West (Oregon)
    eu-west-1 EU (Ireland)
    eu-central-1 EU (Frankfurt)
    ap-northeast-1 Asia Pacific (Tokyo)
    ap-northeast-2 Asia Pacific (Seoul)
    ap-southeast-1 Asia Pacific (Singapore)  
    ap-southeast-2 Asia Pacific (Sydney)
    sa-east-1 South America (São Paulo)

    Names in parentheses is what is displayed at the upper-right on various AWS consoles.

    NOTE: In addition to the above, Amazon’s has a AWS GovCloud (US) and China (Beijing) which cannot be specified this way.

  3. Availability Zones under each region are listed on the Status by service under each continent at status.aws.amazon.com

    Each region within Amazon contains multiple, isolated Availability Zones.

    Additional end-point locations via AWS CloudFormation CDN service.

    CAUTION: The number and mapping of Availability Zones per region may vary between AWS accounts.

    NOTE: Amazon charges for network traffic between availability zones.

    Set Default Region and URL for CLI

  4. Open your MacOS profile using a text editor (substitute atom with subl, vim, etc.):

    PROTIP: Set an environment variable to your default regional endpoint (for example, https://ec2.us-west-1.amazonaws.com):

    
    atom ~/.bash_profile
    
  5. Add to the bottom of the file based on your selection in the step above:

    export AWS_DEFAULT_REGION=us-west-2
    export EC2_URL=https://us-west-2.console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/v2/home?region=us-west-2

    Notice the region is specified twice in EC2_URL.

    WARNING: Do not include in EC2_URL the # and what follows, such as “#Instances:sort=instanceId”.

  6. Save the file and run the file to load it into memory:

    
    source ~/.bash_profile
    

    List regions using CLI

  7. In a Terminal window, view the very latest list of AWS regions:

    
     aws ec2 describe-regions
     aws ec2 describe-availability-zones --region us-west-2
     

    For examples of AWS CLI commands such as the above, see:
    Amazon’s User Guide on Regions and availability zones.

  8. If you get an error message like this:

    -bash: aws: command not found
    

    then install Python 2.7, pip, and the AWS CLI.

  9. If you get an error message such as this:

    An error occurred (UnauthorizedOperation) when calling the DescribeRegions operation: You are not authorized to perform this operation.
    

    then use the AWS configure command to obtain:

    • AWS Access Key ID
    • AWS Secret Access Key
    • Default region name (such as “us-west-2”)

    PROTIP: Create Named Profiles in file ~/.aws/credentials and ~/.aws/config (containing region) because you will likely use multiple AWS accounts.

    Then, go to IAM to define permissions for each user to access EC2.


Microsoft Azure cloud regions

Not all services are available in all regions.

Regions with locations, rearranged by continent:

Region Location API
Canada Central Toronto -
Canada East Quebec City -
West US California Y
Central US Iowa Y
East US Virginia Y
East US 2 Virginia Y
North Central US Illinois Y
South Central US Texas Y
Brazil South Sao Paolo Y
North Europe Ireland Y
West Europe Netherlands Y
Germany Central Frankfurt -
Germany Northeast Magdeburg -
Japan East Tokyo, Saitama Y
Japan West Osaka Y
Southeast Asia Singapore Y
East Asia Hong Kong Y
Australia East New South Wales -
Australia Southeast Victoria -
Central India Pune -
South India Chennai -
West India Mumbai -
China North Beijing -
China East Shanghai -

Two regions for the US Government are in Virginia. http://bit.ly/msgovt

See https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/cloud-os/global-datacenters.aspx

Rackspace

Rackspace began operations soon after the announcement of AWS. The company provides value-added on AWS as well as on its own servers East of its Austin, Texas headquarters.

AppScale (@appscalecloud) gives you the freedom to run App Engine applications on any public, private, or hybrid cloud.

More on DevOps

This is one of a series on DevOps:

  1. DevOps_2.0
  2. ci-cd (Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery)
  3. User Stories for DevOps
  4. Enterprise Software)

  5. Git and GitHub vs File Archival
  6. Git Commands and Statuses
  7. Git Commit, Tag, Push
  8. Git Utilities
  9. Data Security GitHub
  10. GitHub API
  11. TFS vs. GitHub

  12. Choices for DevOps Technologies
  13. Pulumi Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
  14. Java DevOps Workflow
  15. Okta for SSO & MFA

  16. AWS DevOps (CodeCommit, CodePipeline, CodeDeploy)
  17. AWS server deployment options
  18. AWS Load Balancers

  19. Cloud services comparisons (across vendors)
  20. Cloud regions (across vendors)
  21. AWS Virtual Private Cloud

  22. Azure Cloud Onramp (Subscriptions, Portal GUI, CLI)
  23. Azure Certifications
  24. Azure Cloud

  25. Azure Cloud Powershell
  26. Bash Windows using Microsoft’s WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux)
  27. Azure KSQL (Kusto Query Language) for Azure Monitor, etc.

  28. Azure Networking
  29. Azure Storage
  30. Azure Compute
  31. Azure Monitoring

  32. Digital Ocean
  33. Cloud Foundry

  34. Packer automation to build Vagrant images
  35. Terraform multi-cloud provisioning automation
  36. Hashicorp Vault and Consul to generate and hold secrets

  37. Powershell Ecosystem
  38. Powershell on MacOS
  39. Powershell Desired System Configuration

  40. Jenkins Server Setup
  41. Jenkins Plug-ins
  42. Jenkins Freestyle jobs
  43. Jenkins2 Pipeline jobs using Groovy code in Jenkinsfile

  44. Docker (Glossary, Ecosystem, Certification)
  45. Make Makefile for Docker
  46. Docker Setup and run Bash shell script
  47. Bash coding
  48. Docker Setup
  49. Dockerize apps
  50. Docker Registry

  51. Maven on MacOSX

  52. Ansible
  53. Kubernetes Operators
  54. OPA (Open Policy Agent) in Rego language

  55. MySQL Setup

  56. Threat Modeling
  57. SonarQube & SonarSource static code scan

  58. API Management Microsoft
  59. API Management Amazon

  60. Scenarios for load
  61. Chaos Engineering