Learn Amazon Web Services in a Month of Lunches

Chapter 14. High availability: working with AWS networking tools

Back in chapter 12, you doubled the ability of your application to meet growing demand by replicating the instance, running it as an AMI, and then launching it as a new instance. But there’s a far more important reason to replicate your resources: to protect against failure. All hardware (and most software) will eventually stop working; it’s just a matter of time. This means the storage drive containing your OS will one day drop dead, the network connection will fail, and the application software will bug out. That’s life.

But why let disaster become catastrophe? Consider high availability—the sysadmin way to provide backup resources that can be automatically deployed to replace ...