When do you need to use some form of Cloud Distribution?
If you consider this concept a form of caching, then you need it when your website passes a certain threshold in terms of users and the volume of data that is being sent out. The actual numeric figure depends entirely on your setup – you may have large files and sending them out of your server may fill up the available bandwidth. Or you may have a lot of users and may want to ease the load on the server by pushing some of this load to somewhere else.
Nevertheless, the purpose of this article is to show you how this is being done by using the AWS CloudFront.
AWS CloudFront
First, you need to go to the “CloudFront” option in the AWS Console and attempt to create a Web distribution. On the creation page you should first fill in your domain name as the distribution origin (the primary source of the content):
1. Classification
Before getting into action, let’s split the “performance” problem in a couple of boxes, as the concept itself is quite general. First, deciding what we want to monitor (an entire system? a particular application?) – and second, deciding on what type of performance monitoring do we require (stats collection by the kernel? in-depth analysis?). Based on this particular classification, we may end up with 4 categories, each with its particular software selection:
Stats (Counters) | Tracing / Profiling / Debugging | |
System Wide | ||
Per Process |
NB:
netstat offers much more info beyond statistics on interface / protocol and may also be used to monitor individual connections.
dtrace and SystemTap can also trace individual applications.