Lesson Recap

• Monitoring
• Alerting
• Recovering
• Automating

Lesson Objectives

You will be able to:

• Monitor AWS applications
• Alert on problems in applications
• Recover failures in your platform
• Understand testing and tradeoffs in automating recovery from failure

In this lesson, you learned how to monitor and maintain systems in AWS. You also looked at what and how to recover systems that have failed. The larger your application grows, the more parts and services it will have. The more complex it grows, the more things that can go wrong. The more things that can go wrong, the more frequently they will go wrong. Expect failures, and plan to address and recover from them.

Glossary

• SSL certificate: Cryptographic certificate for encrypting traffic between two computers.
• Source of truth: When data is stored in multiple places or ways, the "source of truth" is the one that is used when there is a discrepancy between the multiple sources.
• Monitoring: Systems to track and make visible metrics that are useful in identifying system performance.
• Alerting: Systems to attract attention when performance thresholds are crossed.
• Chaos Engineering: Intentionally causing issues in order to validate that a system can respond appropriately to problems.

Further Reading

• AWS Services That Publish CloudWatch Metrics
• PagerDuty
• VictorOps
• Analyzing Log Data with CloudWatch Logs Insights
• Everything Fails All the Time
• Principles of Chaos Engineering
• Chaos Monkey