Java Applications on Amazon Web Services (AWS)

When I graduated from college in 1996, main programming languages for enterprise applications were C and C++. Although it was created for set-top boxes at the beginning, Java was gaining traction for enterprise projects. Since then Java has been widely the main choice for large enterprise applications.

Nowadays, many other languages emerged for cloud applications. With microservices architecture monolith applications are divided into self-contained logical units that are easily manageable. Because each service is independent of others, run-time platform of each service can also be different. This architecture allows us to easily select the best platform and language for each service. We can build one service with Ruby while using Scala for the other.

Java Applications in the Cloud

Event it is 20 years old, Java has it's place in cloud applications. Big companies like Netflix still use Java for their cloud applications. And thanks to companies that believe in open source like Netflix, building cloud applications in Java is easy.

Although you are not Netflix or Google, you can build Java cloud applications with Netflix Open Source Software packages. Spring Cloud framework contains Netflix open source software that includes service registration and discovery, circuit breakers, metrics, etc.

Amazon Web Services

Amazon has started its cloud services about ten years ago and now it is a leader in public cloud services. It provides many different integrated cloud services and it is a good choice if you try to build cloud applications.

Recently I decided to learn Amazon Web Services. I have used a couple of services like Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Elastic Load Balancing (ELB).

When you learn something new, it is very important to use it. If you practice the things you learned, they become more permanent. At this point AWS Free Tier is incredible. It allows you to use many of services to some degree without a fee.

Also, I believe when you know something that can help others, you should share with others. So I started a blog, and I will share the things that I have learned about running Java cloud applications on AWS.

At the beginning, I will show how to develop a simple Java Spring Boot application and run in an AWS EC2 instance. In the next parts, I will show how to use other AWS services.

In this first post, to keep it short, I will only talk about creating an AWS account and setting up your environment. In the next post, I will show how to build a simple Java Spring Boot application.

Creating an AWS account

Before you start you need an AWS account. You can create a free AWS account here.

You should note that although AWS Free Tier gives 12 months free usage of some AWS services, credit card information is needed at registration time.

In addition, please note that registering an AWS account is an easy task, but staying in the Free Tier and keeping your account safe is not a trivial thing. It is important to know that AWS uses Shared Responsibility Model. So, please keep these things in mind:

1. Enable AWS Multi-Factor Authentication mechanism on your root account to prevent account theft. You can use your smart phone as a virtual authentication device.
2. Create a new IAM user and use its credentials for AWS CLI or AWS SDK API calls, not your root account.
3. Keep your AWS access key id and secret access key private. Don’t make it public by putting in a public repository by accident. Hackers use bots to search API keys in public repositories.
4. Create a billing alarm to keep you safe.
5. After you did your experiments, delete the resources you created to avoid any charges.

AWS Command Line Interface

To execute commands on the command line you should install AWS CLI tools. You can install and configure as shown here.

After it is installed and configured correctly, you can execute commands like this.

C:\Users\Ceyhun>aws iam list-users
{
    "Users": [
        {
            "UserName": "CeyhunOzgun",
            "Path": "/",
            "CreateDate": "2016-12-10T08:25:15Z",
            "UserId": "XXXXXXXXXXXXXX",
            "Arn": "arn:aws:iam::XXXXXXXXXXX:user/CeyhunOzgun"
        }
    ]
}

And you are ready to run Java applications on AWS.

In the next post, I will show how to develop and deploy a simple Java Spring Boot application to an AWS EC2 instance.