Amazon Web Services: A Quick Reference Guide

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a collection of managed web services (infrastructure building blocks) that together make up a cloud computing platform.  The most well known are Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Services (S3).

Amazon has been steadily improving and innovating on multiple fronts – storage, compute, databases, management and orchestration. The innovation is outpacing the market ability to absorb in many cases. Corporate IT is way behind the startup world in its ability to comprehend, let alone leverage these Web Services.

The next decade is going to be the transformation of enterprise architecture to take advantage of these innovations. Just like e-commerce took almost 10+ years to become mainstream, i anticipate the same trajectory is going to happen with the adoption of cloud web services.

How can these web services help your business?

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

The Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is a Web service that allows users to provision new machines into Amazon’s virtualized infrastructure in a matter of minutes; using a publicly available API (application programming interface), it reduces the time required to obtain and boot a new server.

EC2 is very attractive to IT organizations that want to move fast.  The 5 core benefits are : (1) elastic capacity with ability to scale up and down in minutes; (2) quick and global deployment; (3) No CapEx, no initial large spend; (4) Pay as you go, for what you use; and (5) Automation and scaling.

Provisioning

Setting up an EC2 instance is quite easy. Once you create your AWS (Amazon Web service) account, you can use the on-line AWS console, or simply download the offline command line’s tools to start provisioning your instances.

EC2 instance is typically a virtual machine with a certain amount of RAM, CPU, and storage capacity. Users get full root access and can install almost any OS or application in their AMIs (Amazon Machine Images). Web services APIs allow users to reboot their instances remotely, scale capacity quickly, and use on-demand service when needed; by adding tens, or even hundreds, of machines.

There is no up-front hardware setup and there are no installation costs, because Amazon charges only for the capacity you actually use.

Pricing Models

Amazon EC2 provides its customers with three flexible purchasing models to make it easy for the cost optimization:

• 
  On-Demand instances, which allow you to pay a fixed rate by the hour with no commitment.
• Reserved instances, which allow you to pay a low, one-time fee and in turn receive a significant discount on the hourly usage charge for that instance. It ensures that any reserved instance you launch is guaranteed to succeed (provided that you have booked them in advance). This means that users of these instances should not be affected by any transient limitations in EC2 capacity.
• 
  Spot instances, which enable you to bid whatever price you want for instance capacity, providing for even greater savings, if your applications have flexible start and end times.
• Pay for servers “by the hour” (on-­‐demand); Pay for storage “per Gigabyte” per month; Pay for data transfer “per Gigabyte”;

AutoScaling and Provisioning

Amazon provides an excellent set of tools that help in provisioning service. For instance…it makes it easy to turn resources on/off (running  costs).

Amazon Auto Scaling is a set of command line tools that allows scaling Amazon EC2 capacity up or down automatically and according to the conditions the end user defines.

This feature ensures that the number of Amazon EC2 instances can scale up seamlessly during demand spikes to maintain performance and can scale down automatically when loads diminish and become less intensive to minimize the costs.

Auto Scaling service and CloudWatch (a monitoring service for AWS cloud resources and their utilization) help in exposing functionalities required for provisioning application services on Amazon EC2.

Amazon Elastic Load Balancer is another service that helps in building fault-tolerant applications by automatically provisioning incoming application workload across available Amazon EC2 instances and in multiple availability zones.

Notes and References

• AWS certifications that are critical for CIOs — SAS70 Type II Audit; ISO-27001 Certification; PCI Level 1 Service Provider; FISMA A&A; Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Compliant Platform
• See Amazon Web Services: A Quick Reference Guide

Related articles

• Pinterest: Leveraging the Amazon Cloud (cloudblueprint.wordpress.com)
• Amazon EC2 gets a spot market (news.cnet.com)
• Amazon Web Services simplifies creation of private clouds (infoworld.com)

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

AWS pioneered the introduction of IaaS clouds in 2006.  AWS mission “Enable businesses and developers to use web services (what people now call “the Cloud”) to build capable, sophisticated applications.”

AWS is essentially is a self-service infrastructure outsourcing business. It’s the third segment of Amazon.com’s business – consumer business, marketplace and IT infrastructure.

AWS business model is utility computing. Simply put this is a business model for on-demand delivery of computing power; consumers pay providers based on usage (“pay-as-you-go”), similar to the way in which we currently obtain services from traditional public utility services such as water, electricity, gas, and telephony.

Rapid Business Model Shift. In the IT infrastructure industry we are seeing the value migration to cloud (or utility computing) models. The concept is that computing is always there like electricity.  When plugging an electric appliance into an outlet, we care neither how electric power is generated nor how it gets to that outlet. This is possible because electricity is virtualized; that is, it is readily available from a wall socket that hides power generation stations and a huge distribution grid. When extended to IT, this concept means delivering useful functions while hiding how their internals work.

Pinterest: Leveraging the Amazon Cloud

Heard an interesting case study at the Amazon Web Services Summit, in New York.  Pinterest is an online pinboard where users can organize, share and explore things they love. Pinterest was named 2012′s Breakout Digital Trend at South by Southwest in March.

Pinterest is completely running in the cloud.  Pinterest has made heavy use of Amazon Web Services, in particular relying on Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 for critical infrastructure.  What makes the case study interesting is the rapid growth, almost 18+M visitors, that Pinterest is able to support with a small infrastructure team.

According to Ryan Park, operations engineer for Pinterest, “The cloud has enabled us to be more efficient, to try out new experiments at a very low cost, and enabled us to grow the site very dramatically while maintaining a very small team of 2 people.” The advantages Pinterest is leveraging: (1) elastic capacity; (2) quick and global deployment; (3) No CapEx, no initial spend; (4) Pay as you go, for what you use; and (5) Automation and Reuse.