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)

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