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)

Cloud First Strategy of U.S Federal Agencies

The U.S. Federal Government is pushing a “Cloud First” policy in 2012.

This policy is intended to accelerate the pace at which the government will realize the value of multi-tenant, subscription-based  cloud computing by requiring agencies to evaluate safe, secure cloud computing options before making any new investments. The goal is shut down  1200 data centers by 2015.  The U.S government has 3200 data centers > than 500 sq ft.

The Dept of Defense (DoD) modernization cuts are going to accelerate the move to the cloud services.  DoD, Dept of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Intelligence Services are extremely large buyers of computing.  If they start moving services to the cloud, I believe the cloud trend is going to accelerate creating a talent shortage in the government contractors.

The increasing adoption of cloud computing and penetration of mobile devices are the two inter-related trends transforming the IT industry today.  Government is no exception and in some areas leading the charge.

We are clearly in the middle of a once-in-a-decade transformation.  In the consumer and retail world, the movement to Web based cloud services, is being accelerated by the move to build social apps, mobile apps, location aware, real-time applications. It’s increasingly obvious that old applications and technologies need to adapted —  Four different delivery models are emerging differentiated by service level agreements (SLAs).

But, how do you explain “cloud services” to someone new to this space  especially in Government?  There are multiple ways of describing cloud services.

In this page I highlight some useful taxonomies from various sources that I found useful in explaining Cloud Computing and Cloud Services. Depending on who you are talking to pick the relevant one.

• Describing the Cloud to an Enterprise Audience
• Describing the Cloud to a Technical Audience
• Describing the Cloud as Outsourcing 3.0
• Describing the Innovation Roadmap unleashed by the Cloud
• NIST Cloud Taxonomy

Zynga’s Z-Cloud Infrastructure

Cloud Computing when done right can be a source of significant competitive advantage.

Case in point Zynga, the social gaming company.

Zynga, founded in 2007, is the world’s largest social game developer with more than 250 million monthly active users playing their games, which include CityVille, FarmVille, FrontierVille, Words With Friends, Mafia Wars, Zynga Poker, Café World and Treasure Isle.

Zynga games are available on a number of global platforms including Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo, the iPad and iPhone, and Android devices.

Zynga makes most of its revenue by serving the 800m audience on Facebook.

Social games powered by Facebook represent a new form of entertainment that will capture an increasing proportion of consumer leisure time.  The potential is huge.  One data point… my 72 year old mother-in law spends hours playing games on her iPad.

Social games are the most popular applications on Facebook and will be, a key driver of engagement on social networks, and increasingly on mobile platforms.

Games have become the second most popular internet activity based on time spent, and have even surpassed email.

To support this growth, Zynga  created a scalable hybrid cloud-based server and network infrastructure that enables it to deliver games to millions of players simultaneously with high levels of performance and reliability.

Infrastructure as a Service: Cloud Hosting Marketspace

The business of supplying cloud services to corporations certainly looks promising. Technology research firms are forecasting that the market for cloud services will expand at a dizzying pace over the next several years.

The logic  — remotely providing computing, data storage and applications as a service — is compelling. Customers don’t have to buy all that hardware and software themselves, and suppliers gain the efficiencies of running large-scale data centers for many different customers.

In this blog, let’s consider some key trends to build clarity around Infrastructure-as-a-service.  I review this marketspace and highlight some innovative cloud infrastructure vendors that are carving out a niche for themselves.

Storage-as-a-Service: Cloud Storage Providers

Cloud Storage has been increasing in popularity recently due to many of the same reasons as Cloud Computing.

Cloud Storage delivers virtualized storage on demand, over a network based on a request for a given quality of service (QoS). There is no need to purchase storage or in some cases even provision it before storing data. You only pay for the amount of storage your data is actually consuming.

Cloud Market Sizing – Factoids for Business Case

“Predicting the future is pointless, but it is possible to identify trends that have significant effects.” Peter Drucker

The increasing adoption of cloud computing and penetration of mobile devices are the two inter-related trends transforming the IT industry today. 

We’re in the midst of a “once-a-decade” technological transition where the Cloud has become a new platform for delivering resources such as computing and storage to tethered and untethered customers on demand.

So the question facing managers and strategists — What does cloud trend (IT-as-a-service) mean to our organization? What is the current penetration of cloud computing and how is it expected to change in the next one to three years?

Cloud Enabling IT-as-a-Service

Computing is going the way of a power utility.  This evolution parallels other big shifts like manufacturers, business and households moving to the electric grid from dedicated powerplants (i.e., windmills and waterwheels).

Today, similar shifts are happening in computing as dedicated (expensive) data centers are giving way to a computing and storage grid model. The maturation of the Internet, Web and networks are the ultimate catalysts.

Rather than being a new technology in itself, the cloud is a new business model wrapped around new technologies such as server virtualization that take advantage of economies of scale and multi-tenancy to reduce the cost of using IT resources.

Cloud is simply the manifestation of a broader transformation trend: “IT-as-a-Service.”  The services (applications, platforms and infrastructure) simply reside in the cloud and are consumed as a service. The “IT-as-a-Service” trend in its infancy and will take a decade to play out similar to e-commerce.  Early adopter companies are making their move to the cloud today, and they’re doing it aggressively to get a performance advantage.

Cloud computing is more of a service and business model shift than a technology. It is my belief that the cloud is, at its very essence, a service delivery and consumption model shift.  The value migration is clear and stark. We will see a steady erosion in value migrating from the previous “behind-the-firewall” business model to a new outside-the-firewall” business model.  A cloud landscape view is shown below.

When Worlds Collide: Cloud Computing and Corporate IT

Cloud Landscape

The 2012 forecast for enterprise IT calls for partly cloudy computing, but what does the 3-to-5 year outlook foretell?

The bigger question is, what will enterprise computing look like in 2020?

The recent recession has prompted many executives to more closely examine the way they invest in, manage and innovate the business.

One particular area of focus is IT, where a new wave of growth and transformation is becoming prominent. There’s no doubt you’ve heard the buzz about cloud computing, a way of accessing and using business infrastructure and applications over the Internet.

Think Salesforce.com, Workday, Apple iTunes, Google’s Gmail, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon.com, online retailing or online banking in the consumer cloud market.

These days, senior executives, strategy leaders and even corporate boards find themselves pondering the following key questions: What does the trend mean for our company? How can it change the performance trajectory of our business? How should we restructure our IT function given the maturing of the cloud model in the next one, three or five years?