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.

Understanding Personal Cloud Management: Apple iCloud, SkyDrive and AcerCloud

As people switch to mobile devices as their center of gravity, the ecosystem of tools need to support them and keep them productive changes.  Apple iCloud provide a glimpse into what is coming.

According to Steve Jobs  “it is a real hassle and very frustrating to keep all your information and content up-to-date across all your devices. iCloud keeps your important information and content up to date across all your devices. All of this happens automatically and wirelessly, and because it’s integrated into our apps you don’t even need to think about it,it all just works.”

Apple with its iCloud solution offering is attacking the consumer multi-device digital content access, backup and replication problem. Surprised Google has not responded with an equivalent offering whereas Microsoft came out with SkyDrive.

So, what’s the big deal?  Apple is addressing a widely faced content retrieval problem:   How to free up data trapped in “device and  application jails” in a user-friendly way. The “scan and match” concept   is quite applicable to large scale device specific repositories which suffer from data integrity issues as edge data capture and consumption devices proliferate.

What can enterprises learn from iCloud? Seamless data ingestion, governance and management is a huge problem facing large organizations.  Getting data out of and sync’ing data across laptops, desktops and multiple mobile devices of employees is a big challenge. Apple shows the next generation way of addressing the personal cloud management problem.

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.

Picking a Cloud Vendor: Questions to Ask in Due Diligence

Multi-tenant, subscription-based cloud computing  is entering a new phase.

“Buy” instead of “build” will be a common strategy as companies race to become relevant in the Cloud.

As cloud momentum builds, every large, medium and small public and private corporation is looking for a IaaS, PaaS or SaaS vendor.

So what questions should you ask in your RFI, RFP or research process before selecting a vendor? What specific areas should be analyzed when choosing to move your data to the cloud?

The following are some questions to ask a potential provider and other considerations. Note that some of the information should be checked in due diligence or carefully reviewed in the service-level agreements (SLAs) or contracts.

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.

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?