Amazon web services

Amazon Web ServicesRamkumar Lakshminarayanan

Amazon Web Services is one of the early and also the most successful implementations of the Public Cloud.

Amazon initially started offering a Cloud based Message Queuing service called Amazon Simple Queue Service or SQS.

Other services are Mechanical Turk, Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), A CDN service called CloudFront, a flexible and distributed database service called SimpleDB.

Amazon recently announced the availability of MySQL in the Cloud through a service called Relational Data Service (RDS).

Amazon offers the core capabilities to run a complete web application or a Line of Business application, it is obvious that it is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

AWS is truly the platform of the platforms. You can choose an OS, App server and the

programming language of your choice. AWS SDK and API is available for most of the

popular languages including Java, .NET, Python and Ruby.

Amazon’s Simple Storage Service or S3 is a great way to store data on the Cloud that can be accessed by any application with access to the Internet.

S3 can store any arbitrary data as objects accompanied by metadata. These objects can be organized into buckets. Every bucket and object has a set of permissions defined in the Access Control List (ACL).

S3

The objects stored in S3 can be anything from a document, a media file, serialized objects or even Virtual Machine images.

Each object can be 5GB in size while the metadata can be up to 2KB.

All the objects can be accessed using simple REST or SOAP calls.

S3 an ideal storage solution to centrally store and retrieve data across multiple clients.

S3 can also be treated as a virtual file system to provide persistence storage capabilities to applications.

EC2 is hiring a server running at a remote location. These servers are actually Virtual Machine images running on top of Amazon’s powerful data centers.

Amazon calls these virtualized server instances as Amazon Machine Images or AMI.

EC2

These instances come in different sizes that you can choose from.

Please refer to http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#instance for more details on the instance types.

There are many pre-configured AMIs that you can choose from.

The typical workflow on EC2 is that you choose a pre-configured AMI, launch that AMI, customize it by adding additional software and by loading an app and finally, save that AMI as your custom AMI on S3.

You can launch multiple instances of your AMI and attach them to an IP called the Elastic IP. Because of the dynamic capability of launching multiple instances of the same AMIs to scale up and terminating them to scale down, it is called Elastic Compute Cloud.

SQS is the message queue on the Cloud. It supports programmatic sending of messages via web service applications as a way to communicate over the Internet.

Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) is a popular way of ensuring that the messages are delivered once and only once.

Moving that infrastructure to the web by yourself is expensive and hard to maintain.

SQS

SQS gives you this capability on-demand and through the pay-by-use model. SQS is accessible through REST and SOAP based API.

When your web application is targeting the global users, it makes sense to serve the static content through a server that is closer to the user.

One of the solutions based on this principle is called Content Delivery Network (CDN).

CloudFront utilizes S3 by replicating the buckets across multiple edge servers.

Amazon charges you only for the data that is served through CloudFront and there is no requirement for upfront payment.

Cloud Front

If S3 offers storage for arbitrary binary data, SimpleDB is a flexible way to store Name/Value pairs on the Cloud.

This dramatically reduces the overhead of maintaining a relational database continuously.

SimpleDB is accessed through REST and HTTP calls and can be easily consumed by any client that can parse a HTTP response.

SimpleDB

Amazon RDS offers relational database on the Cloud. It is based on the popular MySQL database.

When you are moving a traditional Line of Business application to the Cloud and want to maintain high fidelity with the existing systems, you can choose RDS.

The advantage of RDS is that you do not install, configure, manage and maintain the DB server.

RDS

You only consume it and Amazon takes care of the rest.

Routine operations like patching the server and backing up the databases are taken care and you only consume the service.

RDS is priced on Pay-as-you-go model and there is no upfront investment required. It is accessible through the REST and SOAP based API.

Scenarios

If you are an aspiring entrepreneur and want to go-live with your app without an upfront investment, Amazon is the place to go.

By running your web app on Amazon, you can dynamically scale you application on demand and only pay for what you use.

This can be the best playground for you to determine the server capacity needs and asses the peak traffic patterns before the commercial launch of your web app.

Scalable Web Application

If your enterprise has to open up an internal LOB application to its employees and trading partners, it can extend the application to the Cloud by leveraging a concept of AWS called Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). This is achieving the Hybrid Cloud capabilities by partially moving an application to the Cloud while still running the sensitive and proprietary part of the LOB application secured behind the firewall.

VPC enables organizations to securely extend itself to the Cloud.

Line of Business Application

Data that is not very frequently accessed but may be required due to data retention policies can be easily archived on Amazon S3.

By building a simple, searchable frontend, this data can be searched and retrieved on-demand.

Moving the data to the Cloud will ensure that is available from any where and any time.

Data Archival

For many enterprises, there is an occasional requirement of high performance computing.

Investing in high-end servers is not an optimal solution because they may not be utilized after the task is done.

With AWS, companies can virtually ‘hire’ as much computing power as they need and pay only for what they used.

This will eliminate the expensive proposition of investing in the infrastructure.

High-Performance Computing On Demand

A TV channel might want to start delivering the recorded shows to its global audience.

Since most of the content is static, they can leverage the CDN capabilities.

Signing up with services like Akamai and LimeLight can be expensive.

Because the media content is already stored on S3, it is very easy and cost effective to leverage Amazon’s CloudFront to deliver the media content through the geographically spread edge locations.

Scalable Media Delivery

http://aws.amazon.com/console/

A Review of AWS

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Amazon Elastic MapReduce Auto Scaling

Compute

Amazon CloudFront

Content Delivery

Amazon SimpleDB Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) Amazon ElastiCache

Database

AWS Elastic Beanstalk AWS CloudFormation

Deployment & Management

Amazon Route 53 Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) AWS Direct Connect Elastic Load Balancing

Networking

Amazon Fulfillment Web Service (FWS)

E-Commerce

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Identity & Access

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)

Messaging

Amazon Flexible Payments Service (FPS and ASP)

Amazon DevPay

Payments & Billing

AWS SDK for Android AWS SDK for iOS AWS SDK for Java AWS SDK for .NET AWS SDK for PHP AWS SDK for Ruby AWS Toolkit for Eclipse AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio

Software Development Kits (SDKs)

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) AWS Import/Export AWS Storage Gateway

Storage

Questions ?