Introducing Amazon Web Services Introducing Amazon Web Services Introducing Amazon Web Services
Overview of Amazon Web Services Overview of Amazon Web ServicesOverview of Amazon Web Services Overview of Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services is one of the early and also the most successful implementations of the Public Cloud. Many well-known online properties leverage AWS. Amazon initially started offering a Cloud based Message Queuing service called Amazon Simple Queue Service or SQS. They eventually added services like Mechanical Turk, Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), A CDN service called CloudFront, a flexible and distributed database service called SimpleDB. In the last few years the number of services offered by AWS has grown significantly.
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Given that 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, PHP, Python and Ruby.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the key service offerings from Amazon
Amazon Elastic Compute CloudCompute CloudCompute CloudCompute Cloud
In simple terms, 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. 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. 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.
Amazon Simple Storage Amazon Simple Storage Amazon Simple Storage
Amazon Simple Storage ServiceServiceServiceService
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). 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 5TB in size while the metadata can be up to 2KB. All the objects can be accessed using simple REST or SOAP calls. This makes S3 an ideal storage solution to centrally store and retrieve data across multiple clients. Some tools let you treat S3 a virtual file system to provide persistence storage capabilities for backup and archiving scenarios.
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Amazon SSSSimple imple imple imple QQQQueuing ueuing ueuing ueuing SSSServiceerviceerviceervice
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 gives you this capability on-demand and through the pay-by-use model. SQS is accessible through REST and SOAP based API.
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Amazon CloudFrontCloudFrontCloudFrontCloudFront
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).
But this infrastructure of geographically spread servers to serve static content can be very expensive. CloudFront is CDN as a service. Amazon is leveraging its data center presence across the globe by serving content through these edge locations. CloudFront works in conjunction with 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
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. Many Web 2.0 applications built using AJAX, Flash and Silverlight can easily access data from SimpleDB.
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Amazon RDS offers relational database on the Cloud. It supports the popular MySQL and Oracle databases. 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. 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.
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud Amazon Virtual Private Cloud Amazon Virtual Private Cloud Amazon Virtual Private Cloud
Amazon VPC is a secure way of connecting company’s existing IT infrastructure to the AWS cloud. Amazon VPC enables enterprises to connect their existing infrastructure to a set of isolated AWS compute resources via a Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection, and to extend their existing management capabilities such as security services, firewalls, and intrusion detection systems to include their AWS resources.