Amazon Web Services

What is AWS? –
• Amazon Web Services(AWS) is a cloud service from Amazon, which
provides services in the form of building blocks, these building blocks
can be used to create and deploy any type of application in the cloud.
• These services or building blocks are designed to work with each
other, and result in applications that are sophisticated and highly
scalable.
What are the services provided by AWS?

• Each type of service in this “What is AWS” blog, is categorized under a

domain, the few domains which are widely used are:
• Compute
• Storage
• Database
• Migration
• Network and Content Delivery
• Management Tools
• Security & Identity Compliance
• Messaging
 Compute services

• Compute services constitute the fundamental element of cloud

computing systems.
• The fundamental service in this space is Amazon EC2, which delivers
an IaaS solution that has served as a reference model for several
offerings from other vendors in the same market segment.
• Amazon EC2 allows deploying servers in the form of virtual machines
created as instances of a specific image. Images come with a
preinstalled operating system and a software stack, and instances
can be configured for memory, number of processors, and storage.
• Users are provided with credentials to remotely access the instance
and further configure or install software if needed
 Amazon machine images
• Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) are templates from which it is possible to
create a virtual machine. They are stored in Amazon S3 and identified by a
unique identifier in the form of ami-xxxxxx
• An AMI contains a physical file system layout with a predefined operating
system installed. These are specified by the Amazon Ramdisk Image (ARI,
id: ari-yyyyyy) and the Amazon Kernel Image (AKI, id: aki-zzzzzz), which are
part of the configuration of the template.
• AMIs are either created from scratch or “bundled” from existing EC2
instances. A common practice is to prepare new AMIs to create an instance
from a preexisting AMI, log into it once it is booted and running, and install
all the software needed
• Once an AMI is created, it is stored in an S3 bucket and the user can decide
whether to make it available to other users or keep it for personal use
 Amazon EC2
• EC2 instances represent virtual machines. They are created using AMI
as templates, which are specialized by selecting the number of cores,
their computing power, and the installed memory.
• The processing power is expressed in terms of virtual cores and EC2
Compute Units (ECUs). The ECU EC2 instances represent virtual
machines. They are created using AMI as templates, which are
specialized by selecting the number of cores, their computing power,
and the installed memory.
 Categories of Instances
We can identify six major categories:
• Standard instances- This class offers a set of configurations that are suitable for
most applications. EC2 provides three different categories of increasing computing
power, storage, and memory.
• Micro instances. This class is suitable for those applications that consume a
limited amount of computing power and memory and occasionally need bursts in
CPU cycles to process surges in the workload. Micro instances can be used for small
Web applications with limited traffic.
• High-memory instances. This class targets applications that need to process
huge workloads and require large amounts of memory. Three-tier Web applications
characterized by high traffic are the target profile. Three categories of increasing
memory and CPU are available, with memory proportionally larger than computing
power.
• High-CPU instances. This class targets compute-intensive applications. Two
configurations are available where computing power proportionally increases more
than memory.
Categories of Instances
• Cluster Compute instances. This class is used to provide virtual cluster
services. Instances in this category are characterized by high CPU
compute power and large memory and an extremely high I/O and
network performance, which makes it suitable for HPC applications
• Cluster GPU instances. This class provides instances featuring graphic
processing units (GPUs) and high compute power, large memory, and
extremely high I/O and network performance. This class is particularly
suited for cluster applications that perform heavy graphic
computations, such as rendering clusters. Since GPU can be used for
general-purpose computing, users of such instances can benefit from
additional computing power, which makes this class suitable for HPC
applications.
 Pricing of EC2 instance
• EC2 instances are priced hourly according to the category they belong to.
At the beginning of every hour of usage, the user will be charged the cost
of the entire hour. The hourly expense charged for one instance is constant.
• Instance owners are responsible for providing their own backup strategies,
since there is no guarantee that the instance will run for the entire hour.
• Another alternative is represented by spot instances. These instances are
much more dynamic in terms of pricing and lifetime since they are made
available to the user according to the load of EC2 and the availability of
resources.
• . Currently, there are five availability zones that are priced differently: two
in the United States s (Virginia and Northern California), one in Europe
(Ireland), and two in Asia Pacific (Singapore and Tokyo).
9.1.1.3 EC2 environment
• EC2 instances are executed within a virtual environment, which provides
them with the services they require to host applications. The EC2
environment is in charge of allocating addresses, attaching storage
volumes, and configuring security in terms of access control and network
connectivity. By default, instances are created with an internal IP address,
which makes them capable of communicating within the EC2 network and
accessing the Internet as clients.
• C2 instances are also given a domain name that generally is in the form
ec2-xxxxxx-xxx.compute-x.amazonaws.com, where xxx-xxx-xxx normally
represents the four parts of the external IP address separated by a dash,
and compute-x gives information about the availability zone where
instances are deployed
9.1.1.3 EC2 environment
• Amazon EC2 controls the accessibility of a virtual instance with basic
firewall configuration, allowing the specification of source address,
port, and protocols (TCP, UDP, ICMP). Rules can also be attached to
security groups, and instances can be made part of one or more
groups before their deployment.
• Security groups and firewall rules constitute a flexible way of
providing basic security for EC2 instances, which has to be
complemented by appropriate security configuration within the
instance itself.
Advanced Compute services
• AWS Cloud Formation
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk
• Amazon Elastic Mapreduce
AWS STORAGE SERVICES
 AWS Storage Services
1. Object Storage – Applications developed within the cloud often cash
in on object storage’s vast scalability and metadata characteristics.
Object storage solutions like Simple Storage Service (Amazon
S3) and Amazon Glacier are ideal for building modern applications
from scratch that need scale and adaptability, and may even be wont to
import existing data stores for analytics, backup, or archive.
2. File Storage – Many applications got to access shared files and need
a filing system. this sort of storage is usually supported with a Network
Attached Storage (NAS) server. File storage solutions like Elastic File
System (Amazon EFS)are ideal to be used in cases like large content
repositories, development environments, media stores, or user home
directories.
 AWS Storage Services
• 3. Block Storage – Other enterprise applications like databases or ERP
systems often require dedicated, low latency storage for every host.
this is often analogous to direct-attached storage (DAS) or a cargo
area Network (SAN). Block-based cloud storage solutions like Elastic
Block Store (Amazon EBS) and EC2 Instance Storage
Storage Offered By Amazon Web Services (AWS)
1. Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)

• UsageAmazon S3 the oldest and most supported storage platform of AWS uses an
object storage model that is built to store and retrieve any amount of data. Data can
be accessed everywhere such as websites, mobile apps, corporate applications, and
data from IoT sensors or devices that can be dumped onto S3.

S3 has been highly used for hosting web content with support for high bandwidth and
demand. Scripts can also be stored in S3 making it possible to store static websites that use
JavaScript.It supports the migration of data to Amazon Glacial for cold storage, by using
lifecycle management rule for data stored in S3.
• Features
Amazon S3 runs upon the world’s largest global cloud infrastructure and was built from the
ground up to deliver a customer promise of 99.999999999% durability. Data is
automatically distributed across a minimum of three physical facilities that are
geographically separated within an AWS Region, and also automatically replicates data to
any other AWS Region.
1.Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)

• Security
S3 supports 3 forms of encryption, including server-side-encryption
and client-side-encryption. Data in S3 can only be accessed by other
users or AWS account when they have been granted access by the
admin by writing the access policy. With the support of Multi-Factor
Authentication (MFA) another layer of security can be added for object
operation.S3 supports multiple security standards and compliance
certifications.
 4.Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)

• Similar to EFS, EBS volumes are network file systems. Volumes get automatically
replicated within Availability Zones for high availability and durability.
• Usage
• It is durable block-level storage to be used with EC2 instances in the AWS cloud. EBS
Volumes are used by mounting them onto EC2 instance as you will do with a physical
hard drive on-premise and then format the EBS volume to the desired file system. EBS
allows for dynamically increasing capacity, performance tuning and you can even
change the type of volume with any downtime or performance impact.
• Features
• EBS allows for save point-in-time snapshots of volumes to increases the durability of the
data stored. Each separate volume can be configured as EBS General Purpose (SSD),
Provisioned IOPS (SSD), Throughput Optimized (HDD), or Cold (HDD) as needed.EBS
Volumes has a very low failure rate of about 0.1 to 0.2 percent.
4.Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
• Security
• IAM policy is needed to be defined to allow access to EBS volumes.
Coupled with encryption for data-at-rest and data-in-motion security
it offers a strong defense-in-depth security strategy for your data