HANDS-ON WITH AMAZON WEB SERVICES (AWS)

PART 3 – DISCUSSION ON AWS SERVICES

8-Dec-2012

Pavan Verma

Founder, P3 InfoTech Solutions Pvt. Ltd.

http://p3infotech.in, pavan@p3infotech.in

Core AWS Services

• EC2

• Elastic IP

• EBS

• S3

• RDS

• DynamoDB

• CloudFront

• Cloudwatch

• Auto Scaling

EC2 – Types of instances

• On-demand instances

• Reserved instances

• Spot instances

EC2 – On-demand instances

• Completely pay-per-use

EC2 – Reserved instances

• Hybrid model – combination of one-time

upfront payment and pay-per-use

• 2 reservation terms – 1 year and 3 years

• 3 types of reservation instances – Light,

Medium, Heavy

• Can get confusing!

Elastic IP

• EC2 IP addresses do not persist across a

shutdown event

• Therefore, these cannot be used as static IP

addresses

• Elastic IP addresses are static IP addresses

associated with an account, not a particular

instance.

• Elastic IP addresses can be mapped to any

EC2 instance of the account

EC2 – Spot instances

•Unused instances that users can bid on

•Can be much cheaper than on-demand

and reserved instances

•Gotcha! No guarantee on how long they

run

• Will be stopped if that instance gets a

higher bid

STORAGE SERVICES

Local Instance Storage (aka Ephemeral Storage)

• Block-level temporary storage for EC2 instances

• Served from disks attached to the box on which the

VM is running

• No persistence – All data disappears when EC2

instance is stopped

• Use cases:

• Scratch disks

• Temporary files, buffers, caches

• Easily replicated data

Local Instance Storage (aka Ephemeral Storage) (2)

• Not durable

• No replicas, backups

• Application can do its own backups if required

• Number and size of instance store varies by EC2

instance type

• Larger instances have larger volumes

• Not optimized for high performance

• Good sequential I/O performance

• Poor random I/O performance

• Cost: Free with EC2 instance, no additional cost

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)

• Block-level persistent storage for EC2 instances

• Data lifetime independent of EC2 instance lifetime

• Can attach multiple EBS instances to an EC2 instance

• Any individual EBS can only be attached to a single

EC2 instance

• Off-instance, network attached storage

• Use cases:

• File system (including root filesystem of EC2 instance)

• Databases

• Anywhere where persistent storage is required

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) (2)

• Durable storage

• Mirrored within a single Availability Zone

• EBS Snapshots can be used for increased

durability and backups

• Incremental snapshots

• Stored in S3

• Optimized for high performance

• Up to 80 MB/sec sequential access

• About 100 IOPS for 8K random requests

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) (3)

• Cost: $0.10 per GB-month and reduces

with more quantity used

• IOPs priced separately (free upto a limit)

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)• Scalable and durable data storage

• Object storage

• Accessed via a REST API

• Not attached to EC2 instance

• Can be accessed by multiple EC2 instances in parallel

• Can be accessed by non-EC2 systems (for example, my laptop)

• Read/Write/Delete objects (files) from 1B to 5TB

• Use cases

• Static web content

• Working storage for large scale computation or analytics

• Backup, Archival, and DR storage

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) (2)

• Cost: starts at $0.095 per GB-month and reduces with

more quantity used

• Access to data priced separately (free upto a limit)

• Extreme Durability

• Automatic replication within region

• Design point is eleven 9s durability and four 9s availability

• Extremely Scalable

• Unlimited number of objects per bucket

• Web-scale concurrent read/writes

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) (3)

• Two layer hierarchy: Buckets and Objects

• Bucket name has to be unique across entire AWS

• Every object has a unique URL

• Simple GET/PUT/DELETE API using HTTP

• Support Access Control (ACLs)

• S3 is an object store, not a filesystem

• S3 generally good for reads/writes of whole files

• Web-like usage patterns, rather than disk-like

Amazon CloudFront

• Content Delivery Network (CDN)

• Can use S3 as the origin store

• More than 30 edge locations worldwide

• Use cases:

• Fast access to mostly static data

• Scalable data distribution at global scale

DynamoDB

• Fully managed NoSQL database service

• Provides fast and predictable performance

with seamless scalability

• Built-in fault tolerance

• Automatically and synchronously replicates

data across three Availability Zones in a Region

• Uses a proprietary database

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)

• Fully-functional relational database

provided as a managed service

• Automates: Patching, Backups, Failover,

Read Replicas

• Supports standard databases: MySQL,

Oracle, SQL Server

HOW TO MANAGE AWS SERVICES

Managing AWS Services

• AWS services can be managed in following

ways

• AWS console

• REST API. ALL AWS services are accessible

via a REST API

• Command line tools

• SDKs for PHP, Java, Python, Ruby, .NET

AWS CloudWatch

• Provides monitoring for AWS cloud resources

• Basic Monitoring for Amazon EC2 instances:

10 pre-selected metrics at 5-minute frequency,

free of charge

• Detailed Monitoring for Amazon EC2

instances: 7 pre-selected metrics at 1-minute

frequency, for an additional charge

AWS Auto Scaling

• Scale EC2 capacity up or down automatically

according to pre-defined conditions

• Ensure that the number of EC2 instances

increases seamlessly during demand spikes

to maintain performance, and decreases

automatically during demand lulls to minimize

costs

AWS CloudFormation

• Provides an easy way to create a collection

of related AWS resources and provision

them

• Useful to provision complete application

stacks in one shot

List of All AWS Services

•Compute and Networking

• EC2

• Route 53

• Direct Connect

• Elastic MapReduce

• VPC

List of All AWS Services (2)

•Storage and Content Delivery

• S3

• Glacier

• CloudFront

• Storage Gateway

List of All AWS Services (3)

•Database

• RDS

• DynamoDB

• ElastiCache

List of All AWS Services (4)

•Deployment and Management

• IAM

• CloudWatch

• CloudFormation

• Elastic Beanstalk

List of All AWS Services (5)

•App Services

• CloudSearch

• SWF – Simple Workflow Service

• SQS – Simple Queue Service

• SNS – Simple Notification Service

• SES – Simple Email Service

AWS Marketplace

• Online store where customers can find, buy, and

immediately start using the software and services that

run in the EC2 cloud

• Includes software from vendors like SAP, Zend,

Microsoft, IBM, Canonical, Perforce, Couchbase, Acquia,

Check Point Software, and 10gen as well as many widely

used open source offerings including Wordpress, Drupal,

and MediaWiki.

• Extends AWS’ pay-as-you-go pricing model to third party

software

• Customers pay by the hour

• Developers charge by the hour