Short presentation on parts of Amazon's cloud computing offering that I have experience with; what is it good for, anyway?

1. Amazon Web Services
cloud: is it good for anything?

2. What’s this cloud thing?
Web infrastructure as a service
with an API
and shared authentication
Pay as you go, per hour, no commitments
Flexibility
TANSTAAFL

3. What infrastructure?
EC2 — virtual servers
RDS — ready-to-use MySQL servers
S3 — online storage (private and public)
Route 53 — DNS servers
SQS — message queues
Mechanical Turk — human intelligence tasks

4. There’s more!
but I have no experience with that
CloudFront — content delivery network
Elastic Beanstalk, Elastic MapReduce, Cloud
Formation — high level orchestration
DevPay, Flexible Payment Services,
Fullfillment Web Service
Simple Email Service, Simple Notification
Service, SimpleDB, Virtual Private Cloud

5. Common stuff
Availability zones: multiple datacenters on
three continents
API is default means of control
command-line tools are provided
Key-based API authentication
IAM — Identity & Access Management

6. EC2
Elastic Compute Cloud

7. Compute Units
type CU CPUs Memory Storage Price/h
m1.small 1 1 1.7 GB 160 GB $ 0.0085
m1.large 4 2 7.5 GB 850 GB $ 0.34
m1.xlarge 8 4 15 GB 1690 GB $ 0.68
t1.micro <2 1 613 MB EBS only $ 0.02
m2.xlarge 6.5 2 17.1 GB 420 GB $ 0.50
m2.2xlarge 13 4 34.2 GB 850 GB $ 1.00
m2.4xlarge 26 8 68.4 GB 1690 GB $ 2.00
c1.medium 5 2 1.7 GB 350 GB $ 0.17
c1.xlarge 20 8 7 GB 1690 GB $ 0.68
cc1.4xlarge 33.5 8 23 GB 1690 GB $ 1.60
cg1.4xlarge 33.5 8 22 GB 1690 GB $ 2.10
Cluster instance GPU cluster computing instance

8. EC2 storage
Volatile instance storage
Persistent EBS storage
Root partition is volatile
(except EBS-backed instances)

9. Elastic Block Storage
(EBS) for EC2
Network-mapped persistent block device
Up to 1TB in size
Atomic snapshots and cloning
Live attach/detach
Replicated on backend

10. EC2 IPs
Instances are behind NAT;
local and external IPs and DNS entries
External DNS is split-horizon
Elastic IPs can be attached to any instance
Security groups provide named firewall rules

11. Other EC2 features
Reserved instances
Elastic Load Balancing — automatically
distribute application server traffic
Virtual Private Cloud — hybrid cloud/physical
network with a VPN
CloudWatch — monitoring for EC2 instances,
with auto scaling
High Performance Computing clusters

12. Relational DB Service
(RDS)
Hosted, pre-tuned MySQL on EC2 instances
No SSH access to instance; SQL only
Snapshot-based backup, point-in-time
recovery, some support for replication

13. Simple Storage Service
(S3)
Named buckets of 1B-5TB objects
Objects never leave assigned region
Public or authenticated access to objects
BitTorrent protocol support (?)
99.999999999% durability and
99.99% availability over a year; Reduced
Redundancy Storage for non-critical data

14. Route 53
HA and scalable DNS service
Direct API access — no zone files!
Automated computed DNS for automatically
managed infrastructure!

16. Simple Queue Service
(SQS)
Producer → queue → consumers model for
offline processing
Unlimited number of named queues
Unlimited queue depth
Processing lock

17. Mechanical Turk
On-demand workforce
Marketplace for Human Intelligence Tasks
(think solving CAPTCHAs)
Pay only for accepted work,
min. $0.0005/HIT
Optional qualification test for workers

18. In comparison with
metal hardware
More expensive No commitment
Less efficient API for everything
Less flexible HA and redundancy
built in where needed
Quicker to set up
(ready within minutes) Low-level stuff is
someone else’s
Pay-as-you-go, per problem
hour/GB/API call

19. So, what is the cloud
good for?
Experiments, tests
Flexible, adapting environments
Figuring out actual needs(agile startups)
Throwing money at a problem
(instead of manpower and time)
Parts of complex systems
(hybrid environment)