1. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
(EC2)
BY AKASH BADONE

2. Several Historical Trends
 Shared Utility Computing
 1960s – MULTICS – Concept of a Shared Computing Utility
 1970s – IBM Mainframes – rent by the CPU-hour. (Fast/slow switch.)
 Data Center Co-location
 1990s-2000s – Rent machines for months/years, keep them close to the network access point and
pay a flat rate. Avoid running your own building with utilities!
 Pay as You Go
 Early 2000s - Submit jobs to a remote service provider where they run on the raw hardware. Sun
Cloud ($1/CPU-hour, Solaris +SGE) IBM Deep Capacity Computing on Demand (50 cents/hour)
 Virtualization
 1960s – OS-VM, VM-360 – Used to split mainframes into logical partitions.
 1998 – VMWare – First practical implementation on X86, but at significant performance hit.
 2003 – Xen para virtualization provides much perf, but kernel must assist.
 Late 2000s – Intel and AMD add hardware support for virtualization.

3. Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
 Amazon web services for computing
 EC2
 Elastic Map Reduce (EMR).
 Data storage solutions (DynamoDB, RDS, S3 or EBS).
 Hope to use multiple features for storing input/output files and perform
intensive computations.

4. What is EC2?
Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing
 Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
 Allows customers to rent virtual computers by the hour. All they need to
provide is money, and they will have a virtual server instance.

5. Getting Started with Amazon EC2
 Step 1: Sign up for Amazon EC2
 Step 2: Create a key pair
 Step 3: Launch an Amazon EC2 instance
 Step 4: Connect to the instance
 Step 5: Customize the instance
 Step 6: Terminate instance and delete the volume created

6. EC2 Layers

7. EC2 Diagram

8. Types of Instances
 Free Tier
 Use AWS instances for up to 12 months (minimal performance)
 On-Demand
 Setup and tear down whenever you need to
 Reserved
 Pay up front for servers with contracts
 Spot
 Bid for unused capacity, but no control over when it’s terminated

9. EC2 instances
 A virtual computing environment with a web interface.
 Create and configure an “instance” (Amazon Machine
Image)
 Example: Extra large instance (standard)
 15GB of memory
 8 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores)
 1690GB of local storage
 64 bit platform
 Also offers cluster compute instances
 Example
 Cluster Compute Eight Extra large with 60GB memory, 88 EC2
units, 3370 local storage, 64-bit platform, 10 Gigabit Ethernet.

10. EC2 Instances
 Operating system Windows Server, Ubuntu Linux, Red Hat Enterprise linux
etc.
 Currently using AWS’s free usage tier (Getting started!)
 Pay for the capacity actually consumed
(http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing).
 Regional Servers located in 8 regions (US East, US West, EU, Asia Pacific
etc)
 Currently running a t1.micro instance
 Ubuntu Server version 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) 64-bit.

11. Amazon AWS
 Grew out of Amazon’s need to rapidly provision and configure machines of
standard configurations for its own business.
 Early 2000s – Both private and shared data centers began using
virtualization to perform “server consolidation”
 2003 – Internal memo by Chris Pinkham describing an “infrastructure
service for the world.”
 2006 – S3 first deployed in the spring, EC2 in the fall
 2008 – Elastic Block Store available.
 2009 – Relational Database Service
 2012 – Dynamo DB
 Does it turn a profit?

12. Amazon Web Services(AWS)

13. Virtualization
 Paravirtual
 Paravirtual AMIs boot with a special boot loader called PV-GRUB, which starts
the boot cycle and then chain loads the kernel specified in the menu.lst file on
your image
 Hardware Virtual Machine
 Unlike PV guests, HVM guests can take advantage of hardware extensions that
provide fast access to the underlying hardware on the host system
 Allows user to run an operating system directly on top of a virtual machine
without any modification, as if it were run on the bare-metal hardware.

14. Virtualization Specifications
 Xen Hypervisor for virtualization
 Provides services that allow multiple computer operation systems to execute on
the same computer hardware
 Hardware specifications are tailored to the needs of the use
 Storage, Computing, Memory, Graphics
 Why did Amazon choose Xen?

15. XEN Hypervisor
 Basic abstraction layer of software that sits directly on the hardware below
any operating systems.
 Responsible for CPU scheduling and memory partitioning of the various
virtual machines running on the hardware device.
 Controls the execution of virtual machines as they share the common
processing environment.
 No knowledge of networking, external storage devices, video, or any other
common I/O functions found on a computing system.

16. Storage
 Amazon EC2 uses two different kinds of storage. One is local storage,
known as Instance Storage, which is non-persistent and data will be lost
after an instance terminates. The other kind is persistent, network-based
storage called Elastic Block Store(EBS), which can be attached to running
instances or also used as a persistent boot medium.
 Instance Storage
 EBS

17. Elastic Block Storage
 Provides raw data blocks that can be attached to EC2 instances.
(Essentially works as network drives)
 Can be backed up and restored to another instance for when failures occur
on an a current instance

18. Instance Storage

19. Costs (On Demand)
Why did Amazon choose this
method of charging customers?
• Compute
• Storage
• Network IOPS