Amazon Web Services
The Blue Book pages 19 onwards
References

http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/
connect/forumindex.jspa
An overview of AWS


AWS is Amazon’s umbrella description of all
of their web-based technology services.
Mainly infrastructure services:
◦
◦
◦
◦
◦

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
Amazon CloudFront
Amazon SimpleDB
Amazon EC2 is hiring
◦ http://aws.amazon.com/ec2-jobs/
Amazon EC2
EC2 provides web services API for
provisioning, managing, and deprovioning
virtual servers inside amazon cloud.
 Applications anywhere on the Internet
can launch a virtual server in the amazon
cloud with a single web services call
(either REST or SOAP WS call)
 Where is SOAP API? For example,

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonEC2/dg/2006-06-26/using-soap-api.html
Storage
Instance –store : disappears with the
instance (transient)
 Block storage: SAN-like, persists across
time
 S3 is independent of an instance: for
archival purposes: vault: store it now and
retrieve it at a later date
 Amazon: SimpleDB: Relational database
better than MySQl or Oracle for
reliability.

Amazon Cloud-front
Cloud-based content distributing network
enables you to place the content at the
edges of the network for rapid delivery.
 Place the contents in S3 and run the
application from anywhere and the
content is moved to where the
application is (to the edges).

S3
Amazon web services API support the ability to:
 Find buckets and objects
 Discover their meta data
 Create new buckets
 Upload new objects
 Delete existing buckets and objects
 When manipulating the buckets you can optionally
specify where they should be stored.
 Use REST API preferably something that abstracts out
even that: Jets3t; s3cmd (command line)
 BitTorrent access to S3 is also available

Bucket Naming
Flat namespace
 Names may contain only lowercase
letters, numbers, periods, underscores,
and dashes, and must start with a number
or letter
 Create your own namespace with your
own bcukets

EC2 concepts
See figure 2.1
 Instance: virtual server running a guest os
of your choice
 AMI: Pristine image of your server so that
you can launch any number of instance
from this. Minimally machine image will
operating systems + pre-installed tools.
 Elastic IP address: Not static not dynamic
but elastic; an IP reserved for your use;
disappears once the server is terminated.

EC2 (contd.)
Availability zone: Any two availability zones are
guaranteed to share any common points of
failure ( US, EU, Asia/Pacific)
 Security group: define the firewall/security.
Defines what can talk to your instances. (Ex;
http, and not sftp etc.)
 Snap shot: You can take snapshots of block
volume (that can be formatted etc) and is
stored in S3 for later use or for rollback etc.
 What is the difference between instances and
machine images?

How to access Ec2?
AWS console
http://console.aws.amazon.com
 The ElasticFox firefox plugin
 The amazon command line tool

Typical Use in an organization

Maintain a library of AMIs for the business
◦ May contain legacy systems or company-specific
systems
◦ Harden AMIs using such software as Bastille

Launch instances for non-technical but domain
experts to work with.
◦ What will you provide them so that they can start
working?

Use S3 for archival storage and shared storage