Amazon Web Services
(abbreviated AWS) is a collection of remote computing services (also called web
services) that together make up a cloud computing platform, offered over the
Internet by Amazon. The most central and well-known of these services are
Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3.
AWS is a suite of
hosting products that aims to take the headache out of traditional hosting
solutions. Services like Dropbox and websites such as Reddit all use AWS. In
Fact we feel that we are in a good neighbourhood by being on AWS.
AWS isn't just for
the Dropboxes and Reddits of the world, though. You and I can host a couple of
servers on AWS and quite efficiently too. We recently have been using AWS to
host the web backend for an enterprise web application we built for the
mortgage servicing industry, which usually runs on high traffic during the
office hours and a bit of less traffic in the off hours.
For transient
events like this, AWS makes a lot of sense. The traffic is high during the day,
and then will dwindle off, allowing us to manage the amount of server
computation needed to host the backend without being tied into a yearlong
contract, or paying for power we don't necessarily need.
I've compiled a few
of our reasons for choosing AWS and explained them here. So let's dive in and
see why AWS is better than the competition, for big and small users.
On the Go Pricing
Amazon took a
refreshing approach to pricing its hosting when launching AWS. Every service is
"a la carte", meaning you pay for what you use. This makes a lot of
sense for server infrastructure, as traffic tends to be very bursty, especially
the larger the site is.
Traditional
hardware, for the most part, goes unutilized for 90% of its lifecycle. AWS
helps deal with this problem by keeping it cheap during the slow times.
The Free Tier
The biggest reason
many people do not use AWS is lack of knowledge. EC2 is not like a traditional
hosted solution, as it's designed to bring servers online and offline very
quickly as needed. Because of this, many IT professionals were leery of using
EC2 (or the rest of the AWS suite) because of the cost associated with
"playing around" to figure it out.
The free tier,
which provides enough credit to run an EC2 micro instance 24/7 all month,
resolves this. It comes with S3 storage, EC2 compute hours, Elastic Load
Balancer time, and much more. This gives developers a chance to try out AWS's
API in their software, which not only enhances their software, but also ties
them to AWS, which benefits Amazon in the long run.
Performance
There's no denying
the speed of AWS. The Elastic Block Storage is nearly as fast as S3, but
provides different features. EC2 Compute Units give Xeon-class performance on
an hourly rate. The reliability is better than most private data centers in the
world, and if there is a problem, you're usually still online , but with
reduced capacity.
This is tested
using a beautiful application Chaos Monkey, where by using this application it
randomly powers down a component in your cloud environment. Then you could
whether your application is still running or if it is brought down entirely. So
in our case the chaos monkey brought down our database and a web server. The
database which was a RDS service immediately switched to another database using
the Multi AZ feature as promised by AWS. In the web server scenario, when one
web server was down then another web server was launched using the autoscaling
feature, so we finally concluded that AWS delivers High Availability
Performance as promised by them.
In a traditional
traditional hosting environments, this probably would have meant downtime and
404 errors as the websites would have just gone dark. But in a truly
cloud-hosted environment like AWS, there's enough separation between processing
and storage that sites can remain online and continue generating revenue even
with reduced functionality. We host our sites out of the Northern Virginia
cluster and Oregon cluster, and experienced no problems.
But the performance
power of AWS is in the storage. The distributed nature of EBS and S3 yields
millions of input/output operations per second to all instances. Think of it
like having a raid array of SSDs attached to a particular computer. Add in
incredible bandwidth, and you have a storage system that is capable of vast
scaling, with the reliability of 99.999999999%.
Deployment Speed
If you've ever had
to provision a hosted web service, you know this pain very well. Traditional
providers take anywhere from 48-96 hours to provision a server. Then you have
to spend a few hours tweaking it and getting everything tested.
AWS shrinks that
deployment time to minutes. If you utilize their Amazon Machine Images, you can
have a machine deployed and ready to accept connections in that short amount of
time. This is important when, for example, you are running a promotion that
generates tons of traffic at specific intervals, or just need the flexibility
to handle the demand when a new product launches.
The Cloudformation
Templates is a gift from the AWS which can be used to roll out multiple
environments at the click of button and as well can be rolled down at the click
of a button when the requirement recedes.
Security
Access to the AWS
resources can be restricted using the IAM(Identity and Access Management),
using the roles in IAM we can define the privileges for user actions which
greatly reduces any malpractices.
AWS also provides
VPC, which can be used to host our services on a private network which is not
accessible from the internet, but can communicate with the resources in the
same network. This restricts the access to the resources such that any ill
intentioned user from the internet.
These resources
hosted in the private network can be accessed using the Amazon VPN or some open
source service like OpenVPN.
Flexibility
The most important
feature in AWS is its flexibility. All the services work and communicate
together with your application to automatically judge demand and handle it
accordingly.
Combined with the
fantastic API and the Amazon Machine Images you create, you can have a
completely customized solution that provisions a server instance in under 10
minutes, and is ready to to accept connections once it comes online. Then you
can quickly shut down instances when they are no longer needed, making server
management a thing of the past.
ABC For Technology training institute providing Amazon Web Services(AWS) training For Freshers and Experienced. ABC providing Quality training and placement.
Comments
Post a Comment