Using Amazon Web Services Cloud Platform

AWS consists of many cloud services that we can use in combinations tailored to our business or organizational needs. This section introduces the AWS services in the following categories: compute, networking, storage and content delivery, databases, analytics, application services, deployment and management, mobile and applications.

2.2.1 Amazon EC2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers and system administrators. Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows us to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides with complete control of computing resources and lets us run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances (called Amazon EC2 instances) to minutes, allowing us to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as our computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing user to pay only for capacity that is actually used. Amazon EC2 provides developers and system administrators the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate themselves from common failure scenarios.

Benefits Elastic Web-Scale Computing

Amazon EC2 enables to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. We can commission one, hundreds or even thousands of server instances simultaneously. Of course, because this is all controlled with web service APIs, our application can automatically scale itself up and down depending on its needs.

Completely Controlled

We can have complete control of our Amazon EC2 instances. They have root access to each one, and we can interact with them as we would any machine. We can stop our Amazon EC2 instance while retaining the data on our boot partition, and then subsequently restart the same instance using web service APIs. Instances can be rebooted remotely using web service APIs. In addition, we can use the AWS Management Console, a simple, web-based user interface, to access and manage our Amazon EC2 instances.

Flexible Cloud Hosting Services

We can choose among multiple Amazon EC2 instance types, operating systems, and software packages. Amazon EC2 allows us to select a configuration of memory, CPU, instance storage, and the boot partition size that is optimal for our choice of operating system and application. For example, our choice of operating systems includes numerous Linux distributions and Microsoft Windows Server.

Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services

Amazon EC2 works in conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) to provide a complete solution for computing, query processing, and storage across a wide range of applications. Reliable

Amazon EC2 offers a highly reliable environment where replacement instances can be rapidly and predictably commissioned. The service runs within Amazon’s proven network infrastructure and data centers. The Amazon EC2 Service Level Agreement commitment is 99.95% availability for each Amazon EC2 region.

2.2.2 Amazon VPC

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) lets provision a logically isolated section of the AWS cloud where we can launch AWS resources in a virtual network that we define. We have complete control over our virtual networking environment, including selection of our own IP address range, creation of subnets, and configuration of route tables and network gateways. We can easily customize the network configuration for our Amazon VPC. For example, we can create a public-facing subnet for our web servers that have access to the Internet, and place our backend systems such as databases or application servers in a private-facing subnet with no Internet access. We can leverage multiple layers of security (including security groups and network access control lists) to help control access to Amazon EC2 instances in each subnet.