Amazon Cloud Services

With the increase in demand and usage of software products and services, the demand for the large infrastructure has also been increased for data processing activities. This in turn led to the deployment of new infrastructure which again proved out be both, costly as well as time consuming. To solve this problem, Amazon introduced its web services in terms of infrastructure.

Amazon web service basically comprises of two segments:

• Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2): This is used to provide infrastructure services like Desktop Virtualization to a company.
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), to provide data storage facility to an organization.

The deployment of this cloud technology reduced the cost of installation for new infrastructure and was easy to deploy. Amazon also provided ‘Infrastructure as a Service’ and ‘Software as a Service’ and soon emerged as the leader among the various cloud computing companies offering cloud services.

The basic requirement of providing computing services over a network was fulfilled by Amazon’s Cloud Compute (EC2). EC2 allows the organizations to hire a virtual machine, which runs the computer applications desired by the organization and operate over a network. EC2 provide scalable amount of virtual machines called as “Instances”. The user pays according to the amount of services used for its working rather than renting the instances for a fixed duration of course.

EC2 is based on Xen virtual machine (VM) monitor which allows multiple operating systems to execute over the same hardware platform concurrently. Every instance or the virtual machine in EC2 works as a private virtual server giving a sense of dedicated system to the user. The size of each instance is drafted in accordance with the Elastic Compute Unit i.e. ECU. Amazon defines ECU as several benchmarks or tests to manage the consistency and predictability of the cloud computing unit.

There are different types of ECU packages which contain a number of VM’s and the amount of data storage. These are:

• Micro ECU: provides 1-2 instances and 633 MB of memory
• Small ECU: comes with only 1 instance but increased memory of 1.7 GB.
• Larges ECU: provides 4 instances and 7.5 GB memory.
• XL ECU: comes with 8 instances and 15 GB memory, etc.

Each VM has a processing capacity equivalent to 1.0-1.2 GHz, 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xenon processor.

In August 2006, Amazon launched EC2 with Linux, Open Solaris of Sun Microsystems and Solaris express community edition. But in October 2008, Amazon added Windows server 2003 and Windows server 2008, in list of available OS’s for cloud computing.

EC2 instances are available with two types of storage options; one is using the local instance store disk which is temporary storage and all the data gets lost as soon as the instance lasts. Another method to launch EC2 instance is using EBS, Elastic Block Store, which is more like a data storage disk at the server and stores the data independent of the lifetime of the instance.

With Amazon EC2 service, Elastic IP addressing is done between instance and the user’s system. With this users are free to map their system to any desired VM without taking into account the network administrator and without waiting for DNS to propagate the new binding. This allocates the IP address to the account being used and not the VM being used. In a sense, Elastic IP addressing is more like Static IP addressing.

Another important feature of EC2 is the automated scaling of the servers which means in high traffic situation, the number of servers would increase and if the traffic reduces, the server number would also be reduced. This gives the flexibility of pricing to the customer as the cost will be in accordance with the usage of service.

Since 2006, Amazon is providing useful and reliable IT infrastructure services over the web to its clients and charging on the usage basis for services and infrastructure, thus giving the scalable services according to need of a software development company which eventually cuts away the cost and time of installation and maintenance of such infrastructure.