10.b) Explain Amazon Web Services (AWS) in detail.
Answer:
Amazon web services
- Development of flexible applications by providing solutions for elastic infrastructure scalability, messaging, and data storage
- Accessible through SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) or RESTful (Representational State Transfer) Web service interfaces.
- Expenses computed on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Compute services: Compute services constitute the fundamental element of cloud computing systems. The fundamental service in this space is Amazon EC2, which delivers an IaaS solution that has served as a reference model for several offerings from other vendors in the same market segment. Amazon EC2allows deploying servers in the form of virtual machines created as instances of a specific image.Images come with a preinstalled operating system and a software stack, and instances can be configured for memory, number of processors, and storage.
- Amazon machine images: Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) are templates from which it is possible to create a virtual machine. They are stored in Amazon S3 and identified by a unique identifier in the form of ami-xxxxxx and a manifest XML file.
- EC2 instances: EC2 instances represent virtual machines. They are created using AMI as templates, which are specialized by selecting the number of cores, their computing power, and the installed memory.
- EC2 environment: EC2 instances are executed within a virtual environment, which provides them with the services they require to host applications. The EC2 environment is in charge of allocating addresses, attaching storage volumes, and configuring security in terms of access control and network connectivity.
- Advanced compute services: EC2 instances and AMIs constitute the basic blocks for building an IaaS computing cloud. On top of these, Amazon Web Services provide more sophisticated services that allow the easy packaging and deploying of applications and a computing platform that supports the execution of MapReduce-based applications.
Storage services: AWS provides a collection of services for data storage and information management. The core service in this area is represented by Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). This is a distributed objectstore that allows users to store information in different formats.
- S3 key concepts: As the name suggests, S3 has been designed to provide a simple storage service that’s accessiblethrough a Representational State Transfer (REST) interface, which is quite similar to a distributedfile system but which presents some important differences that allow the infrastructure to be highlyefficient.
- Amazon elastic block store: The Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) allows AWS users to provide EC2 instances with persistent storage in the form of volumes that can be mounted at instance startup. They accommodate up to 1 TB of space and are accessed through a block device interface, thus allowing users to format them according to the needs of the instance they are connected to (raw storage, file system, or other).
- Amazon ElastiCache: ElastiCache is an implementation of an elastic in-memory cache based on a cluster of EC2 instances. It provides fast data access from other EC2 instances through a Memcached-compatible protocol so that existing applications based on such technology do not need to be modified and can transparently migrate to ElastiCache.
- Structured storage solutions: Enterprise applications quite often rely on databases to store data in a structured form, index, and perform analytics against it. Traditionally, RDBMS have been the common data back-end for a wide range of applications, even though recently more scalable and lightweight solutions have been proposed.
- Amazon CloudFront: CloudFront is an implementation of a content delivery network on top of the Amazon distributed storage infrastructure. It leverages a collection of edge servers strategically located around the globe to better serve requests for static and streaming Web content so that the transfer time is reduced as much as possible.
Communication services: Amazon provides facilities to structure and facilitate the communication among existing applications and services residing within the AWS infrastructure. These facilities can be organized intotwo major categories: virtual networking and messaging.
- Virtual networking: Virtual networking comprises a collection of services that allow AWS users to control the connectivity to and between compute and storage services. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and Amazon Direct Connect provide connectivity solutions in terms of infrastructure; Route 53 facilitates connectivity in terms of naming.
- Messaging: Messaging services constitute the next step in connecting applications by leveraging AWS capabilities. The three different types of messaging services offered are Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), and Amazon Simple Email Service (SES).
- Additional services: Besides compute, storage, and communication services, AWS provides a collection of services that allow users to utilize services in aggregation. The two relevant services are Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon Flexible Payment Service (FPS).
Additional services: Additional services such as Amazon GovCloud, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Flexible Payment Service (FPS), Amazon DevPay, Amazon Fullfillment Web Service (FWS), Amazon Mechanical Turk, Alexa Web Information Service, Alexa Top Sites are also offered by AWS.