Amazon Web Services Aws Computer Science Essay

Amazon Web Services Aws Computer Science Essay Amazon Web Services is a collection of  web services that together make up a  cloud computing  platform, offered over the Internet by  Amazon.com.   AWS or Amazon Web service is a suite of products used for hosting that aims to take the trouble out of traditional hosting solutions. Dropbox , Reddit and many other services use Amazon web Service. AWS isnt just used for storage, It can also be used to host a couple of servers  on AWS and quite efficiently too. It can be used host a large scale of applications such as a backend program for an iPhone application or a large server for a banking industry. The below Image shows the services provided by Amazon Web Services The reasons why we have chosen amazon web service as opposed to its competitors are listed below. 1. Flexibility The most important feature of the Amazon Web Service is the flexibility it gives to its user. All the service hosted work and communicate together with the application to automatically judge demand and handle the work accordingly. The making use of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) provided by Amazon and the Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) we create, we can have a solution which is completely customized and one that provisions a server instance in less than ten minutes, and is ready to accept connections once it comes online. The instances can then be quickly shut down when they are no longer needed, making server management at the easiest ever. It also provides the Auto Scaling and Load Balancing features which enhances the flexibility of Amazon Web Service. 2. Performance The AWS is the fastest among the entire service provider available. The Elastic Block Storage (EBS) is nearly as fast as S3, but provides different features. EC2 Compute Units provides Xeon-class performance to the user at an hourly rate. The reliability is better with Amazon Web service than most other private datacenters in the world, and if there is a problem in the server, youre always still online, but with reduced capacity. An example of this is the recent outage that happened in the Northern Virginia cluster of AWS, one of Amazons primary datacenter farms in the United States. It affected Reddit, WordPress.com, and several other major sites which had used Amazon Web Service. These sites were still online but in a read-only mode, as Amazon had to shut down writing to their backend storage until they could resolve the problem. In a traditional hosting environment, this probably would have meant a longer downtime and 404 errors (Page not found) as the websites would have stopped responding. But in a truly cloud-hosted environment like AWS, theres enough separation between processing and storage that sites can remain online and continue generating revenue even with reduced functionality. But the primary performance power of Amazon Web Service is in the storage. The distributed nature of Elastic Block Storage (EBS) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) yields millions of inputs and output operations per second to all its instances. Imagine of it like having a raid array of Solid State Drives on a particular computer with incredible bandwidth, and you have a storage system which is capable of vast scaling, with an approximate reliability of 99.999999999%. 3. Pay for what you use Pricing The pricing policy used by Amazon Web Service is very different from most of the other service providers. Every service provided by Amazon Web Service is a la carte, meaning you pay for what you use. This makes it very useful for server infrastructure, when the traffic is very bursty, especially when the site is large. Consider a scenario when you need to develop an application to showcase it at an event for a very short duration of time. If we were to use a traditional service provider we would be tied up to a year contract but using amazon web service we pay for what we use, and also we pay for the CPU usage and not by the duration alone. This way the user does not have to worry about the performance as the AWS Auto scaling would create a new Instance and balance the load. 4. The Free Tier The free tier provided by AWS on user registration, provides enough credit for a user to run an EC2 micro instance 24/7 all month. It comes with Simple Storage Service, EC2 compute hours, Elastic Load Balancer time, and much more. This gives developers a chance to try out Amazon Web Services Application Programming Interface in the software they develop, which not only enhances their software, but also ties them to Amazon which would benefit Amazon in the long run. 5. Deployment Speed The biggest difficulty in developing an application is in during the deployment of the application. Traditional service providers take somewhere from 48-96 hours to provision a server. Then the developer needs to spend an extra few hours tweaking it and getting everything tested. Amazon Web Services shrinks that deployment time to minutes. By making use of the Amazon Machine Images, we can have a machine deployed and ready to accept connections in a very short amount of time. This is important when, for example, we are running a promotion that generates heavy traffic at certain specific intervals of time, or when flexibility is required to handle the demand when a new product is released. Competitor Comparison: Company Specification Computing Category Iaas Iaas Control Interface Web Based Application/Control Panel Web Based Application/Control Panel Application Programming Interface Application Programming Interface Command Line Graphical User Interface Guaranteed Network Availability 99.999% 100% Pricing Information Subscription Type Use Based and Subscription Plans Use Based Pricing Information http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing https://www.lunacloud.com/en/cloud-server-pricing Inbound Bandwidth Price 0 Cents 0 Cents Outbound Bandwidth Price 12 Cents per GB Used 10 Cents per GB Used Base Plan Cost $0.08 per hour $0.02 per hour Base Plan Details 1.7GB RAM, 160GB local storage, 1 EC2 Compute Unit 512 MB RAM, 1 vCPU, 10 GB DISK 2 cents/hour Features Free Support Not Available Yes but Limited Free Security Features Advanced Firewall Critical Data Privacy Custom/Secure Permissions Failover Features Advanced email/password Security Advanced Firewall Failover Features Persistency Snapshot Backup Paid Security Features Advanced Firewall Critical Data Privacy Data Encryption Intrusion Detection Persistency Snapshot Backup Backup Storage Snapshot Backup Auto scaling Yes, Free Yes, Free Load Balancing Yes, With Charge Yes, Free Monitoring Yes, Free Not Available Virtual Private Servers Yes, With a charge Yes, With a charge Root Access Yes Yes File Hosting Service Yes, With a charge Web Hosting Service No Yes, Free Compatibility Compatible Operating Systems Cent OS 5.4 Debian Fedora Gentoo Linux Open Solaris OpenSUSE Linux Red Hat Enterprise Linux SUSE Linux Oracle Enterprise Linux Ubuntu 10.04 Ubuntu Linux Windows Server 2003 Windows Server 2008 Cent OS Debian Fedora 11 Linux Operating Systems OpenSUSE Linux Red Hat 5.1 Ubuntu Linux Windows Server 2008 Processor 32 Bit and 64 Bit 64 Bit Programming Languages Supported Java PHP Python Ruby The cloud computing provider offers root access to the servers, all the programming languages are supported by the provider. WinDev The cloud computing provider offers root access to the servers, all the programming languages are supported by the provider. http://partnerweb.vmware.com/GOSIG/home.html http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/cloud/cloud-services-apps/350-5-reasons-why-amazon-web-services-takes-traditional-servers-to-school