A presentation for AWS Usergroup Greece, introducing the basic Amazon Cloud services, concepts and buzzwords.

1. An intro to AWS
15 March 2012
Fotis Stamatelopoulos
Leonidas Tsementzis
Andreas Chatzakis
AWSUG Greece
Not affiliated with, sponsored or endorsed by AWS

2. DynamoDB
Storage Gateway
SES SWF Availability Zones
EC2 SimpleDB
Reserved instance
EMR SNS AWS CloudFront
CloudFormation
SQS Elastic IP
EBS ELB VPC
RDS CloudWatch Eventually consistent read
S3
Ephemeral storage
ElastiCache Route53

3. Elastic Compute Cloud: Virtual Servers
EC2 provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud
 Elastic: Obtain or release server instances in minutes
 Full Control: Root access, choice of OS and specs
 Secure: Firewall settings, dedicated instances, VPC
 Automation: Control servers via rich API, Autoscaling
 Cost Effective:
 OnDemand, Reserved & Spot pricing
 Pay per hour + Data Transfer

Globally Available: Regions, AZs, Elastic IPs
 Virtualized: Create Amazon Machine Images (AMI)
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4. AMIs & Instance Types
Virtualization and vertical scaling
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5. Regions & Availability Zones
Reduce Latency - Improve Availability
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6. Security Groups
Protect your services with Security Groups
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7. EC2: Elastic Block Storage
Non ephemeral disk volumes for your EC2 instances.
 Virtual hard drive attached to single EC2 instance
 Up to 1TB each, multiple drives per instance
 Persists independently from instance life
 AZ specific, Replication within that AZ
 Snapshot volumes, persist to Amazon S3, clone
 Variable performance
 Better for larger instance types
 Software RAID considered good practice
 Pay-as-you-go ($ * M I/O + $ * GB-month)
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8. EBS flexibility
Atach, Detach, Snapshot, Create Volume
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9. EC2: Elastic Load Balancing
ELB automatically distributes incoming application traffic
across multiple Amazon EC2 instances
 HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, SSL, Custom
 Health Checks
 CNAME to alias your domain name
 Sticky sessions
 Nothing to manage - Automagically scales
 Pay-as-you-go ($ * hours + $ * GB)
 Operational metrics (latency, count) @ Cloudwatch
 Usually much cheaper than running your own on EC2
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10. Simple Storage Service: Scalable Storage
S3 allows applications to store and retrieve any amount of
data objects, at any time, from anywhere on the web.
 Scalable: Unlimited Objects, up to 5TB each
 Region specific
 Manage via REST & SOAP – POSIX (but s3fs works)

Not a true distributed filesystem
 Download via HTTP,BitTorrent – Public vs Protected
 High (99.999999999%) or reduced (99.99%) durability (cheaper)
 Versioning and MFA deletion protection
 Good for static content, logs, backups
 $ * GBs stored+$ * GBs transfered+$ * 1K requests
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11. Cloudfront: Content Delivery Network
Cloudfront allows content distribution with low latency &
high data transfer speeds
 Caches copies of content close to end users
 Worldwide network of Edge locations
 Download or Stream
 Plays nicely with S3 (origin store)
 No support for query string invalidation (yet)
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12. Amazon Relational Database Service
RDS makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a
relational database in the cloud.
 Managed service (no server admin work!)
 MySQL or Oracle
 Failover on different AZ for High Availability(extra cost)
 Replica(s) on same AZ for Scalability (extra cost)
 Configurable settings
 Scale horizontally or vertically with no downtime
 Automated Backups & point-in-time recovery
 Automagic replacement of faulty instance
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13. SimpleDB: Schema-less DB Service
SimpleDB provides a highly available and flexible non-
relational datastore
 Managed service (no server admin work!)
 High Availability and Data Durability
 Data automatically indexed, flexible querying
 No schema (Domains, Items, Attributes and Values)
 Everything is a string (...and padding is your friend)
 Consistent or eventually consistent read requests
 Powerful when combined with S3 (simpleDB for meta-
data)
 10GB limit per domain (aka table)
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14. DynamoDB: Predictable Scalable NoSQL
High performance NoSQL DB with seamless scalability
 Managed service (no server admin work!)
 Any amount of data, Any level of request traffic
 Durable data (replicated in multiple Azs)
 Guaranteed provisioned throughput
 Primary Key: Hash index or Hash + ranged index
 Schema less but limited query flexibility vs simpleDB
 Strong Consistency, Atomic Counters
 On the background: Shared nothing architecture + SSD
 Plays nice with Elastic Map Reduce
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15. ElastiCache: In-Memory Cache
Memcache as a service
 Managed service (no servers to manage)
 Add or remove nodes to scale cache size up or down
 Automagic replacement of faulty nodes
 Cloudwatch monitors memcache specific metrics
 Set maintenance window for upgrades
 Configurable
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16. SES: Email Sending Service
Highly scalable and cost-effective bulk and transactional
email-sending service
 Send emails via API or via SMTP
 Reliable & Scalable
 Monitor sending activity & deliverability
 Feedback on bounce backs & spam complaints
 No replacement for your mailbox
 Beware of sending quota
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17. CloudWatch: Resource Monitoring
Cloudwatch is a monitoring system for AWS cloud
resources and custom metrics
 View Graphs & Statistics for AWS services
 Set Alerts and automated Response Actions
 Autoscaling based on cloudwatch metrics
 Submit custom metrics via API
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18. SQS: Message Queue Service
Simple Queue Service is a hosted queue service for
storing messages in a distributed environment
 Reliable and scalable
 Accessible via an API
 Supports object locking
 Authentication mechanisms
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19. There is more!
 Elastic Map – Reduce: Hadoop framework as a service
 SNS: Push Notification Service
 Route53: Reliable DNS hosting
 IAM: Control Access to AWS resources
 SWF: Workflow Service for Coordinating Application
Components
 Storage Gateway: Integrates on-premises IT environments
with Cloud storage
 CloudFormation: Templated AWS Resource Creation
 Elastic Beanstalk: AWS Application Container
 VPC: Isolated Cloud Resources
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20. Appendix

21. Unstructured Data Storage Comparison
Amazon S3 Amazon EBS Amazon EC2 Instance Storage
Type Object Block Block
Performance Moderate (single thread) to Very High High
High (multiple threads)
Durability of the data High Moderate Low
Elasticity/scalability Automatic Manual (by adding more No
volumes)
Availability High Moderate to High (using EBS Low
snapshots)
Persistence across instantiations Yes Yes No
Cross-instance access Yes No No
Degree of redundancy Highly redundant across multiple Redundant within an Availability Not redundant
data centers Zone
Interfaces HTTP, REST, or SOAP Access through EC2 OS/file Block device map, access
system through EC2 OS/file system
Size limits Effectivley unlimited (5TiB per 1GiB to 1TiB per volume (can 160GiB to 3.3TiB (larger
object, unlimited objects per use multiple volumes or striping instances have both larger
bucket) for larger capacities) volumes and more volumes)
Shareability across EC2 nodes Yes No No
Management Manual Manual Automatic
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22. DBs in AWS
You need.. ….consider
A relational database service with minimal Amazon RDS, a fully managed service that offers
administration? a choice of MySQL or Oracle engines, scale
compute & storage, Multi-AZ availability and
more.
A relational database you can manage and fully control Your choice of relational AMIs on Amazon EC2
on your own? and EBS that provide scale compute & storage,
complete control over instances, and more.
A NoSQL database service for smaller datasets Amazon SimpleDB, a fully managed service that
(<10GB) with flexible query capabilities? provides a schemaless database, reliability and
more.
A fast, highly scalable NoSQL database service? Amazon DynamoDB, a fully managed service that
offers extremely fast performance, seamless
scalability and reliability, low cost and more.
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