Amazon Web Services

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AmazonWebservices Logo.svg
Developer(s) Amazon.com
Initial release 2006[1]
Website aws.amazon.com

Amazon Web Services (abbreviated AWS) is a collection of remote computing services (also called web services) that together make up a cloud computing platform, offered over the Internet by Amazon.com. The most central and well-known of these services are Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3. The service is advertised as providing a large computing capacity (potentially many servers) much faster and cheaper than building a physical server farm.[2]

Contents

Architecture [edit]

Map showing the approximate geographical regions utilized by Amazon Web Services.

AWS is located in 8 geographical 'Regions': US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Northern California), US West (Oregon), São Paulo (Brazil), Ireland, Singapore, Tokyo and Sydney. There is also a "GovCloud" in the USA provided for US Government customers. Each Region is wholly contained within a single country and all data and services stay within the designated Region.

Each Region has multiple 'Availability Zones', which are distinct data centers providing AWS services. Availability Zones are isolated from each other to prevent outages from spreading between Zones. Several services operate across Availability Zones (e.g. S3, DynamoDB) while others can be configured to replicate across Zones to spread demand and avoid downtime from failures.

History [edit]

AWS Summit 2013 event in NYC.

Officially launched in 2006,[3] Amazon Web Services provide online services for other web sites or client-side applications. Most of these services are not exposed directly to end users, but instead offer functionality that other developers can use in their applications. Amazon Web Services’ offerings are accessed over HTTP, using REST and SOAP protocols. All services are billed based on usage, but how usage is measured for billing varies from service to service.

In late 2003, Chris Pinkham and Benjamin Black presented a paper proposing the company could build and sell a set of services based on the experience of building and operating the infrastructure for Amazon.com.[4] The first AWS service launched for public usage was Simple Queue Service in November 2004.[5] Amazon EC2 was built by a team in Cape Town, South Africa under Pinkham and lead developer Chris Brown.[6]

In June 2007, Amazon claimed that more than 330,000 developers had signed up to use Amazon Web Services.[7]

On April 20, 2011, some parts of Amazon Web Services suffered a major outage. A portion of volumes utilizing the Elastic Block Store (EBS) service became "stuck" and were unable to fulfill read/write requests. It took at least two days for service to be fully restored.[8]

On June 29, 2012, several websites that rely on Amazon Web Services were taken offline due to a severe storm of historic proportions in the Northern Virginia area where Amazon's largest datacenter is located.[9]

On October 22, 2012, a major outage occurred, affecting many sites such as reddit, Foursquare, Pinterest, and others. The cause was a latent bug in an operational data collection agent.[10]

On Christmas Eve 2012, Amazon AWS again suffered an outage, causing websites such as Netflix instant video to be unavailable[11] for some customers, particularly in the North-eastern US. Amazon later issued a statement [12] detailing the issues with the Elastic Load Balancing service that led up to the outage.[13]

While AWS revenue is not broken out in Amazon financials (it falls into the "Other" category), industry watchers estimated it to be over $1.5B in 2012.[14]

List of AWS products [edit]

Compute [edit]

Networking [edit]

  • Amazon Route 53 provides a highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service.
  • Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) creates a logically isolated set of Amazon EC2 instances which can be connected to an existing network using a VPN connection.
  • AWS Direct Connect provides dedicated network connections into AWS data centers, providing faster and cheaper data throughput.

Content Delivery [edit]

Storage & Content Delivery [edit]

  • Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) provides Web Service based storage.
  • Amazon Glacier, Provides a very low cost long-term storage option (when compared to its S3 service). High redundancy and availability, but low-frequent access times. Ideal for archiving data.
  • AWS Storage Gateway, an iSCSI block storage virtual appliance with cloud-based backup.
  • Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provides persistent block-level storage volumes for EC2.
  • AWS Import/Export, accelerates moving large amounts of data into and out of AWS using portable storage devices for transport.

Database [edit]

  • Amazon DynamoDB provides a scalable, low-latency NoSQL online Database Service backed by SSDs.
  • Amazon ElastiCache provides in-memory caching for web applications. This is Amazon's implementation of Memcached.
  • Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) provides a scalable database server with MySQL, Oracle, and SQL Server support.
  • Amazon Redshift provides petabyte-scale data warehousing with column-based storage and multi-node compute.
  • Amazon SimpleDB, allows developers to run queries on structured data. It operates in concert with EC2 and S3 to provide "the core functionality of a database."
  • AWS Data Pipeline, provides reliable service for data transfer between different AWS compute and storage services(e.g. Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon EMR.). In other words this service is simply a data-driven workload management system, which provides a simple management APIs to managing and monitoring of data-driven workloads in cloud applications.

Deployment [edit]

  • Amazon CloudFormation provides a file based interface for provisioning other AWS resources.
  • AWS Elastic Beanstalk provides quick deployment and management of applications in the cloud.
  • AWS OpsWorks for configuration of EC2 services using Chef (software).

Management [edit]

  • Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM), an implicit service, the authentication infrastructure used to authenticate access to the various services.
  • Amazon CloudWatch, provides monitoring for AWS cloud resources and applications, starting with EC2.
  • AWS Management Console (AWS Console), A web-based point and click interface to manage and monitor the Amazon infrastructure suite including (but not limited to) EC2, EBS, S3, SQS, Amazon Elastic MapReduce, and Amazon CloudFront. Amazon also makes available a mobile application for the Android which has support for some of the management features from the console.

App Services [edit]

  • Amazon CloudSearch provides basic full text search and indexing of textual content.
  • Amazon DevPay, currently in limited beta version, is a billing and account management system for applications that developers have built atop Amazon Web Services.
  • Amazon Elastic Transcoder (ETS) provides video transcoding of S3 hosted videos, marketed primarily as a way to convert source files into mobile-ready versions.
  • Amazon Flexible Payments Service (FPS) provides an interface for micropayments.
  • Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) provides bulk and transactional email sending.
  • Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) provides a hosted message queue for web applications.
  • Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) provides a hosted multiprotocol "push" messaging for applications.
  • Amazon Simple Workflow (SWF) is a workflow service for building scalable, resilient applications.

Miscellaneous [edit]

  • Amazon Fulfillment Web Service provides a programmatic web service for sellers to ship items to and from Amazon using Fulfillment by Amazon. This service will no longer be supported by Amazon. All of the functionality of this service is now transferred to Amazon marketplace Web service.
  • Amazon Historical Pricing provides access to Amazon's historical sales data from its affiliates. (It appears that this service has been discontinued.)
  • Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk) manages small units of work distributed among many persons.
  • Amazon Product Advertising API formerly known as Amazon Associates Web Service (A2S) and Amazon E-Commerce Service (ECS), provides access to Amazon's product data and electronic commerce functionality.
  • Amazon Gift Code On Demand (AGCOD) for Corporate Customers enables companies to distribute Amazon gift cards (gift codes) instantly in any denomination, integrating Amazon's gift-card technology into customer loyalty, employee incentive and payment disbursement platforms.
  • AWS Partner Network (APN) provides technology partners and consulting partners with the technical information and sales and marketing support to increase business opportunities through AWS and with businesses using AWS. Launched in April 2012, the APN is made up of Technology Partners including Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), tools providers, platform providers, and others.[15][16][17] Consulting Partners include System Integrators (SIs), agencies, consultancies, Managed Service Providers (MSPs), and others. Potential Technology and Consulting Partners must meet technical and non-technical training requirements set by AWS.

Competitors [edit]

References [edit]

  1. ^ "Amazon Web Services About Us". Amazon.com. September 2011. Retrieved 16 May 2012. 
  2. ^ http://aws.amazon.com/what-is-cloud-computing/
  3. ^ "Amazon Web Services About Us". Amazon.com. September 2011. Retrieved 16 May 2012. 
  4. ^ http://blog.b3k.us/2009/01/25/ec2-origins.html
  5. ^ http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2004/11/amazon_simple_q.html
  6. ^ Bort, Julie (28 March 2012). "Amazon's Game-Changing Cloud Was Built By Some Guys In South Africa". Business Insider. Retrieved 16 May 2012. 
  7. ^ Amazon.com-News Release
  8. ^ Summary of outage occurring April 20-22 2011
  9. ^ Summary of the AWS Service Event in the US East Region
  10. ^ Summary of the October 22, 2012 AWS Service Event in the US-East Region
  11. ^ Bishop, Bryan. "Netflix streaming down on some devices due to Amazon issues". The Verge. Retrieved 5 February 2013. 
  12. ^ http://aws.amazon.com/message/680587/
  13. ^ Summary of the December 24, 2012 Amazon ELB Service Event in the US-East Region
  14. ^ http://wikibon.org/wiki/v/Cloud_Computing_2013%3A_The_Amazon_Gorilla_Invades_the_Enterprise
  15. ^ Darrow, Barb. Amazon, seeking to relieve partner angst, launches partner program, GigaOM, April 18, 2012, Retrieved February 27, 2013
  16. ^ Ricknäs, Mikael. Amazon lays groundwork for AWS Partner Network, Computerworld, IDG, April 18, 2012, Retrieved February 27, 2013
  17. ^ Sharwood, Simon. Amazon Web services revamps partner program, The Register, April 18, 2012, Retrieved February 27, 2013

External links [edit]

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