We continue our Cloud provider information with Amazon Web Services Breakdown.
Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) – The basic building block of Amazon’s Cloud, Virtual machines that comes in various RAM and CPU sizes. They have 10 OS’s including RedHat Enterprise Linux, OpenSolaris, SUSE enterprise and Windows 2008 ready to use. Not to mention you can upload your own custom VM’s right into their environment.
These virtual machines come with one public IP and one internal network IP. The internal IP is part of the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). It allows customers to do extensive customizable networking to meet your advanced security needs. It allows things like custom tunnels between server clusters in different availability zones or even VPN tunneling to your office or private datacenter.
Additional available networking services include Amazon Route 53 for your DNS Service needs and Elastic Load Balancing to balance your EC2 virtual machines.
Amazon Storage- Amazon has two specific types of storage, Simple Storage Service (S3) or Elastic Block Store (EBS). S3 allows for unlimited storage and also includes CloudFront, Amazon’s own Content Delivery Network (CDN). Elastic Block Store is more like a dedicated SAN in the Cloud that can be added to an EC2 instance within that specific Availability Zone. They can be from 1GB to 1TB in size and can be used in various ways to meet your specific storage needs.
Amazon Database as a Service -
SimpleDB – is a highly available, flexible, and scalable non-relational data store that offloads the work of database administration. Developers simply store and query data items via web services requests, and SimpleDB does the rest.
Relational Database Service (RDS)- Relational Database as a service solution to offload your relational database server needs to Amazon. This also automates database backups and scaling issues, so you can concentrate on the front end services.
Monitoring and Deployment Management programs –
CloudFormation – Think of this as a very basic version of puppet or chef for your Amazon Cloud. Allow you to build various templates to quickly standup of additional systems as needed.
CloudWatch – Web based front end for monitoring of cloud resources and your applications. System administrators can use it to collect and track metrics, gain insight, and react immediately to keep their applications running smoothly. It lets you retrieve your monitoring data, view graphs, and set alarms to help you troubleshoot, spot trends, and take automated action based on the state of your cloud environment.
Amazon Cloud Applications –
Simple Email Service (SES) – Is a scalable and cost effect bulk email sending service, much in the same line as sendgrid.com.
Fulfillment Web Service (FWS) – allows merchants to access Amazon.com’s fulfillment capabilities through a simple web services interface. Merchants can programmatically send order information to Amazon with instructions to physically fulfill customer orders on their behalf.
Flexible Payments Service (FPS) - is the first payments service designed from the ground up for Amazon’s customers. It is built on top of Amazon’s reliable and scalable payments infrastructure and provides developers with a convenient way to charge Amazon’s large customer base. Amazon customers can pay using the same login credentials, shipping address and payment information they already have on file with Amazon.