A bit of History…

One uppon a time…

Scaling up soon became an issue.

AWS: a few figures

• 9 regions, including special ones
  • 1 for the US Government in North America
  • 1 for the Chinese market in Beijing
• Revenue: $7.88 billion (2015)
• Profit: ≈ $1 billion
• Growth ≈ 50%/year since 2010

AWS: services

• 55 services accessible through the Web Console
• Stack organization: higher level services rely on low-level services

A resilient infrastructure

Regions

Plus ≈ 40 Edge regions.

Edge locations

These edge locations are used by CloudFront (CDN) and Route53 (DNS) only.

Region layout

Each region is composed of multiple isolated Data Centers called Availability Zones

Example: eu-west-1 region

Average distance between two AZs: ≈40km.

AWS: main services

EC2

EC2 instances

An EMI (Amazon Machine Image) is a snapchot of a system that is used as a base for VMs. It can be seen as an archive of an entire filesystem.

• Each VM uses its own copy of the EMI
• 2 types of instance:
  • Instance storage: non-persistent storage
  • EBS storage: the root filesystem is a persistant EBS volume

EC2: 3 types of instances

…that are actually billing options:

• On-demand instances
• Reserved instances
• Spot instances

For all of them, license fees can be added!

EC2: On-demand instances

The most common type of instances:

• No long-term commitment
• Charged by the hour
• The most handy

EC2: Reserved instances

Pay upfront for a defined period and save up to 75%. Two modes:

• Always-on: on 24x7, always available (and always charged)
• Scheduled: reserved on a recurring schedule basis, accomodates important but irregular needs

EC2: Spot instances

The cheapest: save 50-90% renting unused instances for a low price. the price fluctuates according to the platform capacity and demand.

The customer fixes a bid. At any point in time:

• If the current instance price is lower than the bid, your instance can run.
• Otherwise, your instance cannot run, you have to wait for the price to lower or increase your bid.

Difficult to use: instances can disappear anytime due to price variations!

Well fitted for batch on Bag of Tasks (BoT) applications.

Other important AWS services

EC2: Security Groups

A software firewall for instances

• Defines a set of firewall rules
• By default: out traffic allowed, in traffic blocked (including SSH!)
• Every instance is in a security group (default group)
• Custom rules can be added

Elastic IP

Addressing: customers can rent public IPs from Amazon

Each instance has:

• 1 private IPv4 address
• 1 public IPv4 address

By default, the instance public IP address is dynamic (NAT).

Optionally, a static address (paid) can be assigned from customer Elastic IP pool.

IAM

Identity & Access Management

• Roles and access management
• User groups
• Limited API access depending on user roles
• Detailed billing per roles/groups
• Fine grained access policies
  • Per role
  • Per resource

EBS

Elastic Bloc Storage

• Offers persistent storage volumes
• Volumes can be attached to/detached from one or more EC2 instances
• Snapchots: create an copy of an EBS volume at a given time
• Create new volumes from snapchots

ELB

Elastic Load Balancing

Balances incoming requests to a pool of EC2 instances

• Supports TCP, HTTP(S) and SSL protocols
• Intances can be attached/detached dynamically
• Compatible with auto-scaling features:
  • provision/deprovision instances dynamically
  • according to pre-defined policies (response time, CPU load, etc.)

Glacier

Long-term storage, archival.

• For very infrequent access
• Very cheap (from $0.0.7/GB/month)
• Long restoration delays (3 to 5 hours)
• Accessed though S3

Route 53

DNS-as-a-Service

• Manages DNS inside and outside AWS
• Routing policies based on
  • Latency
  • Locality
  • Weighted Round Robin
• Compatible with EC2, EIP and ELB
• Very low propagation latency

Relational Database Service

• DBaaS (Amazon Aurora, Oracle,MS SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB)
• High-availability SQL DB with replication
• Easy scaling
• Backup/Restore
• Effortless
• Import/export feature

DynamoDB

Amazon’s NoSql (key/value) database.

• SSD based: very low latency
• Replicated over 3 Availability Zones inside any given region
• Strong consistency
• Very scalable

(EMR) Elastic MapReduce

Hadoop is great (but hard to setup!) EMR is an integrated Hadoop-based MapReduce framework:

• Put your data in S3
• Lauch EMR:
  • EC2 cluster automatically provisioned
  • MR tasks automatically run on top of the EC2 cluster
• Get the results back from S3
• EC2 cluster automatically de-provisioned

More than just Hadoop: HDFS, Pig/Latin, Hive, Spark, …

Virtual Private Cloud

Simulates a private cloud with EC2 instances and VPN techniques.

• Isolated network (software)
• A dedicated IP pool
• Security: limit access to S3 to a VPC
• Allows to bind an EIP to an instance inside a VPC
• Cost: $0.05/h/VPN access

Amazon EC2 Container

The new buzzword in Cloud Computing

• Allows easy deployment of Docker containers in EC2 instances
• AMI that includes the Docker daemon
• No virtualized OS: faster deployment*
• Same instances charge

*once the EC instances and Docker daemons are deployed

Deployment services

Elastic Beanstalk

AWS PaaS service.

Allows to deploy a complete stack…

• Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, Docker…
• Relies on other AWS services to deploy and maintain the platform
• Does not deploy DB backends
• Scenario based deployments

…without having to maintain the underlying software.

CodeCommit

Private git repo hosting.

• No administrative duty
• IAM takes care of users and ACL
• Elastic: grows with your data
• Low cost: $1/user/month
  • 10GB and 2000 queries/month

CodeDeploy

Deploy development code on EC2 instances

• The app must be in S3 or in a git repo
• Integrates with common development tools & platforms
  • GitHub, Jenkins, Tavis CI, CloudBees, etc.
  • Apache, Nginx, Passenger and IIS.
• Deployment configured by recipies (declarative text)
• Web Console, CLI and Python SDK
• Minimizes downtime

CodePipeline

Rolling release of development code.

• Based on various external events
• A GUI to define deployment pipelines

OpsWorks

Automated infrastructure deployment based on Chef.

• Deploy complete appliances filled with industry-standard software (HAProxy, Memcached, MySQL, etc.)
• Compatible with your existing Chef recipies
• Manageable with APIs

Amazon Workspaces

A virtual desktop in EC2

• A set of desktop applications inside a web browser
• Windows-based
• Let you chose applications to deploy from a catalog
• From $21/month (BYOL)