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 isn’t 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, you’re 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 Amazon’s 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, there’s 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
Order Now