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.

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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