Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a range of cloud computing services, including compute and storage options, allowing flexible and scalable web application architecture. Key features include quick setup times, simple scaling options, and various security and database services, such as RDS and DynamoDB. AWS's pricing model allows for cost-effective resource management, making it suitable for diverse application needs.

1. Amazon AWS
Layman introduction
I spent a few days getting around my hands with Amazon
WebServices :
Just sharing what I understood if it may help beginners
Parashar

2. What is Amazon Web Services ?
AWS
Amazon Web Services offers a
complete set of infrastructure
and application services that
enable you to run virtually
everything in the cloud: from
enterprise applications and big
data projects to social games
and mobile apps.
Is it IAAS or PAAS ?
It probably does not matter. It
primarily provides compute and
storage as a service. Amazon is
not a traditional software vendor
like MS so it necessarily does
not want you to go with any
specific stack. Lot of flexibility.
Source :
www.amazon.com

3. A Simple Web App Architecture on Amazon
Domain Name Server
Load Balancer
Web Server 1
OS : Linux, Stack :
Service : EC2,
Apache2, JRE
Amazon EC2 Instance
Amazon Route 53
Amazon ELB Instance
……..
Service : EC2,
Apache2, JRE
Web Server
OS : Linux, Stack :
Amazon EC2 Instance
Database
Service : Amazon RDS, OS : Linux, Db : MySQL
Amazon RDS Instance
Cool Things : 1) Setup time is less than 15 minutes (apart from code and software aspects)
2) Web Server can scale pretty easily – just keep on adding or removing servers as per your needs. If there is persistence at
this level (e.g images), there are 2-3 ways to get around this – example NFS mounts
3) Database Scaling – For RDBMS, one can just go with a bigger box or look at replication. Multiple options available

4. Building Blocks
Instances
An instance provides a predictable amount of compute capacity. You can pay by hour or reserve it for a year or more
M1: Small
M1: Medium
M1: Large
1.7 GiB memory
1 EC2 Compute Unit (1
virtual core with 1 EC2
Compute Unit)
160 GB instance
storage
3.75 GiB memory
2 EC2 Compute Unit (1
virtual core with 2 EC2
Compute Unit)
410 GB instance
storage
7.5 GiB memory
4 EC2 Compute
Units (2 virtual cores
with 2 EC2 Compute
Units each)
M1: Extra
Large
M3: Extra
Large
M3: Double
Extra
15 GiB memory
8 EC2 Compute
Units (4 virtual cores
with 2 EC2 Compute
Units each)
1,690 GB instance
storage
15 GiB memory
13 EC2 Compute
Units (4 virtual cores
with 3.25 EC2
Compute Units
each)
EBS storage only
30 GiB memory
26 EC2 Compute
Units (8 virtual cores
with 3.25 EC2
Compute Units
each)
EBS storage only
Note
These are examples of some of the most common instance types. The complete list is at :
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/

5. Some other things
Amazon Marketplace
Security
Hosting Zone
This is basically like a app store from where you can download/purchase
AMIs (Amazon Machine Images) of vendor software that you may need in
your application instances
You are expected to take care of application level security mostly but
Amazon provides you most of the basic building blocks and also some
specific domain level certifications. You setup access to ports and IP
address and other amazon instances which can access your instance.
Tools like SSH and Putty will be your friends.
More here : http://aws.amazon.com/security/
Amazon has multiple places in the world where they have data centers and
they let you choose where you want to host. For e.g some of the locations
are Oregon, Singapore, Australia etc. It sometimes makes sense to have
your servers nearer to your client base. For .eg if you are developer a India
centric web app, you may want to host in Singapore. It is also possible to
use multiple hosting zones.

6. How is it different (Ones that I found compelling)?
Pricing Flexibility
Scale
Elastic
This is pretty cool. Suppose you want to create a website that needs to be hosted only
during IPL Inauguration day : www.iplinaugurationday.com and expect 50 million visitors
for 1 day. You can just do some capacity utilization exercise and buy 50 servers for one
day and then release all the servers the next day. At per hour rates, this will be very
cheap.
Horizontal scaling is pretty easy. Setup an alarm for watching events like CPU utilization or
concurrent users and ask Amazon to add or delete servers as per the logic. Fully automated
and pretty sweet.
You can go both ways from e.g from 1 to 50 or 50 to 1 in a matter of minutes. Example, If
you are a big movie website and you get 10x traffic on Sat and Sunday compared to
normal days, you can operate with say 50 servers from Monday to Friday and can use 500
servers on Sat and Sunday. This can be automated very easily and is very very powerful

7. Database
You can use the RDS service to get a relational
database. Options include mySQL, Oracle and
SQL Server. Backup, Patches, Recovery etc is
done automatically
Database
Service
RDS
Dynamo DB
ElastiCache
RedShift
If you need a NOSQL database, you can use
Amazon Dynamo DB. All data items are stored in
solid state drives
In-Memory Cache. Protocol compliant with
memcache.
Datawarehousing Service

8. Storage
Store and retrieve any amount of data from
anywhere in the web as objects
Storage
S3
EBS
Storage Gateway
Import/Export
Block level storage volumes for EC2 instances.
Example : This can be used to store the root
folder of a web application
Secure gateway service for data tranfser between
AWS and on-premise apps
Import/Export bypassing internet using
Amazon’s Internal network

9. Compute
Compute
EC2
EMR
Simple webservice that helps provide
Compute capacity (refer Slide 4)
Auto Scaling
Web Service for Map Reduce. Uses hosted
hadoop and Amazon S3
Used to scale up or down instances as
Per conditions

10. Networking
Lets you provision a virtual private isolated
section of the AWS cloud
Networking
Load Balancer
VPC
ELB
Route 53
Direct Connect
Domain Name Service
Dedicated connection service for faster
and secure access

11. Other Services
Cloud Watch
IAM
Elastic Beanstalk
Cloud Front
All the other good things
Monitor key parameters e.g CPU utilization
and take actions
Identity Management
Deployment service
Content Delivery Network
Notifications, Workflows, Queuing, Email
etc

12. Conclusion
Its not cool because of the things it does but because of the ease with which you can you do these
things (read right click) ..If you have a bad deployment architecture, no problem, you can deploy a
completely new one pretty quickly, (maybe within minutes). Try it, there is also a free tier.