The document discusses the historical evolution and functionality of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering that allows customers to rent virtual servers by the hour. It traces trends in computing from shared utility computing concepts in the 1960s to modern virtualization techniques, highlighting various EC2 instance types and storage solutions. Additionally, it provides a step-by-step guide for getting started with EC2, along with details on the virtualization technologies and storage options used by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

1. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
(EC2)
BY AKASH BADONE

2. Several Historical Trends
 Shared Utility Computing
 1960s – MULTICS – Concept of a Shared Computing Utility
 1970s – IBM Mainframes – rent by the CPU-hour. (Fast/slow switch.)
 Data Center Co-location
 1990s-2000s – Rent machines for months/years, keep them close to the network access point and
pay a flat rate. Avoid running your own building with utilities!
 Pay as You Go
 Early 2000s - Submit jobs to a remote service provider where they run on the raw hardware. Sun
Cloud ($1/CPU-hour, Solaris +SGE) IBM Deep Capacity Computing on Demand (50 cents/hour)
 Virtualization
 1960s – OS-VM, VM-360 – Used to split mainframes into logical partitions.
 1998 – VMWare – First practical implementation on X86, but at significant performance hit.
 2003 – Xen para virtualization provides much perf, but kernel must assist.
 Late 2000s – Intel and AMD add hardware support for virtualization.

3. Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
 Amazon web services for computing
 EC2
 Elastic Map Reduce (EMR).
 Data storage solutions (DynamoDB, RDS, S3 or EBS).
 Hope to use multiple features for storing input/output files and perform
intensive computations.

4. What is EC2?
Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing
 Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
 Allows customers to rent virtual computers by the hour. All they need to
provide is money, and they will have a virtual server instance.

5. Getting Started with Amazon EC2
 Step 1: Sign up for Amazon EC2
 Step 2: Create a key pair
 Step 3: Launch an Amazon EC2 instance
 Step 4: Connect to the instance
 Step 5: Customize the instance
 Step 6: Terminate instance and delete the volume created

6. EC2 Layers

7. EC2 Diagram

8. Types of Instances
 Free Tier
 Use AWS instances for up to 12 months (minimal performance)
 On-Demand
 Setup and tear down whenever you need to
 Reserved
 Pay up front for servers with contracts
 Spot
 Bid for unused capacity, but no control over when it’s terminated

9. EC2 instances
 A virtual computing environment with a web interface.
 Create and configure an “instance” (Amazon Machine
Image)
 Example: Extra large instance (standard)
 15GB of memory
 8 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores)
 1690GB of local storage
 64 bit platform
 Also offers cluster compute instances
 Example
 Cluster Compute Eight Extra large with 60GB memory, 88 EC2
units, 3370 local storage, 64-bit platform, 10 Gigabit Ethernet.

10. EC2 Instances
 Operating system Windows Server, Ubuntu Linux, Red Hat Enterprise linux
etc.
 Currently using AWS’s free usage tier (Getting started!)
 Pay for the capacity actually consumed
(http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing).
 Regional Servers located in 8 regions (US East, US West, EU, Asia Pacific
etc)
 Currently running a t1.micro instance
 Ubuntu Server version 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) 64-bit.

11. Amazon AWS
 Grew out of Amazon’s need to rapidly provision and configure machines of
standard configurations for its own business.
 Early 2000s – Both private and shared data centers began using
virtualization to perform “server consolidation”
 2003 – Internal memo by Chris Pinkham describing an “infrastructure
service for the world.”
 2006 – S3 first deployed in the spring, EC2 in the fall
 2008 – Elastic Block Store available.
 2009 – Relational Database Service
 2012 – Dynamo DB
 Does it turn a profit?

12. Amazon Web Services(AWS)

13. Virtualization
 Paravirtual
 Paravirtual AMIs boot with a special boot loader called PV-GRUB, which starts
the boot cycle and then chain loads the kernel specified in the menu.lst file on
your image
 Hardware Virtual Machine
 Unlike PV guests, HVM guests can take advantage of hardware extensions that
provide fast access to the underlying hardware on the host system
 Allows user to run an operating system directly on top of a virtual machine
without any modification, as if it were run on the bare-metal hardware.

14. Virtualization Specifications
 Xen Hypervisor for virtualization
 Provides services that allow multiple computer operation systems to execute on
the same computer hardware
 Hardware specifications are tailored to the needs of the use
 Storage, Computing, Memory, Graphics
 Why did Amazon choose Xen?

15. XEN Hypervisor
 Basic abstraction layer of software that sits directly on the hardware below
any operating systems.
 Responsible for CPU scheduling and memory partitioning of the various
virtual machines running on the hardware device.
 Controls the execution of virtual machines as they share the common
processing environment.
 No knowledge of networking, external storage devices, video, or any other
common I/O functions found on a computing system.

16. Storage
 Amazon EC2 uses two different kinds of storage. One is local storage,
known as Instance Storage, which is non-persistent and data will be lost
after an instance terminates. The other kind is persistent, network-based
storage called Elastic Block Store(EBS), which can be attached to running
instances or also used as a persistent boot medium.
 Instance Storage
 EBS

17. Elastic Block Storage
 Provides raw data blocks that can be attached to EC2 instances.
(Essentially works as network drives)
 Can be backed up and restored to another instance for when failures occur
on an a current instance

18. Instance Storage

19. Costs (On Demand)
Why did Amazon choose this
method of charging customers?
• Compute
• Storage
• Network IOPS