The document introduces cloud computing and Amazon Web Services. It defines cloud computing as on-demand access to scalable computing resources and services. It describes how AWS provides infrastructure services through EC2 virtual machines, storage through S3, and other services. It presents a case study of a file storage platform called MyNetworkFolders that uses AWS to dynamically scale its infrastructure based on user demand and minimize costs.

1. Introduction to Cloud Computing
and the Amazon Cloud
1st CloudCamp Athens
Colab Athens Oct 1, 2011
Fotis Stamatelopoulos
@fstama
http://linkedin.com/in/fstamatelopoulos

2. About the Presentation
20' presentation
○ What is Cloud Computing
○ The Amazon Cloud
○ Case study

3. What is Cloud
Computing ?

4. "The Cloud"
Different meaning: (a) user perspective, (b) software engineer /
systems perspective
source: wikipedia.org
source: shanghaiwebhosting.com

5. Cloud Computing
● The natural evolution of widely used technologies and
computing paradigms, like:
○ the client-server model
○ virtualization (dynamic multiple "virtual" machines
contained into a physical one)
○ the service oriented architecture
○ utility computing
● The "Cloud Computing" buzzword focuses more on the
business model than on the technologies involved
○ computing/network resources consumed on demand
○ elasticity - scalability
○ service, resources managed by the provider

7. Type of Cloud Computing Services
● Based on the service offered:
○ Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) - Amazon AWS
○ Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) - Google Appengine
○ may also include Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) -
SalesForce.com
● Based on ownership:
○ Public clouds - offer services to everyone
○ Private clouds - in-house solutions
○ Hybrid clouds - little bit of both

8. the goal of cloud computing is to provide
on demand, scalable access
to computing resources
& IT services

9. How ?
IaaS: you built your software and rent
○ Virtual machines (time based)
○ Storage (e.g. bytes per month)
○ Traffic in/out (per month)
○ Additional services (via API calls)
○ Deploy your software components and
you manage elasticity & scalability
PaaS:
○ Deploy your specially designed application and the
service handles elastic usage of resources / scaling
SaaS: you rent the usage of a software product
○ on a subscription basis (per user cost)
○ or on demand (time & per user cost)
○ some application customization is offered

11. What, how, why in 3 bullets...
● What's Amazon Web Services: pay-as-you-go access to
cloud infrastructure and elastic services via REST/SOAP
and/or a Web-based console.
● How (simplified):
○ create machine images (AMIs)
○ launch VMs (boot from AMIs)
○ attach persistent volumes (EBS vols)
○ login and install software & applications
○ (optional) use other AWS services via REST/SOAP
● Why:
○ dynamic, elastic usage of resources
○ cost-effective high availability (e.g. S3)
○ pay on usage (hourly-rate)

12. ... in a picture

13. Snapshot of the management console

14. AWS products & services
● EC2: your virtual machines in predefined HW configurations
● EBS: persistent block storage (faster than S3, slower than
volatile EC2 instance disks)
● S3: object (file) storage via REST/SOAP, high availability
and geographical replication, also used for your AMIs
● CloudFront: Amazon's CDN
● Cloudwatch / Autoscaling: monitoring and scaling of EC2
● Elastic Cache: distributed in-memory cache

15. AWS products & services (cont'd)
● SQS: distributed queue
● SNS: notification service(messaging / topics & events)
● SES: scalable, bulk e-mail service
● SimpleDB / RDS: Amazon's NoSQL / RDBMS services
● Elastic MapReduce: Hadoop on EC2/S3
● and more on deployment and management, payments/e-
commerce, networking... etc

16. Costs
● There is a free usage tier: new user sign-up, one year for a
Linux micro instance
● Pay as you go for what you use
○ pay usage per hour
○ pay for traffic (volume)
○ pay for storage (volume)
○ pay for I/O operations / transactions
● Much more expensive than the typical rented physical
machines / VMs

17. Expensive? Why should I use it?
● Cost effective high availability
● Elasticity, easy to scale up/down dynamically
● REST-based infrastructure management & monitoring
● Massive processing power for short periods
○ e.g. launch 10.000 VMs for a week
○ MapReduce big data projects
● It's not cost-effective to use EC2 instances for your low-
traffic web site (maybe on the free-tier)

18. Real world case study
MyNeworkFolders.com

19. ● SaaS offering implemented by EBS.gr
● A distributed, scalable and elastic file storage platform that:
○ supports access via multiple user interfaces (web
browser, mobile devices, desktop, WebDAV)
○ provides an API for building custom client applications
○ it is based on EBS's open source project gss-project.org
● It is designed for operating in the cloud, currently deployed
at the Amazon cloud.

21. High level architecture requirements
● MyNetworkFolders requires multiple servers for hosting its
software components:
○ duplicated (for fault tolerance) front-end web server
○ cluster of (at least two) application servers
implementing the core business logic
○ database cluster for storing meta-data and other info
○ search / indexing server cluster for full text search
○ a secure, efficient and scalable file storage system
● All these add up to at least three virtual servers and can
easily grow to clusters of tens of servers.

22. Hosted vs the Cloud
● Old school hosting solution: private or rented physical
servers in a data center:
○ always maintain and support a minimum number of
servers even when the load is low
○ energy & cost efficient adaptation to fluctuating load is
almost impossible to achieve
○ scaling up requires buying/renting and setting up new
physical servers (and supporting equipment)
■ for the application
■ for the storage subsystem
○ high operating costs for a small company, especially for
achieving a high level of fault tolerance / availability

23. Hosted vs the Cloud
● Having mynetworkfolders.com hosted in the cloud:
○ use and pay only what we need
○ easily and dynamically grow or shrink resource usage
(and energy consumption) to meet fluctuating user
demand during the day
○ easily scale up (more virtual servers) when the user
base increases, or when new functionality is added
○ economy of scale offers high availability and fault
tolerance in an affordable cost
○ minimize operational costs

24. AWS Technologies & Products Used
● Currently using in production:
○ EC2 for server instances (app, db, search,admin)
○ S3 - reliable, replicated file storage
■ the main reason we used AWS
○ CloudWatch (monitoring)
● Plan to use:
○ Elastic Load Balancing
○ CloudFront

25. Thank you! Questions?
@fstama
http://linkedin.com/in/fstamatelopoulos