Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Amazon and Sun are examples of such companies that provide such computing
resources.
Amazon (Amazon Web Services 2009) is an American electronic commerce
company based in Seattle. Amazon owns Amazon.com that began as an online
bookstore, but now sells DVDs, music CDs, computer software, video games, elec-
tronics, apparel, etc. Furthermore Amazon offers in its catalogue web services for
access as well as for integration with other retailers like Target and Marks & Spencer.
Amazon offers two interesting web services for developers, namely, Simple Storage
Service (Amazon S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).
Simple Storage Service (S3) allows any developer to store and retrieve almost
any amount of data by accessing the same “highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpen-
sive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of
web sites” (Amazon S3 2009). This allows developers to begin new businesses with
little or no up-front investments or performance compromises. The provision of
quick, always available and secure access to the company's data is inexpensive and
simple. Any file type is allowed to be stored, up to 5GB and can be set as public,
shared or private. The service is charged for $0.15 (USD) per GB of storage per
month and $0,20 (USD) for each GB of data transferred upstream or downstream.
Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a service that enables developers to use
Amazon's computing power for their own needs. It is possible for the user to obtain
and configure capacity with the minimum of effort and to have complete control of
the computing resources. Also EC2 allows the quick scalability of the capacity of
the system in both directions according to the changes in the computing require-
ments. The developer is charged only for the capacity that has been reserved and
due to the very little time that is needed to increase or reduce server instances, it's
possible to keep the actual capacity used very close to day to day requirements.
EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and protect
themselves from common failure scenarios. On the other hand, the architecture of
EC2 is simple. The servers that provide the EC2 service are Linux-based virtual
machines that are called instances. There are two instance families; the standard one
which is well suited for most of the applications and the high-CPU one that includes
instances that have proportionally more CPU resources than memory (RAM) and
are better suited for compute-intensive applications. The charges for the instances
that belong to the aforementioned families are shown in the table 5.6 (Arrington
2006, Garfinkel 2007, Hof 2006).
