Introduction to AWS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a very large suite of Cloud services provided by Amazon. AWS provides, at a base level, virtual machines and the services surrounding them. Many Cloud-based virtual machine services such as Google Compute Engine, DigitalOcean, Rackspace, Windows Azure, and so on provide the ability to bring up a machine from a supported base operating system image or snapshot, and it's up to the user to customize it further.

Amazon has made itself one of the leaders for Cloud-hosting by providing not just virtual machines, but configurable services and software implementations of hardware found in data centers. For most large-scale systems, the move to Cloud infrastructure brings to the table a huge set of questions on how to handle issues such as load balancing, content delivery networks, failover, and replication. The AWS suite can handle the same issues that a physical data center can, usually for a fraction of the cost. They can get rid of some of the red tape that comes with a data center such as requesting provisioning, repairs, and scheduling downtime.

Amazon is constantly offering new services to tackle new and unique problems encountered with Cloud infrastructure. However, this book may not cover every service offered by Amazon. The services that this book will cover include:

• Computing and networking
  • Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) virtual machines
  • Route 53 DNS provides local and global DNS look-ups
  • Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) isolated Cloud networks provide internal networks
  • Elastic Load Balancers (ELB) automatically distribute traffic across EC2 instances
  • Auto Scaling Groups (ASG) provide a way to scale instances up and down based on schedules or metrics gathered via CloudWatch from the EC2 instances attached to them
• Database
  • SimpleDB is a highly scalable NoSQL database
  • Relational Database Service (RDS) is a scalable SQL database apart from MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, or SQL Server
  • ElastiCache is an in-memory cache on top of Redis or MemCached
• Storage and content delivery
  • Simple Storage Service (S3) is a distributed storage network that crosses data center boundaries with built-in redundancy
  • CloudFront is a CDN that distributes content based on latency or location
• Application services
  • Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a fast, reliable, scalable, and fully managed message queuing service
• Deployment and management
  • CloudFormation is a service that allows the provisioning and updating of AWS resources through templates, usually JSON
• Logging
  • CloudWatch can monitor, display, and alert on instance metrics and logs

Tip

For information on other services provided by AWS that are not relevant to the information in this book visit http://aws.amazon.com/products/.