rubycoloredglasses

I'm Jason, a web application developer in East Tennessee.

• on cloud9 aws

Amazon Web Services

This article documents my exploration of Amazon Web Services (AWS).

History

The first service publically offered by Amazon in 2004 was Amazing Simple Queue Service (SQS), a distributed message queueing service. Message queuing helps provide communications between applications/services, with the concern or risk of requests (messages) being lost or overburdening the systems processing the messages.

Thereafter AWS was relaunched offering Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

One of the most popular of the Amazon Web Services is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). I’m more familiar with dedicated or colocated hosting, where an actual desktop or rack mount computer is setup for you with some Linux variant installed so that you can SSH into it and configure the server using your own chosen methods. I’m also familiar with using Virtual Private Servers hosted by companies like Linode or DigitalOcean.

Much like VPS hosting, EC2 instances are provided by hypervisor technology running on physical machines, thus hosting multiple Virtual Machines (VMs). EC2 uses the [Xen] hypervisor, whereas other VPS services may use the open source Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) module for Linux hosting, Hyper-V for Windows hosting, or VMware vSphere for cross-platform virtualization.

VPS Comparison

So how does EC2 differ from typical VPS services?

Automation

A VPS provider may have some sort of API to automate the setup and configuration of new virtual machines (VMs), but usually this has some limitations. EC2 is intended to be provided as a service that allows for management of EC2 instances through a manual interface or via web based APIs.

Hardware Abstraction

The hardware and networking details for EC2 instances are completely abstracted for you. They’re not necessarily confined to a single host machine like a VPS is.

This can come with some challenges however when your needs require efficient communication between nodes.

Resources

A VPS typically has fixed resources such RAM, bandwidth, disk space, and CPU. EC2 allows you to modify these manually or via scripted automation.

EC2 also provides flexibility with instance types that vary in their optimization of resources.

There are general purpose instances that range in power appropriate for micro services or small web servers, to gaming servers or testing environments. There are instances intended for high performance computing. There are instances intended for intense disk input/output (IO) such as Big Data processing, Database servers, or logging. There are instances intended for optimized memory usage such as Memcached, Redis, or database servers. There are instances optimized for enhanced networking. You can enable GPU acceleration to be used with Amazon Elastic Inference (EI) for machine learning.

If you need high disk I/O capacity, which is typical for big data applications, then you can use a service such as Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) with your EC2 instances.

Billing

You can setup an EC2 instance for only a couple hours, days, or weeks, and only be charged for the resources you used. A typical VPS service is billed monthly or yearly, so short term use isn’t economically viable.

Dedicated Hosts

Some organizations require dedicated hosting for security compliance, or even for software licensing.

Container Services

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) provides support to host applications that have been configured to run in a Docker container. You can choose to run your application from a network of EC2 instances, or use Amazon Fargate to simplify the setup so that you can focus on developing your application.

AWS also supports the open-source container orchestration system known as Kubernetes via the Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS).

Anyone that has used Docker knows that you need a container registry to store your container images, so AWS also offers Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR).

Cloud Formation

You can automate the provisioning of your Cloud9 environment by using Amazon Cloudformation.

See Automating AWS Cloud9

Cloud 9

[Amazon Cloud9]

Uses Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) to communicate with the EC2 instance. A virtual private cloud (VPC) is a virtual network dedicated to your AWS account. It is logically isolated from other virtual networks in the AWS Cloud.

Types of Storage

Instance Store vs Elastic Block Store (EBS)

Backup Methods

How to Back Up Amazon EC2 Instances

EC2 Backup Method 2: Creating a New AMI

EC2 instances reply on Elastic Block Store (EBS) for their file system. You can configure Amazon to automatically create snapshots of your EBS file system periodically (daily, weekly, etc).

Alternatively you can also create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI)

Other Services

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