Amazon Web Services is looking the goods

I have to admit I am a fan of the work that Amazon has done putting together what is now a compelling collection of infrastructure services. Together these facilities provide a fantastic vehicle for hosting highly scalable and reliable systems. And the pricing model where you pay for what you use, with prices constantly being reviewed is very enticing. Elasticity is taken to an entirely new level – machines can be purchased by the hour for as little as eleven cents. Some of the services charge in micro cents – more on that later. This is the first of three posts examining Amazon Web Services. this post introduces the key concepts, the next post will talk about some of the scaling techniques provided, and the final post will focus on how Altium is currently leveraging Amazon offerings.

The key services Amazon offer include storage, compute power, and a range of auxiliary services designed to enhance these. Here is a very brief overview:

• Amazon S3 (Simple Structured Storage) provides storage facilities. You can store files of all kinds including video, audio, software and anything else. You pay for the storage and the bandwidth to access them. Costs are very low. Altium uses S3 to store many things including training videos and software builds. When Altium releases a new build, tens of thousands of customers need to be able to get the 1.8GB file very quickly and this works well for that. Storage reliability comes in two levels – the highest provides a 99.999999999% (11 nines) probability of not being lost.
• Amazon Cloudfront provides a perimeter caching facility – files stored in S3 are distributed to local nodes around the world so that people can get access to the files quickly. There is an option to provide files as delivered via streaming.
• Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) provides access to virtual computers you can buy by the hour. The computers come in a number of hardware configurations ranging from low-end single processor machines through to big boxes with lots of processors and 68GB RAM. Machines come in Linux and Windows flavors. You can also get the machines preconfigured with certain hardware packages, and the price of those (if they are chargeable) is built into the rental. For example you can get a machine MS SQL Server in different flavours ranging from free to the Enterprise level. Machines can be imaged so that you can take them off line or replicate them very quickly. EC2 instances can be tied to Elastic Block Storage, effectively S3 storage.
• Amazon RDS is a special case of EC2 that comes with an embedded MySQL database and a range of value added facilities, including automatic backups and the ability to achieve failover replication into an alternative hardware partition in case the main server goes down.
• Amazon SimpleDB is a lightning fast schema-less string-based database consisting of items with many named attribute value pairs. You can, for instance, store a customer record with values for Name, Address, Phone etc, but you can store anything you like. If you want to store Favorite Color for one customer,  you can.  You can even store multiple values for the one attribute.

There are a range of other facilities, but I will discuss these in a later post where I talk about facilities to help you achieve elastic scaling (up and down).