Summary of Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Amazon Web Services provide you with the ability to create virtual servers and only pay for them while they are in use. The virtual servers (known as Instances) can be various sizes in terms of CPU, RAM and disk space. Disk space is temporary; once you stop an Instance, you lose all data stored on that Instance. For permanent storage, Elastic Block Store (EBS), Simple Storage Service (S3) or Simple DB are the solutions needed.
Instances refer to the virtual resources of the virtual server. Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) refer to the Operating System running on your Instance. You can select from prebuilt AMIs providing Linux, Windows and Solaris Operating Systems. Many AMIs are supplied with preinstalled software such as Apache/PHP/MySQL. You can also build your own AMIs and save them for provisioning later. These can be attached to Instances and used with your software.
All services are pay as you go. You pay for the Instance in use by the hour, external bandwidth to and from the Instance (per GB) and the EBS, S3 or SDB storage (per GB).
When implementing a solution with AWS here are just a few questions you may want to consider -
Servers:
* What sizes are available?
* What if I need to expand?
* What distributions are available?
* Can I build my own images?
* Who owns the images?
* What about Microsoft licences?
* How do servers communicate?
* Do I incur bandwidth charges for internal communication?
Storage:
* Which storage is best – S3 or EBS?
* Can data be recovered?
* Can data be backed up?
* What is the cost difference?
* Where is my data physically located?
* What is the speed of access?
* Can I lose my data?
* Is it scalable?
* How do I import data?
Security:
* Are the servers secure?
* Who has physical access?
* Where are the servers?
* If I lose the keypair can I login?
Applications:
* What applications can I run?
* What is the difference between SDB and MySQL?
* How easy is it to migrate?
Scaling and Load balancing:
* How easy is it to up scale the hardware?
* What load balancing is available?
Costs:
* What are the overall costs?
* How can I control costs?
ForLinux can help you answer these questions and provide a management service for your AWS deployments. In terms of support, following set up there is very little difference between a Linux server running on AWS and one running on a physical server.
Contact us on to discuss how ForLinux can help you deploy your AWS solution.
