Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Encyclopedia
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a central part of Amazon.com
Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...

's cloud computing
Cloud computing
Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility over a network ....

 platform, Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services is a collection of remote computing services that together make up a cloud computing platform, offered over the Internet by Amazon.com...

 (AWS). EC2 allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications. EC2 allows scalable deployment of applications by providing a Web service
Web service
A Web service is a method of communication between two electronic devices over the web.The W3C defines a "Web service" as "a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network". It has an interface described in a machine-processable format...

 through which a user can boot an Amazon Machine Image
Amazon Machine Image
An Amazon Machine Image is a special type of virtual appliance which is used to instantiate a virtual machine within the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud...

 to create a virtual machine
Virtual machine
A virtual machine is a "completely isolated guest operating system installation within a normal host operating system". Modern virtual machines are implemented with either software emulation or hardware virtualization or both together.-VM Definitions:A virtual machine is a software...

, which Amazon calls an "instance", containing any software desired. A user can create, launch, and terminate server instances as needed, paying by the hour for active servers, hence the term "elastic". EC2 provides users with control over the geographical location of instances that allows for latency optimization and high levels of redundancy.

In November 2010, Amazon made the switch of its own retail website to EC2 and AWS.

History

Amazon announced a limited public beta of EC2 on August 25, 2006. Access to EC2 was granted on a first come first served basis.
Amazon added two new instance types (Large and Extra-Large) on October 16, 2007. On May 29, 2008, two more types were added, High-CPU Medium and High-CPU Extra Large. There are currently twelve types of instances available.

Amazon added three new features on March 27, 2008. These features included static IP addresses, Availability Zones, and User Selectable Kernels.
Amazon added Elastic Block Store (EBS) on August 20, 2008. This provides persistent storage, a basic feature that had been lacking since the service was introduced.

Amazon EC2 is in full production since it dropped the beta label on October 23, 2008. On the same day, Amazon announced the following features:
a service level agreement for EC2,
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

 in beta form on EC2,
Microsoft SQL Server
Microsoft SQL Server
Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database server, developed by Microsoft: It is a software product whose primary function is to store and retrieve data as requested by other software applications, be it those on the same computer or those running on another computer across a network...

 in beta form on EC2,
plans for an AWS management console, and
plans for load balancing, autoscaling, and cloud monitoring services. These features were subsequently added on May 18, 2009.

Amazon EC2 was mostly developed by a team in Cape Town, South Africa. The team was led by Chris Pinkham
Chris Pinkham
Chris Pinkham is an entrepreneur and technologist born in Singapore, raised and educated in Britain and South Africa.Chris was formerly Vice President, IT Infrastructure at Amazon.com, responsible for the company's global infrastructure engineering and operations...

.

Pinkham provided the initial architecture guidance for EC2 and then built the team and led the development of the project. Other members of the early team included Chris Brown, Quinton Hoole, Roland Paterson-Jones and Willem Van Biljon
Willem Van Biljon
Willem van Biljon is an entrepreneur and technologist born, raised and educated in South Africa. Willem graduated from the University of Cape Town with a degree in Computer Science....

.

Elastic compute units

The Elastic Compute Unit (ECU) was introduced by Amazon EC2 as an abstraction of compute resources. Amazon’s Definition of ECU notes “We use several benchmarks and tests to manage the consistency and predictability of the performance of an EC2 Compute Unit. One EC2 Compute Unit provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz
2007 Opteron
Opteron
Opteron is AMD's x86 server and workstation processor line, and was the first processor which supported the AMD64 instruction set architecture . It was released on April 22, 2003 with the SledgeHammer core and was intended to compete in the server and workstation markets, particularly in the same...

 or 2007 Xeon
Xeon
The Xeon is a brand of multiprocessing- or multi-socket-capable x86 microprocessors from Intel Corporation targeted at the non-consumer server, workstation and embedded system markets.-Overview:...

 processor. This is also the equivalent to an early-2006 1.7 GHz Xeon processor referenced in our original documentation”

Virtual machines

EC2 uses Xen
Xen
Xen is a virtual-machine monitor providing services that allow multiple computer operating systems to execute on the same computer hardware concurrently....

 virtualization. Each virtual machine, called an "instance", functions as a virtual private server
Virtual private server
Virtual private server is a term used by internet hosting services to refer to a virtual machine. The term is used for emphasizing that the virtual machine, although running in software on the same physical computer as other customers' virtual machines, is functionally equivalent to a separate...

. Amazon.com sizes instances based on "Elastic Compute Units".

The performance of multiple identical virtual machines may vary.

, Amazon charges ($0.02 to $0.03)/hour ($14.40 to $21.60)/month) for the smallest "Micro Instance" virtual machine running Linux or Windows, respectively. High CPU and DB instances cost as much as $2.48/hour. "Reserved" instances can go as low as $7.32/month for a three-year prepaid plan.$82 for a three-year reservation amortized over thirty-six months plus one month at $0.007/hour. The data transfer charge ranges from free to $0.12 per gigabyte, depending on the direction and monthly volume (inbound data transfer is free on all AWS services)

Free Tier

As of December 2010 Amazon offers a bundle of free resource credits to new account holders. The credits are designed to run a "micro" sized server for one year. Charges are applied on demand so the credit need not be used in the first month.

Reserved Instances

Reserved instances enable EC2 service users to reserve an instance for one or three years. There is a fee associated with reserving an instance. The corresponding per hour rate charged by Amazon to operate the instance is much less than the rate charged for non-reserved instances.

Operating systems

When it launched in August 2006, the EC2 service offered Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

 and later Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...

' OpenSolaris
OpenSolaris
OpenSolaris was an open source computer operating system based on Solaris created by Sun Microsystems. It was also the name of the project initiated by Sun to build a developer and user community around the software...

 and Solaris Express Community Edition. In October 2008, EC2 added the Windows Server 2003
Windows Server 2003
Windows Server 2003 is a server operating system produced by Microsoft, introduced on 24 April 2003. An updated version, Windows Server 2003 R2, was released to manufacturing on 6 December 2005...

 and Windows Server 2008 operating systems to the list of available operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

s. As of December 2010 it has also been reported to run FreeBSD
FreeBSD
FreeBSD is a free Unix-like operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via BSD UNIX. Although for legal reasons FreeBSD cannot be called “UNIX”, as the direct descendant of BSD UNIX , FreeBSD’s internals and system APIs are UNIX-compliant...

; in March 2011, NetBSD
NetBSD
NetBSD is a freely available open source version of the Berkeley Software Distribution Unix operating system. It was the second open source BSD descendant to be formally released, after 386BSD, and continues to be actively developed. The NetBSD project is primarily focused on high quality design,...

 AMIs became available.

Persistent Storage

An EC2 instance may be launched with a choice of two types of storage for its boot disk or "root device." The first option is a local "instance-store" disk as a root device (originally the only choice). The second option is to use an EBS volume as a root device.

Instance-store volumes are temporary storage, which survive rebooting an EC2 instance, but when the instance is terminated (e.g., by an API call, or due to a failure), this store is lost.

EBS volumes provide persistent storage independent of the lifetime of the EC2 instance, and act much like hard drives on a real server. More accurately, they appear as block devices to the operating system that are backed by Amazon's disk arrays. The OS is free to use the device however it wants. In the most common case, a file system is loaded and the volume acts as a hard drive. Another possible use is the creation of RAID arrays by combining two or more EBS volumes. RAID allows increases of speed and/or reliability of EBS. Users can set up and manage storage volumes of sizes from 1GB to 1TB. The volumes support snapshots, which can be taken from a GUI tool or the API. EBS volumes can be attached or detached from instances while they are running, and moved from one instance to another.

Simple Storage Service (S3)
Amazon S3
Amazon S3 is an online storage web service offered by Amazon Web Services. Amazon S3 provides storage through web services interfaces...

 is a storage system in which data is accessible to EC2 instances, or directly over the network to suitably authenticated callers (all communication is over HTTP). Amazon does not charge for the bandwidth for communications between EC2 instances and S3 storage "in the same region." Accessing S3 data stored in a different region (for example, data stored in Europe from a US East Coast EC2 instance) will be billed at Amazon's normal rates.

S3-based storage is priced per gigabyte per month. Applications access S3 through an API. For example, Apache Hadoop
Hadoop
Apache Hadoop is a software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications under a free license. It enables applications to work with thousands of nodes and petabytes of data...

 supports a special s3: filesystem to support reading from and writing to S3 storage during a MapReduce
MapReduce
MapReduce is a software framework introduced by Google in 2004 to support distributed computing on large data sets on clusters of computers. Parts of the framework are patented in some countries....

 job. There are also S3 filesystems for Linux, which mount a remote S3 filestore on an EC2 image, as if it were local storage. As S3 is not a full POSIX
POSIX
POSIX , an acronym for "Portable Operating System Interface", is a family of standards specified by the IEEE for maintaining compatibility between operating systems...

 filesystem, things may not behave the same as on a local disk (e.g., no locking support).

Elastic IP Addresses

Amazon's Elastic IP Address feature is similar to static IP address in traditional data centers, with one key difference. A user can programmatically map an Elastic IP Address to any virtual machine instance without a network administrator's help and without having to wait for DNS to propagate the new binding. In this sense an Elastic IP Address belongs to the account and not to a virtual machine instance. It exists until it is explicitly removed. It can also be used as unused IP address. Partial IPv6
IPv6
Internet Protocol version 6 is a version of the Internet Protocol . It is designed to succeed the Internet Protocol version 4...

 is provided in the US East (Northern Virginia) and EU (Ireland) regions.

Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch is a Web service that provides real-time monitoring to Amazon's EC2 customers on their resource utilization such as CPU, disk and network. Cloudwatch does not provide any memory, disk space, or load average metrics. An Amazon engineer has stated that this is due to the requirement to install software in the VM - something they wish to avoid. The data is aggregated and provided through AWS management console. It can also be accessed through command line tools and Web API's, if the customer desires to monitor their EC2 resources through their enterprise monitoring software.

The metrics collected by Amazon CloudWatch enables Auto Scaling feature to dynamically add or remove EC2 instances. The customers are charged by the number of monitoring instances.

Since May 2011, Amazon CloudWatch accepts custom metrics that can be submitted programmatically via Web Services API and then monitored the same way as all other internal metrics, including setting up the alarms for them.

Automated Scaling

Amazon's Auto Scaling feature of EC2 allows it to automatically adapt computing capacity to site traffic.

Reliability

To make EC2 more fault-tolerant
Fault-tolerant system
Fault-tolerance or graceful degradation is the property that enables a system to continue operating properly in the event of the failure of some of its components. A newer approach is progressive enhancement...

, Amazon engineered Availability Zones that are designed to be insulated from failures in other availability zones. Availability zones do not share the same infrastructure. Applications running in more than one availability zones can achieve higher availability.

EC2 provides users with control over the geographical location of instances that allows for latency optimization and high levels of redundancy. For example, to minimize downtime, a user can set up server instances in multiple zones that are insulated from each other for most causes of failure such that one backs up the other.

High availability database services, like Amazon Relational Database Service
Amazon Relational Database Service
Amazon Relational Database Service or Amazon RDS is a distributed relational database service by Amazon.com. It is a web service running "in the cloud" and provides users a relational database for use in their applications. Amazon RDS makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database...

 run on top of EC2 instances.

Issues

In early July 2008 the anti-spam organizations Outblaze
Outblaze
Outblaze is a technology company that develops and provides digital media products and services including smartphone games and other apps, social media applications, computer and video games, online transaction systems, and web communication software...

 and Spamhaus.org began blocking Amazon's EC2 address pool due to problems with the distribution of spam
Spam (electronic)
Spam is the use of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately...

 and malware
Malware
Malware, short for malicious software, consists of programming that is designed to disrupt or deny operation, gather information that leads to loss of privacy or exploitation, or gain unauthorized access to system resources, or that otherwise exhibits abusive behavior...

.

On December 1, 2010 Amazon pulled its service to WikiLeaks
Wikileaks
WikiLeaks is an international self-described not-for-profit organisation that publishes submissions of private, secret, and classified media from anonymous news sources, news leaks, and whistleblowers. Its website, launched in 2006 under The Sunshine Press organisation, claimed a database of more...

 after coming under political pressure in the USA. The Internet group Anonymous
Anonymous (group)
Anonymous is an international hacking group, spread through the Internet, initiating active civil disobedience, while attempting to maintain anonymity. Originating in 2003 on the imageboard 4chan, the term refers to the concept of many online community users simultaneously existing as an anarchic,...

 attempted to attack EC2 in revenge; however, Amazon was not affected by the attack.

Amazon's websites were temporarily offline on December 12, 2010, although it was initially unclear if this was due to attacks or a hardware failure. An Amazon official later stated that it was due to a hardware failure.
Shortly before 5 AM Eastern on April 21, 2011, an outage started at EC2's northern Virginia data center that brought down several websites including Foursquare, Springpad
Springpad
Springpad is a free online application and web service that allows its registered users to save, organize, and share collected ideas and information. A personal organizer and information capturing service, Springpad is designed to help its users remember content...

, Reddit
Reddit
reddit is a social news website where the registered users submit content, in the form of either a link or a text "self" post. Other users then vote the submission "up" or "down," which is used to rank the post and determine its position on the site's pages and front page.Reddit was originally...

, Quora
Quora
Quora is a question-and-answer website created, edited and organized by its community of users. The site was founded in June 2009, launched in private beta in December 2009, and made available to the public on June 21, 2010....

, BigDoor and Hootsuite
HootSuite
HootSuite is a social media communications dashboard often used for online brand management. It publishes to websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, MySpace, and WordPress. It also publishes to Flickr, Tumblr, and YouTube via HootSuite Apps...

. Specifically, attempts to use Amazon's elastic-disk and database services hung, failed, or were slow. Service was restored to some parts of the datacenter (three of four "availability zones" in Amazon's terms) by late afternoon Eastern time that day; problems for at least some customers were continuing as of April 25. 0.07% of EBS volumes in one zone have also been lost; EBS failures were a part of normal operation even before this outage and were a risk documented by Amazon, though the number of failures and the number of simultaneous failures may find some EC2 users unprepared.

On Sunday August 6th 2011, Amazon suffered a power outage in one of their Ireland availability zones. Lightning was originally blamed for the outage; however, on August 11th, Irish energy supplier ESB Networks dismissed this as a cause, but at time of writing, could not confirm what the cause of the problem was. The power outage raised multiple questions regarding Amazon's EBS infrastructure, which caused several bugs in their software to be exposed. The bugs resulted in some customers' data being deleted when recovering EBS volumes in a mid-write operation during the crash.

August 8th, 2011 saw another network connectivity outage of Amazon's Northern Virginia datacenter, knocking out the likes of Reddit, Quora, Netflix and FourSquare. The outage lasted around 25 minutes.

See also

  • Bitnami
    Bitnami
    Bitnami is an open source project that produces open source installers or software packages for web applications and solution stacks as well as virtual appliances. Bitnami is sponsored by Bitrock a company founded in 2003 in Seville, Spain by Daniel Lopez Ridruejo...

  • TurnKey Linux Virtual Appliance Library
  • Linode
    Linode
    Linode is a web application hosting and cloud computing provider based in Galloway Township, New Jersey. Linode allows system administrators and software developers to rent virtual servers on which to run their own computer applications...

  • ElasticHosts
    ElasticHosts
    ElasticHosts Ltd is a London based company, founded in March 2008, which provides an international cloud infrastructure service, currently provided from two data centers near London UK and one in San Antonio TX...

  • FlexiScale
    FlexiScale
    FlexiScale is a utility computing platform launched by XCalibre Communications in the summer of 2007, and subsequently acquired by Flexiant. Launched shortly after Amazon's EC2 service, it was Europe's first and the world's second cloud computing platform. Users are able to create, start, and stop...

  • GoGrid
    GoGrid
    GoGrid is a cloud infrastructure service, hosting Linux and Windows virtual machines managed by a multi-server control panel and a RESTful API. GoGrid is privately held and competes in the dedicated hosting space against Rackspace and in the cloud computing hosting space with those listed in the...

  • Google App Engine
    Google App Engine
    Google App Engine is a platform as a service cloud computing platform for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers. It virtualizes applications across multiple servers,...

  • Microsoft Azure
  • Rackspace Cloud
  • Nimbula
    Nimbula
    Nimbula is a startup backed by Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners based out of Mountain View. The company was founded by Chris Pinkham and Willem Van Biljon who led the team that created Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud . Nimbula develops cloud orchestration software for the implementation of public...


External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK