Introducing Amazon

Last week I introduced the Cloud, if you missed it and feel the need to have a read you can find it Here Now on with Introducing Amazon…

I’m not really going to introduce all of Amazon, Amazon release a lot of new features each month but I will take you though some of the basics that Amazon offer so when you’re next confronted with them it is not a confusing list of terms, I won’t go into any of the issues you may face as that is a later topic.

EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud, this is more than likely your entry point, it is in short a virtual platform to provide you an OS on, they come in various shapes and sizes and different flavours. For more information on EC2 click here

ELB Elastic Load Balancer, this is used to balance web traffic or tcp traffic depending on which type you get (layer 7 or Layer 4) an ELB is typically used to front your web servers that are in different Availability Zones (AZ) and they can do SSL termination.

Security Groups These are quite simply containers that your EC2 instances live in and you can apply security rules to them. However, two instances in the same security group will not be able to talk to each other unless you have specifically allowed them to do so in the security group. It is this functionality that separates a security group from a being considered a network, that and the fact each instance is in a different subnet.

EIP Elastic IP, These are public IP addresses that are static and can be assigned to an individual EC2 Instance, they are ideal for public DNS to point to.

EBS Elastic Block Storage, In short, a disk array attached to your EC2 Instance. EBS volumes are persistant disk stores, most EC2 instances are EBS Backed and are therefore persistant. However, you can mount ephemeral disk drives that are local storage on the virtual host, these disk stores are non-persistant so if you stop / start an instance the data will be lost (they will survive a reboot)

S3 Simple Storage Service, S3 is a simple key value store, but one that can contain keys that are folders, and the value can be anything, text files, word docs, ISO’s, html pages etc. You can use S3 as a simple web hosting service if you just upload all of your html to it and make it public. You can also push S3 data into a CDN (Cloud Front). There are some nice security options around accessibility permissions and at rest encryption for your S3 buckets. An s3 bucket is just the term to describe where your data ends up and is the name of the S3 area you create.

IAM Identity and Access Management, This is a very useful service that will allow you to take your original account you used to signed up to amazon with and lock it away for eternity. You can use IAM to create individual accounts for users or services and create groups to contain the users in, with users and groups you can sue JSON to create security policies that grant the user or group specific access to specific services in specific ways.

VPC Virtual private Cloud, This is more or less the same service you get via EC2 but private. There are some interesting elements of it that are quirky to say the least, but you can create your own networks making your services private from the greater amazon network but you can still assign EIP’s if you so wish. Most services, but not all are available with a VPC and some features are only available in VPC’s such as security groups on ELB’s.

AZ Availability Zones, are essentially data halls, or areas of racks that have independent cooling and power but are not geographically disperse. i.e. an AZ can be in the same building as another. Amazons description is as follows “Availability Zones are distinct locations that are engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones and provide inexpensive, low latency network connectivity to other Availability Zones in the same Region” This will be touche don later.

Region A region is a geographically disperse amazon location, it could be in another country, it could be in the same country, I’d imagine that all are at least 30 miles apart but amazon are so secretive about everything it could be that building behind you.

If you want to know more about the products I would read the product page here. In next weeks post I’m going to start going into a bit of detail about architecting for the cloud and some design considerations that you should be aware of.