Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services (AWS ) is a collection of various web services of the online retailer Amazon.com, which started in 2006. Many popular applications such as Dropbox, Foursquare or HootSuite rely on the services of Amazon Web Services. In addition to Microsoft Windows Azure and Google Cloud Platform AWS is one of the most important international offerings in cloud computing and is known as the pioneer in the industry.

History

AWS was launched in 2006 in order to offer developers an IT infrastructure on demand can; the focus was on from the start and foremost enterprises and fewer end user. The company needed for the operation of its e-commerce platform itself globally distributed data centers and high availability services, as well as interfaces to other applications, that should also be provided with Amazon Web Services to third parties for better utilization. The first AWS service for virtual servers has been designed at a site of the company in South Africa.

Amazon Web Services are offered either free of charge. In November 2010, a program called Free Usage Tier has been started, the computing power (750 hours), and other popular AWS services involved to a limited extent. After the first year, customers had to switch to a commercial tariff and pay the normal fees. The introduction of a free quota was widely seen as a response to OpenStack, which is particularly promoted by competing companies Rackspace.

In May 2013 Amazon announced its intention to Amazon Web Services to develop in the future in Germany. Having previously corresponding centers have been developed in other regions, new services for AWS from mid-2013 should be set at locations in Berlin and Dresden.

Again and again, serious vulnerabilities were known in Amazon Web Services, which is why the platform of experts will critically evaluated. It was also in 2013 announced that Amazon has received a major order from the CIA and the public will operate cloud, which cast further doubt gave rise to the Notice of the offer. Amazon sat down with AWS in the award against IBM and other candidates.

Components

Server

The Elastic Compute Cloud ( also known as Amazon EC2 ) are virtual servers running either a Linux distribution or Microsoft Windows Server. They have no fixed contract term and are billed by the hour. There are several calling plans to choose from, which differ on the basis of available memory and the Compute Units that correspond to virtual processors. Compared to other providers, virtual machine instances are not persistent, that is, they do not store data and will be back after a restart reset to its original condition.

Memory

One of the most popular offerings of AWS is called the Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Under this designation, a web service is provided, which can theoretically secure arbitrarily large amounts of data and is charged according to consumption. Amazon has the concept of buckets and objects first introduced, similar to directories and files and has established itself as the default, mimicking the other vendors. In addition to Amazon S3 offers the Elastic Block Store, with which users can EC2 instances it permanently, including a version control system with snapshots. Amazon EBS supports all popular file systems of the available operating systems.

Network

CloudFront is a content delivery network that can provide content from other AWS services such as EC2 or S3 distributed globally in order to reduce the access time. The service is limited to the HTTP protocol and is calculated according to the called gigabytes depending on the particular region. Depending on the configuration of individual files or entire domains can be provided via CloudFront, optionally encrypted via SSL. In addition, Amazon operates under the name of Route 53 a domain name service that allows the mutual translation of IP addresses and domains. The statement will be graded according to shared zones.

Database

As a virtual database either SimpleDB or Relational Database Service ( RDS short ) can be used. The former is easier for storage - that is not relational - intended information which can be structured in the form of objects and properties. SimpleDB is according to Amazon is still in beta testing, while RDS is not officially supported. The Relational Database Service includes a virtual database based on MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle either. While SimpleDB is settled exclusively by the memory consumed, the rates of Amazon RDS from memory and computing power of the selected instance put together.

Development

Amazon Elastic Beanstalk supports the provision of individual applications based on the JavaBeans technology. In addition, provided more services for developers with Simple Workflow Service ( SWS), Simple Email Service (SES), Simple Queue Service (SQS ) or Simple Notification Service (SNS ). The latter is suitable for example to send notifications of certain events other AWS services by e- mail or SMS. Further applications can be deployed on Amazon Web Services in the so-called AWS Marketplace, where they can be posted by third parties.

Directory

AWS Identity and Access Management ( IAM called ) is a directory service to manage users and resources in an organization, it takes over similar tasks, such as Active Directory or eDirectory. Without Amazon IAM, the application limited to any AWS services on the personal Amazon account that has administrative rights granted and in productive use may pose a security risk. With the help of Identity and Access Management, users can create, create groups and regulate their access to almost all AWS services such as EC2 or S3.

Management

In recent years, Amazon has developed a number of web services, which are used to manage the core offer. For example, was introduced in May 2009 with Amazon CloudWatch the ability to monitor virtual servers on EC2, and optionally automatically adjust the selected tariff and its resources based on workload ( scalability ). Since early 2012, can be produced with Amazon Direct Connect a dedicated network connection to Amazon Web Services, which is realized via third web host and facilitate the transfer of large amounts of data and to improve the IT security and data protection.

Others

While all other Web services are based on technical services, Amazon Mechanical Turk forms (after the English name of the Chess Turk ) with one exception: There settings are allowed, which can be cut into pieces into small tasks and are processed by humans. This includes, for example, a simple search requests on the World Wide Web or the correction of spelling errors in individual records. Even for the recognition of objects in images (about human or animal) Mechanical Turk is often used. The service is still in beta testing.

Privacy Policy

Due to the fact that it is a U.S. company at Amazon, Amazon Web Services is as comparable services in terms of data protection for years in the criticism. To compensate for this problem, called Amazon Availability Zones offers, which in turn are divided into regions and correspond to physical locations for the storage of data. For example, for Amazon EC2 in the Europe Zone Ireland are chosen so that instances are running only there. Since 2007 Availability Zones are outside the United States for Amazon S3 available. In order to improve data protection, Amazon also gives developers specifically the ability to encrypt stored on AWS data itself again - even with the use of an official software development kit. Great company is the use of hardware encryption allowed with individual components.

Criticism

Amazon admits to protect its data centers according to the industry-standard methods, particularly from power outages. However, the company is coming under fire because yet again occur serious problems. For example, resulted in a lightning strike in August 2011, is causing service in the Irish data center were not available and then numerous other online services have failed. The case attracted wide attention, since in addition to Amazon, Microsoft was affected. In July 2012, came to a similar error that was indeed absorbed by the power supply which, in turn, but later also exhibited little a technical fault. After the triple failure Amazon was accused of lack of testing of its systems. Last bothered a failure in August 2012, among others Vine and Instagram.