Generate Your Keys

Now that you have chosen your instance, but before starting you actually start your instance, you need to generate your key pairs. The keypairs are SSH keypairs. A later post will explain SSH in greater detail but the keys come in a pair because there is both public and private components.

SSH is a Secure SHell. This is a command prompt like a DOS box or a telnet connection. However, unlike DOS and Telnet, it is very secure. The private key is the local machine’s secret password. The public key is shared to any host that the local machine will connect to.

Choose an AMI

Amazon, and Amazon clients, are providing a huge variation of machine images. The short story is that you can choose between MS-Windows, Linux and Sun Solaris for your OS. The real story is that it is a bit more complicated than that.

The real question is what applications do you plan to run and what expertise do you have on hand or plan to hire? A quick example is a database like MySQL. MySQL runs on various operating systems. If you have Windows expertise, you may want to stick with windows.

Linux Access with SSH & PuTTY

This post will (attempt) to explain what SSH and PuTTY are so that as a user you understand the terminology of AWS and so that you can be productive in the environment. This post will not attempt to make you an expert in SSH. For best practices in implementing SSH, I strongly recommend a book dedicated to hardening *nix (Linux, Unix, Solaris, etc).

SSH

In the early days, not that long ago really, of networking, very simple tools were used to work with remote computers: telnet as a console, ftp for file copying, rsh for remote command execution and others.

AWS Security

Data Center Security

Amazon is a well known entity and works to provide an extremely secure environment for your applications ans your data. Amazon is pursuing Sabanes-Oxley certification (by an external auditing agency) and SAS-70 Type II certification.

Amazon does not broadcast the locations of their data centers and physical security is a top concern for them. They have military grade external protections. Physical access to Amazon data centers controlled by a two-factor authentication and only those Amazon employees with an actual need are ever given access.

Hardware access is provided only to those administrators who directly require it and they must use their own SSH keys to access bastion hosts (kind of like cloud overseers).

Software as a Service (SaaS)

SaaS is currently the most popular type of cloud computing. Yahoo email, Google apps, zoho, and various other packages like CRM are all instances of SaaS. Application Service Providers (ASP) were the first SaaS providers. ASP was its own buzzword back in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

One of the aspects of SaaS is multi-tenancy or the ability for many customers to share the same service but maintain their own data securely. CRM is the predominant paid SaaS offering but email is, by far, the predominant free SaaS offering.

Any software that is offered over the internet, that runs remotely (where the location is unimportant and unrelated to the user), is a SaaS offering.

Distributed Computing

Distributed computing was one of the first real instances of cloud computing (albeit in reverse). Long before Google or Amazon, there was SETI@Home. Proposed in 1995 and launched in 1999, this program uses the spare capacity of internet connected machines to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. This is sort of the cloud in reverse.

A more recent example would be software like Hadoop. Written in Java, Hadoop is a scalable, efficient, distributed software platform designed to process enormous amounts of data. Hadoop can scale to thousands of computers across many clusters.

Distributed computing is nothing more than utilizing many networked computers to partition (split it into many smaller pieces) a question or problem and allow the network to solve the issue piecemeal.

Another instance of distributed computing, for storage instead of processing power, is bittorrent.

So what is cloud computing? Defining the term “cloud computing” has become an industry unto itself. Is it utility computing? Is it an application service provider’s offering? Is it virtual machines in the sky? All of these are correct depending on who you ask.

Core features of cloud computing are scalable, centrally managed and accessible via the internet. Cloud computing boils down to running software on someone else’s robust hardware in a data center somewhere else. Let’s think about that for a minute: someone else’s software on someone else’s hardware in someone else’s data center.