Looking to spin up a computer in the cloud somewhere but don’t want to spend a bunch of money until you’ve played around for a while? Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud, AWS EC2, gives you a couple of options to start with. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail about what EC2 is. I’ve done that plenty here.
First up, if you don’t already have an AWS account, now’s the time. Starting Nov 1, Amazon is offering a free year (with some limitations) of AWS. To get the free service, you must be a new user.

Ok, now they’ve gone and done it. Amazon just doesn’t know when to quit. Is there a web service they don’t want to own? I josh. I like Amazon and like to see them put new and useful services out there and I am a big proponent of competition. I think competition is good for everyone as long as it doesn’t become predatory.

Now, Amazon has been going after Paypal for a while now with Amazon Checkout. But now, they have made this a super simple, no login, purchase tool with PayPhrase – the easy-to-remember shortcut for paying on Amazon.com and other websites.

AWS Price Decrease

Upcoming Price Changes

Effective November 1, 2009, we will be lowering prices for all On-Demand instances. The tables below show the existing and future On-Demand prices.

How often does a vendor REDUCE their prices, and thereby lowering your bill, without some nasty contract renegotiation? In my experience, never. One more reason to really like Amazon’s web services.
Starting November 1, 2009, EC2 prices are dropping 15% across the board (for linux AMIs). For a small image, that means a drop from $0.10/hour to $0.085/hour, large is going from $0.4/hour to $0.34/hour and the extra large are going from $0.8/hour to $0.68/hour.

Yep, looks like Amazon finally clued in to the fact that SimpleDB is pretty much useless for any mission critical work. They’ve added a new web services, Relational Database Service, abbreviated RDS.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while managing time-consuming database administration tasks, freeing you up to focus on your applications and business.
Amazon RDS gives you access to the full capabilities of a familiar MySQL database.

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.

Choose Your Tool

When working with AWS, you have a choice of tools. You should try several tools and use the one that works best for your needs. Some tools are provided by Amazon and others are provided by third party developers. I cover seven tools in chapters that follow this one but that list is not a comprehensive list. It’s just the tools that I have used myself and that I know for a fact do work.

Some services are more programming tools that anything else. SQS is like that. It is a queuing service that you will plug into your applications.

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).

Sign Up For AWS

First things first, if you don’t have an Amazon.com account, go get one. If you do have one, you can use the one you already have. Amazon offers personal and corporate accounts. A person may have both accounts and can choose which to use when purchasing items.

It also may make sense that all employees have a business only account that uses their work email to log into the service. That way you never have an issue where purchases or billing can go to the wrong place.

Or, you may do like I have done in the past, put all expenses on a personal card and expense them back to the company.

Amazon DevPay

Amazon DevPay is an easy to use billing system for AWS developers. Build your cloud application, allow users to sign up and use your application and let Amazon bill them for you.

DevPay is “AWS-Aware” in that it ties into the billing of AWS services. Instead of a user having to sign up for AWS and be billed separately, you can add in the AWS costs to your costs and just bill the users directly.

DevPay is web based and uses Amazon Payments. The web interface allows you to register your application and set your pricing.

Using and Managing Amazon Web Services (AWS)

I personally believe that AWS is perfect for any development and testing environment. Regardless of how sensitive your data is, you can build your applications and test them in a cloud environment using bogus data.

For production environments, the choice is much harder. Does the country(ies) you operate in have strict privacy, or data on-shoring, laws that would be impact your applications? If you can easily offshore your applications, you can easily use cloud computing.

Does the area where you work have reliable infrastructure?