Cloud Computing Info

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.

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.

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Elastic Block Storage (EBS)

For most of its life in beta, EC2 offered only two kinds of storage, AMI based transient storage and S3. The transient storage was mounted as a filesystem and S3 was used for backup. To save data during downtime for instances, data had to first be saved off to S3 and the instance brought down. When the instance was brought back up, data was restored from S3. It was a painful process.

Enter EBS, the Elastic Block Store.

Sizing and Costs

EC2, like the other services in AWS are pay as you go, pay for what you use, services. As I mentioned above, you basically pay for the power you use which is a CPU per hour charge, bandwidth and storage. Linux and Windows guests have a different pricing menu. I am listing the prices current as of Dec 2008. I recommend you always check at aws.amazon.com to verify current pricing before making a commitment.

Instead of buying or leasing a specific type of hardware (that you would then be responsible for upgrading over time), AWS computing power is based on an EC2 compute unit.

Cloud Computing Info

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Transient Storage

The storage that comes with an AMI is called Transient Storage. That means that when the instance is stopped, the storage goes away. Any data or files saved when the instance was running is lost. This is by design.

To persist your data between sessions, you have two options. During most of the beta period, the Simple Storage Service (S3) was the only internal method of persisting data. S3 cannot be mounted as file system so it served as a backup service only.

Shortly before the beta period ended, Amazon added the Elastic Block Store (EBS).

Cloud Computing Info

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Security and Security Groups

Security is one of the most important, if not the most important, aspects of any important application. If you are thinking about running any kind of a mission critical application in the cloud, security should be a large part of your research.

AWS has been independently certified as Sarbanes-Oxley compliant and has passed a SAS70 audit. Amazon’s physical data center security follows established norms and is routinely audited.

On the software side, Amazon maintains a separation between host operating systems (those that Amazon are responsible for) and guest operating systems (the AMIs).

Cloud Computing Info

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Elastic IPs

Elastic IPs are a very neat feature of EC2. An Elastic IP is a configurable IP address assigned to your account. Unlike the rest of the features in AWS, you pay for any elastic IPs that you have allocated but not used. Amazon doesn’t want customers hoarding, and thus wasting, this resource. If you set aside the IP and use it, it’s free. If you set it aside and just keep it hanging around unused, you’ll pay a small monthly fee.

These IP addresses are connected to your account so you can assign them to any instance you might be running.

Cloud Computing Info

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

EC2 is the computing part of the Amazon services. EC2 provides the CPU, memory, operating system and transient storage. EC2 is the equivalent of a barebones PC. You get to pick the amount of RAM you need (from a predefined list of configurations), the amount of transient storage you need (also from a list) and the number of CPUs you need (from a series of compute options). For the operating system, you can choose from various flavors of Linux, Solaris or Microsoft Windows Server.

If you can use a web browser and understand basic computer technology, you can use EC2.

I’ve been waiting for and Amazon built AWS management console for a long time now.  Ironically, it couldn’t come at a worse time.  I’m just about finished my AWS Cloud Computing book and now I have to figure out how to work in the console.

Anyway, this is a great thing for new users.  There are so many tools out there now that experienced developers will take their time and pick a favorite.  However, for new users, it’s nice that Amazon is offering the basic experience from a trusted source (themselves).