Notes on Amazon Web Services (the Core Ones)
Created 04/30/14
Updated 06/18/14, Updated 09/23/14, Updated 11/26/14, Updated 01/14/15, Updated 02/22/15, Updated 04/13/15
Updated 05/29/15, Updated 06/22/15, Updated 07/21/15, Updated 09/23/15, Updated 01/27/16, Updated 02/09/16
Updated 03/01/16, Updated 05/10/16, Updated 06/12/16, Updated 07/20/16, Updated 09/11/16, Updated 01/19/17
Updated 04/21/17
Introduction
Amazon Web Services refers to the whole set of services from Amazon.com that enable you to use Amazon’s servers for your business. It implements a “cloud computing model”. See an overview in our document “Notes on Cloud Computing Services”.
The core services provided by Amazon Web Services are:
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Elastic Computing Cluster (EC2)
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Elastic Block Store (EBS)
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Simple Storage Service (S3)
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RDS (relational database)
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Simple Queuing Service (SQS)
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Elastic Beanstalk (deployment and configuration in one step)
Some of these services became available in late 2007. New ones have been added frequently, and many have been undergoing major improvements ever since. You pay by the usage, rather than incurring a fixed cost.
To help new AWS customers get started in the cloud, AWS is introducing a new free usage tier. Beginning November 1 (2013), new AWS customers will be able to run a free Amazon EC2 Micro Instance for a year, while also leveraging a new free usage tier for Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, and AWS data transfer. AWS’s free usage tier can be used for anything you want to run in the cloud: launch new applications, test existing applications in the cloud, or simply gain hands-on experience with AWS.
Main Screen with Services Summary (2014)
Resources
Quite a bit of material on their site. Also a set of Kindle books, many at zero cost.
There is introduction and training material at http://aws.amazon.com/training/intro_series/
“Programming Amazon EC2” by Jurg van Vliet, Flavia Paganelli. O’Reilly Press, October 2012. Rated 4 stars on Amazon.com.
Using EC2
EC2 allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications. EC2 allows scalable deployment of applications by providing a Web service through which a user can boot an Amazon Machine Image to create a virtual machine, which Amazon calls an "instance", containing any software desired, such as Linux.
A user can create, launch, and terminate server instances as needed, paying by the hour for active servers, hence the term "elastic". EC2 provides users with control over the geographical location of instances that allows for latency optimization and high levels of redundancy.[1]
You can get started with Amazon EC2 using the AWS Management Console, a point-and-click web-based interface.
AMI Selection
An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) contains all the information needed to create a new instance of a server. For example, an AMI might contain all the software to act as a web server (e.g., Linux, Apache, and your web site), or all the software to act as a Windows database server (e.g., Windows and SQL Server).
Instance Types
The T-series instances are the best general-purpose ones. These come in t2.micro, t2.small, t2.large, and t2.xlarge, and range from 1GB to 8GB of memory.
In 2014, they announced M4 instances, which are third-generation Standard instances. These new instances provide customers with the same balanced set of CPU and memory resources as second-generation Standard instances (M1 instances) while providing customers with more computational capability/core
In late 2012, they announced M3 instances: which are second-generation Standard instances. These new instances provide customers with the same balanced set of CPU and memory resources as first-generation Standard instances (M1 instances) while providing customers with 50% more computational capability/core. M3 instances come as two instance types; extra-large (m3.xlarge) and double extra-large (m3.2xlarge), and are currently available in the US East (N. Virginia) region, starting at a Linux On-Demand price of $0.58/hr for extra-large instances. Customers can also purchase M3 Standard instances as Reserved Instances or as Spot instances.
Similarly, they announced the next generation of Amazon EC2 Compute Optimized instances. The C3 instance type is available in five sizes: c3.large, c3.xlarge, c3.2xlarge, c3.4xlarge and c3.8xlarge with 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32 vCPUs respectively. C3 instances will provide you with the highest performance processors and the lowest price/compute performance compared to all other Amazon EC2 instances. C3 instances also feature Enhanced Networking and SSD-based instance storage.
They recommend using C3 instances for CPU-bound, scale out applications and compute-intensive HPC applications. Customers running high traffic front-end fleets, batch processing, distributed analytics or cluster computing applications will benefit from the high processor and network performance of these instances.
You can purchase C3 instances as On-Demand instances, Reserved instances, or Spot instances. C3 instances are initially available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) regions.
To learn more about Amazon EC2 instance types and to find out which instance type might be useful for you, please visit the Amazon EC2 Instance type page.
Here is the set that were offered in early 2017 for Ubuntu-based instances:
Pricing
There are several different types of instances, ranging from small size to large size. The pricing varies from $0.05 per hour to $1.00 per hour on these. We are paying about $20-$25/month for a t2.small instance. The price doubles for each additional step of memory size. So that would be $100/month for a t2.large.
Stopping and Terminating Instances
When you are not using an instance, you should stop or terminate it. Stopping is different from terminating; while terminating completely kills and frees up all resources, stopping an EBS-backed instances pauses billing for the computing portion but still charges for the storage. Read here and here for more.
When you stop/start an instance, the actual host of the instance may actually change. Under these conditions, you will get a notice about the known hosts data being incorrect.
Recent Updates – January 2015
Amazon EC2 C4 Instances
The Best Compute Performance on EC2
C4 instances are designed for compute-bound workloads, such as high-traffic front-end fleets, MMO gaming, media processing, transcoding, and High Performance Computing (HPC) applications. C4 instances are available in five sizes, offering up to 36 vCPUs, and clock speeds as high as 3.5 GHz with Intel Turbo Boost. Each C4 instance type is EBS-optimized by default and at no additional cost.
Recent Updates – early 2014
New M3 Instance Sizes and Features
M3 instances are now available in two new sizes: m3.medium and m3.large with 1 and 2 vCPUs, respectively. M3 instances now feature SSD-based instance storage and support for Amazon S3-backed AMIs. These M3 instances feature high frequency Intel Xeon E5-2670 (Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge) processors and are available in all AWS Regions, with AWS GovCloud (US) support coming soon.
Recent Updates – late 2013
High Storage instances are a new Amazon EC2 instance family that provides customers with proportionally more instance storage for applications that require high sequential I/O performance. High Storage Eight Extra Large (hs1.8xlarge) instances provide customers with 35 ECUs of CPU performance across 16 virtual cores, 117 GiB of memory and 48 TB of instance storage across 24 hard disk drives, and are ideal for large data warehouses, Hadoop, and other applications that require high sequential I/O performance.
We are excited to introduce the Reserved Instance Marketplace, an online marketplace that provides AWS customers the flexibility to sell their Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Reserved Instances to other businesses and organizations. The Reserved Instance Marketplace gives you the flexibility to sell the remainder of your existing Reserved Instances as your needs change. Customers can also browse the Reserved Instance Marketplace to find an even wider selection of Reserved Instance term lengths and pricing options sold by other AWS customers.
Using EBS
Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) provides raw block devices that can be attached to Amazon EC2 instances. These block devices can then be used like any raw block device. In a typical use case, this would include formatting the device with a filesystem and mounting said filesystem. In addition EBS supports a number of advanced storage features, including snapshotting and cloning. Currently EBS volumes can be up to 1TB in size. EBS volumes are built on replicated back end storage, so that the failure of a single component will not cause data loss.
Pricing
With Amazon EBS, you only pay for what you use. Pricing for Amazon EBS volumes is listed below.
Amazon EBS Standard volumes $0.10 per GB-month of provisioned storage
$0.10 per 1 million I/O requests
Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS volumes $0.125 per GB-month of provisioned storage
$0.10 per provisioned IOPS-month
Amazon EBS Snapshots to Amazon S3 $0.095 per GB-month of data stored
Using RDS
These can be set up to run MySQL, Postgres, Oracle, or SQL Server. The first two have no software license involved.
AWS Free Tier with Amazon RDS
750 hours of Amazon RDS Single-AZ Micro DB Instance usage – enough hours to run a DB Instance continuously each month
20 GB of database storage
10 million I/Os
20 GB of backup storage for your automated database backups and any user-initiated DB Snapshots
In addition to these services, the AWS Management Console is available at no additional charge to help you build and manage your DB Instances on Amazon RDS.
Costs
This is basically the same price of the corresponding EC2 instance. Our current Postgres server is on a t2.micro instance, so that is costing about $15/month. You pay for the CPU time and the storage costs. Postgres software itself is free.
Status
We are running Postgres 9.3.14 on our instance.
Updates
We got the following email in September 2015:
Dear Amazon RDS Customer: A system update is now available for all your Amazon RDS for MySQL database instances created before 26 August 2015. We recommend installing this update to take advantage of several performance improvements and security fixes. You may choose to install this update immediately, or during your next scheduled maintenance window. After 28 October 2015, your RDS instance will be automatically upgraded during its next maintenance window. Instances that have not been upgraded by 11 November 2015 will have the update applied at that time. To learn more about scheduling or installing an upgrade, please refer to the RDS documentation: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/USER_UpgradeDBInstance.OSUpgrades.html. Installing this update will impact the availability of your RDS instance for a few minutes (60-120 seconds for Multi-AZ instances). To reduce downtime, you may consider converting your Single-AZ instances to Multi-AZ. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact your TAM or AWS Support.
Using S3
A storage system in the cloud.
See our document “Notes on Amazon S3 and Tools”. The document also includes information about s3cmd, which is a command-line way to get access to S3.
Using SQS
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a fully-managed message queuing service for reliably communicating among distributed software components and microservices - at any scale. Building applications from individual components that each perform a discrete function improves scalability and reliability, and is best practice design for modern applications. SQS makes it simple and cost-effective to decouple and coordinate the components of a cloud application. Using SQS, you can send, store, and receive messages between software components at any volume, without losing messages or requiring other services to be always available. SQS standard queues offer maximum throughput, best-effort ordering, and at-least-once delivery. SQS FIFO queues are designed to guarantee that messages are processed exactly once, in the exact order that they are sent, with limited throughput. You can get started with SQS in a matter of minutes using the AWS console or SDK of your choice and just three simple commands. SQS lets you eliminate the complexity and overhead associated with managing and operating dedicated messaging software and infrastructure.
Using Elastic Beanstalk
AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an easy-to-use service for deploying and scaling web applications and services developed with Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, and Docker on familiar servers such as Apache, Nginx, Passenger, and IIS.
You can simply upload your code and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment, from capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling to application health monitoring. At the same time, you retain full control over the AWS resources powering your application and can access the underlying resources at any time.
There is no additional charge for Elastic Beanstalk - you pay only for the AWS resources needed to store and run your applications.
Elastic Beanstalk automatically scales your application up and down based on your applications specific need using easily adjustable Auto Scaling settings. For example, you can use CPU utilization metrics to trigger Auto Scaling actions. With Elastic Beanstalk, your application can handle peaks in workload or traffic while minimizing your costs.
Emails in 2015
Dear Amazon Web Services Customer,
Thank you for using Amazon Web Services. We wanted to let you know that your 12 month introductory AWS Free Tier usage is set to expire on July 31, 2015 for account 853301516xxx. Your resources will continue to run once your Free Tier has ended, but will be charged at the standard, pay-as-you-go service rates. For pricing details visit AWS Pricing. You are able to view your historical Free Tier usage on your monthly AWS bill by looking for the line items labeled "free tier."
Emails in 2016
In November, we announced that EC2 and EBS will have longer identifiers for instances, volumes, reservations, and snapshots to support the ongoing growth of Amazon Web Services. Starting today, you can opt into using longer EC2 instance and reservation IDs using APIs or the AWS Management Console. Note: Longer EBS volume and snapshot IDs will be available in April 2016.
From now until early December 2016, you can test your systems with the longer format and opt in when you are ready. From December, all new instances, reservations, volumes, and snapshots will be created with longer IDs. We strongly recommend testing your systems and opting in to the longer ID format across all of your accounts before December 2016. All AWS accounts created after March 7, 2016, will automatically default to longer instance and reservation IDs, with the option to request the original, shorter 8-character format if necessary.
After you opt in, only new instances and reservations will receive longer IDs; any pre-existing resources are not affected. All versions of the AWS CLI, AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell, AWS IDE toolkits, and AWS SDKs are already compatible with longer IDs.
For instructions regarding how to opt in to longer IDs, visit the AWS Blog. More information about timelines, testing procedures, and more can be found on the EC2 FAQ page. If you have questions, contact the AWS support team.
A later email described price reductions on EC2 instances, and the new AWS Certificate Manager (text added above).
March 2016:
Simplified User Experience for Auto Scaling Lifecycle Hooks »
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AWS CloudFormation Adds Support for Amazon VPC NAT Gateway, Amazon EC2 Container Registry, and More »
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Amazon RDS now supports MySQL 5.7 »
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Amazon Redshift is now available in US West (N. California) Region »
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Amazon Route 53 Adds SNI Support for HTTPS Health Checks »
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Now Run Your AWS Data Pipeline On-demand »
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Amazon Kinesis Streams now available in South America (Sao Paulo) Region »
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AWS IoT Now Supported in AWS Mobile SDK for Android »
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Unity support in the AWS SDK for .NET is Generally Available »
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Announcing New Regions for Amazon WorkSpaces Application Manager »
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